These are a few of my favourite things, all of which find their happy home inside surrealism.
Surrealism is ultimately indebted to Freud, which the group [the Surrealists] credits solely for enlightening people of the unconscious mind; Surrealists love psychoanalysis, which posits that the conscious mind does not merit the primary position that the layman allots it and that the lower levels of the psyche certainly require release. The surrealists further corroborate that a human cannot operate optimally without the recognition of this oft-uncharted mental area.
The recently $276-millionFrank Gehry renovated Art Gallery of Ontario is home to the new Surrealism exhibit. Photo/Matthew Filipowich
“The unique difference between immortal Greece and the contemporary epoch is Sigmund Freud,” says Salvador Dali, the most renowned surrealist, “who discovered that the human body, which was purely neo-platonian at the time of the Greeks, is today full of secret drawers that only psychoanalysis is capable of opening.”
Such Freudian praise is commonplace amongst the Surrealists, who acknowledged this in their Manifesto, but none of the group was as vocal as Dali himself. Similarly to the difficulty Freud has had uniting a single voice in regards to the expression and temperance of Michelangelo’s famous sculpture of Moses, the Surrealists believe that no one man can hold a entire answer to the meaning of a particular art piece, and to any discernment of a definite “meaning” whatsoever; not only is every opinion subjective, but each singular opinion can often be interpreted as a subjective conscious opinion, which as Freud purports, the conscious identity cannot possibly hold the only truth.
As this is my first visit to the newly renovated AGO I feel it is my banana duty to briefly neglect my surrealist needs and check out the new digs: after wandering past the illustrious curved stairways and the giant teepee adorning the entrance hall, I walk through the Thompson Collection of European Art, perusing the plethora of ceramics, gold work and still lifes scattered throughout these rooms, in addition to the multitude of various religious scenarios, including the gratuitously gruesome Massacre of Innocents by Peter Paul Ruben that shows a particularly brutal scene of violence from ye olde Bible.
After a full circuit of European impressionist art, I make a brief stop at the sculpture atrium filled mainly with the graphic mirror death, several birds, as well as the occasional creepy birdman. Yet I cannot hold off the insistent pull of Surrealism much longer, so I make my way to the first floor Dada exhibit first.
When I first enter this portion of the exhibit I’m met front and center by one Dr. Heinrich Stadelmann, a portrait painted by Otto Dix that uses bold colours and particularly unsettling eyes that pierce the surface image, alluding to the underlying tumult of the subconscious mind. As I walk through this first room I see the notoriety of Dali making an appearance with an excessively phallic chess set of his design that is comprised chiefly of fingers: the bishop is an index finger crafted with an obvious slit on the top and the rooks oddly take the shape of saltshakers. Quite a smattering of photography scatters throughout this preliminary room, including Phillipe Halsman’s "Dali Exploding," a two dimensional image of Dali with rivulets of skin separating from his forehead moving into floating drops. Josef Sudek is also featured, his "Surrealist Composition" consists of a heavily shaded photograph of the whorls of a shell sitting on a vague object in the dark, at the base of which an eyeball ominously stares up into the distance.
Heading into the next room I begin to explore the Dada arts, primarily those of Angelika Hoerle, commonly known as the "Comet of Cologne Dada." It is through the collective Cologne Dada that I witness the early development of a surreal movement, particularly in the adept Dada artist Max Ernst who serves as a central figure of both movements, featuring art in both sections of the gallery. However, my favourite Dadaist at the exhibit has to be Gerd Arntz, a printmaker whose images are often highly sexual, always politically charged assemblages of images representing different buildings that juxtapose the lifestyles of the high and low classes. Arntz comes across as a well-educated idealist that abandoned his cushy middle class lifestyle in favour of an artistic drive to convey the neglected struggle of the lower class. After Dada, I finally ascend the second floor to Surreal Things, an exhibit I have been slavering over since early May.
