Art: The Surreal House

What does 'surreal' conjure up for you ? Do you visualise Terry Gilliam's madcap animations for Monty Python, or those similarly otherworldly scenes in The Beatles' Yellow Submarine? Thinking more recently but still in a filmic form, perhaps Pans Labyrinth or even Avatar (although I cannot speak from experience) has the images that fit 'surreal' for you. Less specific but more wide ranging, what can be found quite by accident on YouTube today must surely fit such a description. Films that juxtapose everyday activities with extraordinary results or featuring oddball characters and scenes. Whether produced by fluke or constructed by choreography or computer simulation we are receptive to multiple surreal images every day. Having mentioned Monty Python it would be wrong to contemplate contemporary surrealist comedy most obvious in The Mighty Boosh in which our heroes seem to have created their own world of images and actions inside their house-cum-shop. It exists in an otherwise normal (ish) contemporary world where normal (ish) everyday things take place. Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding are today's surrealist performers who would, I feel sure, agree with much of the reasoning behind the origins of the surreal art movement in the 1920's. But we have become so accustomed to surrealism in our lives that we are able to cope with 'Boosh-world' just as easily as being able to open a can of beer with a prawn, use a bag which looks like like a radio, stand on a football-pitch-like rug, drink in a ship-like bar …. think of your own examples from your own lives from here on!

“Surrealism is a means toward the total liberation of the mind and of everything that resembles it... We (The Surrealists) have no intention of changing men's habits, but we have hopes of proving to them how fragile their thoughts are, and on what unstable foundations, over what cellars they have erected their unsteady houses”
Surrealist Declaration 1925


The Surreal House, OMA, Villa Dall'Ava, 1991

My contemporary examples, and to be honest every advert break on TV these days is littered with surrealist imagery, are the the fairly crass and bulldozer result of nearly a hundred years of surreal art and thinking which permeate our everyday lives and attitude; think of perhaps a ten ton pencil with house shaped and house sized rubber being used to crack a football sized peanut containing inflatable eyes – in other words fantastical but unsubtle.
The origins of Surrealist art thinking are highly theoretical and academic and were started by Andre Breton in his Manifestos of Surrealism from 1924 onwards. The Surrealist group of artists were formed in that year in Paris as a continuation of the Dada movement which itself was a radical reaction by young artists to the horrors of the first World War. In its essence there were two approaches, the first of which was the automatic approach to making art most closely akin to 'word' or 'free' association and its aim to free the creativity of the mind from interference, or as Breton put it,
“Thought's dictation in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupation”


The Surreal House, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Beistegui Apartment, Paris, 1929-31

It would be worth keeping this thought in mind when considering the current notorious work of The Dualism. There are obviously some limitations to visual art or even architecture being able to adopt an unconstrained, unpremeditated method but a breakthrough by Max Ernst, later adopted and used for the whole of his career by Rene Magritte, was adapted - the use of collage. In Ernst's theoretical terms,
“The Systematic exploitation of the fortuitous or engineered encounter of two or more intrinsically incompatible realities on a surface which is manifestly inappropriate for the purpose and the spark of poetry which leaps across the gap as these two realities are brought together”

In other words a realisation that juxtaposing two otherwise alien images within the same scene – the body of one creature with the head of another for example – or, perhaps more commonly in terms of everyday use, the shape and image of one object put to use (or made useless) in a way never originally intended. In art terms think of Oppenheim's fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon, think of Dali's Lobster telephone, and in this exhibition, Duchamp's 'Priere de Toucher', the doorbell as a nipple, also used briefly, if my memory serves me correctly, in Fawlty Towers! Sexuality was always to feature prominently in surreal art because the untethered mind could produce work of a type perhaps forbidden within the rules of society.

A second area where the mind could be creative without constraint is of course in dreams where memories are often reproduced in the form of symbols. Analysis of this type could be found in Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams' whose theories were most influential on the 1920's surrealist artists, this form being termed oneiric or 'dreamlike'. The freedom of the unconscious mind was also to be found in the art of the insane, primitive and naïve art, a freedom most succinctly put by Dali,
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad”


The Surreal House, Francesca Woodman, House searching for!! #4, 1976

The Surreal House attempts to use works of some of the original surrealists alongside contemporary artists to examine the mystery of the house and architecture in our imaginations. Because there are reoccurring symbols produced by the unconscious and the freely associated mind it is often thought that surreal images can be more universal than those associated with reality. But Surreal House does attempt to show the significance of the unconscious world of extraordinary dwellings that reflect everything that the rational, sanitized house is not.

