Leave substance for the shadows

A still from Bunuel and Dali's film Un Chien Andalou illustrates the Surrealist obsession with the eye. Photo / Supplied

Surrealism has won the war. The division between Modernism and Surrealism that preoccupied much of 20th century art ended with a winner, according to Didier Ottinger, curator of the show now on at Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA).

"If you see now what we call sculptural installation in contemporary art, it owes more to Surrealism than that overt formalist tradition," says Ottinger, who is also the deputy director of the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

That means he's French and spoiling for a fight over the continuing importance of the last major art movement to emerge out of Paris.

Paris is still peeved about New York assuming the mantle of the world's art capital some time about mid-century, so Ottinger is doing his best to redress that as well.

He said the chance to put together a show for Australia was an opportunity to put forward "a new conception of Surrealism".

While previous surveys had treated the movement as a phenomenon of the 1920s and 30s with a few big names to draw in the crowds, the GOMA show, drawn entirely from the Pompidou's vast collection, places it longer, deeper and wider - not always convincingly, with some of the work at the tail end of the show making only a tenuous connection.

The story starts as always with Dada, the anti-art movement born in the cabarets of Zurich in reaction to the cauldron of war going on across its borders.

"World War I had a real impact on this generation because it was a crisis concerning not just politics but culture in general," Ottinger says.

"It was also a demonstration of the failure of so-called progress, which was built on an extension of the mechanical world, as this generation discovered what was premised as a source of development was in fact used for the destruction of humanity."

Ottinger takes the story through to the death in 1966 of Surrealism's founder, main polemicist and autocratic leader (sometimes called its pope), Andre Breton.

That means he's not relying on the likes of Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte to carry the show, using those popular stars sparingly to push the narrative along. Instead, figures like Max Ernst, Francis Picabia and Albert Giacometti get their due, along with photographers such as Man Ray and Dora Maar.

It also seems at times like an Andre Masson retrospective with supporting works. Masson came to Surrealism not through Dada but though Cubism and, despite being cast out of the movement several times by Breton, he was one of its most consistent explorers, his work appearing in each of the chronological sections of the exhibition.

Breton first encountered Dada publications in 1917 in fellow poet Guillaume Apollinaire's apartment, and was soon corresponding with its founder Tristan Tzara.

But, by the early 1920s, he had rejected Dada's nihilism, positing instead a movement of the imagination which drew not on the real but the surreal, dreams and nightmares and the collective unconscious.

In his first book of essays published in 1924 he plotted the road ahead in a poem, rendered in neon tubing by GOMA's curators: "Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and dreams. Drop your kids in the middle of nowhere. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave behind, if need be, your comfortable life and promising future. Take to the highways."

Ernst's collages, Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades and other outliers that didn't fit the strictures of Cubism and its kin started to make their way into the surreal soup.

On entering GOMA, past a 1923 film of a sleeping Paris, the first paintings are by the Italian Georgio de Chirico, whose shadowed piazzas and strange figures must have seemed out of this world when they first emerged in the 1910s - surreal, a challenge to realism.

"For a beginning he is everywhere, not in Masson but in Magritte, in Dali," Ottinger says.

"He introduced a new idea of a painting in the early 1910s which was the possibility to connect the painting to metaphysics, to philosophy, and also to disturb the appearance of the world apparently by leaving it like it is real, but with something very disturbing that was interesting for surrealism.

"There was the distortion of the perspective. When you see the image there is something eerie."

Next is Max Ernst's Ubu Imperator from 1923. It is a wooden fort, a chess king, a king, a child's spinning top all merged into one unsettling mass approaching the point of unbalance as it spins in a harsh landscape.

Drawn from Alfred Jarry's absurdist play and Ernst's own psychological landscape, it wobbled precariously into the surrealists' consciousness, challenging their original notion that this would be a movement of words and ideas rather than visual art.

Turn your head and a shadow against the wall grabs your attention. Look up and the source of the shadow is Marcel Duchamp's 1914 ready-made Bottle Rack.

This originally mass-produced cone of metal still has the power to shock, not because it's taking a humble everyday item and declaring it to be art, but because that Dada gesture became the foundation for so much art of the subsequent century.