The first room contains a large Surrealist contribution to Romeo and Juliet for director Nijinska, decorated by many surrealists including Max Ernst, who was denounced by Andre Breton when he crashed the opening of a show, distributing pamphlets that stated: “ It is inadmissible that ideas should be at the behest of money.” Following the ballet, I am greeted by an assortment of furniture and surreal objects, a practice that Dali highly recommends. His contribution to the collection is the "Aphrodisiac Jacket," hanging multiple small plastic cups that attach to the front and arms of the dinner jacket with a miniature straw placed in each. When first revealed, Dali had supplied a bottle of crème de menthe so that the viewers could drink directly from the cups during the exhibit, inviting them to directly participate in the artwork. Marcel Duchamp adds his famous "Why not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy" to the collection, a birdcage that appears to be filled with sugar cubes that are in actuality pieces of marble filed down to the appropriate size, a piece that has Duchamp reveling in his deception of the viewer. The furniture takes the form of the Corset Chair from Leonor Fini, which explicitly explores a powerful masculine fetish, as well as the Table with Bird’s Legs, considered Meret Oppenheim’s ode to the bird Loplop, the alter ego to Max Ernst that he considered a literal extension of himself.
Further down the hall the exhibit has assembled a small room decorated with some of Dali’s furniture: the May West Lips Sofa and the Lobster Telephone reside in a room with rather eccentric wallpaper. Across the wall Apparition of a Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach, the first painting that makes use of Dali’s paranoiac-critical method, that creates multiple images, containing the image of a bowl of pears, the outline of a face, as well as a standing dog which I had never recognized before, made from the amalgamation of all the smaller individual images on the canvas. The development of techniques that assist the artist in drawing upon the ideas of the subconscious are very popular among the Surrealists; the technique of frottage was invented by Max Ernst when he rubbed a pencil against paper laid upon a piece of wood, using the accentuated points that appeared as the starting point of a fresh piece of art.
Following the small room, a small three-walled room shows images of the Beistegui apartment projected onto each surface, owned by Charles de Beistegui, an avid collector of surrealist arts and his many other various whims. The layout of the exhibit has allowed many wall projections, featuring Surrealist shorts "Le Sang d’un Poete" by Jean Cocteau and "La Daphne" by Jean Painlevé. However, the apartment is not greatly appealing, so I continue into the next room, the largest of the exhibition that contains the majority of the exhibit.
This large room contains perfumes of Surrealists, Surrealist advertisements based prominently on the art of Surrealist Rene Magritte and clippings from the Surrealist publication Minotaur. Some of Dali’s famous pieces of jewelry are also on display: the sexual Ruby Lips as well as the Starfish Broach, which has fully articulated limbs that can be arranged to the owner’s personal will; the owner of the broach used to attach it suggestively to her breast. Some provocative fashion is also on display, my favourite piece a collaboration of Elsa Schiaparelli with Salvador Dali resulting in the Shoe Hat, designed to create a phallus to placate the female castration complex; a man could wear this hat and double his masculinity in an instant! And although I obviously concentrate heavily on Dali, my favourite Surrealist by far, there are many other surreal artists on display, including a generous helping of Max Ernst, a very prominent figure throughout the Dada and Surreal movements that I had known relatively little about before the exhibit.
During the height of its popularity, through all available mediums, Surrealism attempts to follow the line of thought from the unconscious before it becomes yet another fleeting eruption, dissipating into the images and symbols that constantly overwhelm the conscious mind:
"The world needs more fantasy. Our civilization is too mechanical. We can make the fantastic real and then it is more real than that which actually exists."
Dali asserts that dreams, fantasy and whim all find validity in life, which is something I too deeply admire; surrealists attain nothing less than the very height of self-knowing. Call me a subjective sonofabitch if you must, but I’ll continue to eat surrealism up with a silver spoon with a Dali crutch for support. The man believed he could do anything with a healthy dose of Freud and Nietzsche and evolved into one of the most confident men in history, he had to be doing something right! The exhibit runs until August thirtieth so dive right into that subconscious and prepare for a barrage of repressed imagery!
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