Nearby is Dust Breeding, a tiny 1920 Man Ray photograph of dust on the surface of Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass).

That is also the art of our times, art made by conversations with other art.

The prehistory over, the curators have created a shrine for Breton - artworks based on photographs of Surrealism's ringmaster, a copy of his first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, and a film tracking the interior of his Paris apartment crammed with rare books, artworks, ethnological masks and sculptures.

One of those sculptures, a figure from the Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean, stands in a glass case.

While the Cubists professed to be interested in "primitive" art because of its formal qualities, the Surrealists wanted to tap into the magic that ritual objects possess, and to invest their own work with magic and power. Games and rituals were employed to go beyond conscious decision-making.

The show includes four "exquisite corpses", works produced by sharing the task of producing a picture between several people, with each participant not seeing what the others have produced until the end.

The various games form the basis of a Surrealism for Kids education programme at GOMA and regional galleries during the show.

That the examples of this parlour game on display were produced by poets rather than visual artists adds to their charm, and gives a sense of the fun those involved in the movement must have had - when they weren't arguing.

And what arguments, often precipitated by Breton, usually about the role of the artist.

By the second Surrealist Manifesto of 1929, he was telling them they should join the Communist Party and make their art serve the revolution. Some joined the party. Some, like Masson, refused.

It was during this period, when Surrealism was in crisis over the validity of the interior model versus reality, that Dali moved to Paris. He was known for the film he made with fellow Spaniard Luis Bunuel in 1929, Un Chien Andalou, featuring the scene of a woman's eye being cut with a razor.

Ottinger says Dali's idea of "paranoiac criticism" gave the movement a temporary solution to its crisis, with Dali urging his fellows to follow and shape their obsessions rather than continue with automatism, where the artist tries to let forms emerge from some occult interior process.

If that sounds complicated, it would probably sound better in French, where philosophers are treated like rock stars.

Throughout the course of Surrealism, there were magazines and manifestoes and catalogues aimed at furthering the debate.

These were hugely influential, not only for the ideas of the writers but for the innovations of the designers and as an outlet for the photographers associated with the movement.

What's often extraordinary is the way these artists' explorations of interior space led so often to devastating reflections on external events of the time, such as the rise of fascism.

World War II led to a mass exodus from Europe, with many in the movement ending up in New York.

The exhibition calls for a rethink of the influence the exiles had on the younger generation of American artists, including paintings by Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell.

The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle from Pollock's first show at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery in 1943 certainly shows he had taken on board ideas about ritual, mythology and automatic gesture, but in the end his work became about the act of painting.

Ottinger says the work came to the Pompidou through a gift.

"It's probably not the one the curators at the time would have chosen. They probably would have bought a drip painting, but this is far more interesting," he says.

The Chilean Roberto Matta wanted to create an American chapter of Surrealism, but Breton vetoed the idea. The Matta painting in the show, the seven metre-long Trans-appearance of Language, reads as surrealist, including quotes from The Large Glass, while being on the scale of Abstract Expressionism, and offers a fitting climax.

The other American representative is Dorothea Tanning, the widow of Max Ernst and still alive at age 101. Her 1970 installation Room 202, Hotel du Pavot creates a space where fleshy figures burst from the walls to create an atmosphere of desire and anxiety.

The big revelation of the show is the films, which are interspersed among the other artworks.

"What is striking even for me is the absolute connection through the inspiration, the themes, the way the images are constructed, there is a dialogue with the paintings and the drawings, so this is something new," Ottinger says.

Standing in front of a striking film by the Ukranian Maya Deren, I strike up a conversation with John, a retired eye surgeon who confesses to being fanatical about art to the extent of travelling to the homes and studios so he could see Matisse's interior spaces and Miro's sun-blasted Majorcan light.

It's all about the eyes, he says, the eyes that are ubiquitous through the art and the films.

"That cut eye in Un Chien Andalou, it's a cataract operation. It's about getting behind the eyes, straight to the brain."

* Adam Gifford travelled to Brisbane as a guest of the Queensland Tourism Board.

Exhibition

What: Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams

Where and when: Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, to October 2