The lower level moves through 15 small rooms in an attempt to reflect the interior space and perhaps an inner claustrophobia of the mind. This really only becomes apparent when you ascend the specially installed staircase to an upper world/gallery and can peer down at the domestic compartments. Rachel Whiteread's tomb-like bath is in a darkened interior behind Duchamp's leather and opaque window 'Fresh Widow'; Buster Keaton's 'The Scarecrow' and Maya Deren's 'Meshes of the Afternoon' films 'read' the domestic place with very different imaginative functions and unconscious fears; Francesca Woodman's black and white interior photos show the powerful physical interaction between the inhabitant and the home, whether present or disappeared; absence of presence is magnified in De Chirico's deeply shadowed paintings and the mood is revisited within Hopper's 'House by the Railroad' which delivers a haunted sensation borrowed by Hitchcock for Psycho and used in The Adams Family TV show in the 1960s. Film and animation are well represented in the exhibition as you would expect and the inclusion of Jan Svankmajer's stop-motion 'Down to the Cellar' creates a fearful imaginative world in the dark basement of of our homes (or minds), a place where we don't like to visit or which remains with us in exaggerated memories. Svankmajer has unsurprisingly used 'Alice in Wonderland' for inspiration – The Gothic and Romantic Victorian English writers such as Lewis Carroll being a common source of material for surreal art.


The Surreal House, Salvador Dali, Sleep, c. 1937

Away from the Freudian claustrophobia downstairs, the exhibition on the upper level steps back from the interior to take an outside look at our living space. The image that carries the whole exhibition is, appropriately, Dali's iconic 'Sleep', a giant, yet sagging and slumbering head, held up with fragility by several crutches. Using the head as a metaphor for a 'home of dreams' the painting is juxtaposed with a film of Rem Koolhaas' extraordinary architecture within Villa dall'Ava in France 1996. A supremely creative dwelling which reveals hidden symbols and uses from different angles and heights. A rooftop swimming pool is laid out in modernist primary coloured rectangular roof segments and yet precariously teeters on slender legs. Next, De Chirico's angular 'The Evil Genius of a King' 1914 is presented alongside Jean-Luc Goddard's use of the Casa Malaparte house perched on a rock outcrop in his 'Le Mepris' film. In the following rooms the deeply male subconscious fascination with the womb and womb-like structures for living are examined and then sexualisation examined most powerfully with the inclusion of one of Hans Bellman's mutilated dolls 'Les Jeux de la Poupee' 1938-49. Since the clear and clean, perfect and rational lines of modernist construction are alien living to the paranoias of surreal dreaming it is surprising that Le Corbusier features strikingly twice. For the 1939 World Trade Fair Dali created a 'Dream of Venus' installation within a penthouse apartment designed by Le Corbusier, most notably with an 'outdoor' living room feature. Also photos of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye 1928-31 fallen into disrepair are some of the most poignant in the exhibition. Finally, two of the most destructive yet surreal images are left for the end; Gordon Matta-Clark's most famous architectural rearrangement, the dissection of a whole house is shown in his film 'Splitting' 1974 and one of Andrei Tarkovsky's many surreal filmic moments is shown to good 'dream-like' effect when, in 'Sacrifice', the films protagonist gives up his house by burning it to the ground.


The Surreal House, Sarah Lucas, Au Naturel, 1994

Numerous memorable images feature in this quite exhausting exhibition. At times The theoretical analogies that are presented are dense and unfathomable and threaten to make certain work inaccessible but the inclusion of some more playful items, especially the films 'Steamboat Bill Jnr' by Keaton and Jacques Tati's 'Mon Oncle', and the semi-comic installation 'The Toilet in the Corner' featuring some hidden amateur opera singing redress some of that balance. An exhibition with a more imaginative set or presentation might help make the exhibition more palatable but also may not examine so many aspects covered by surrealist art. It is a major and impressive collection of surrealist art and its legacies and which attempts, and only partially succeeds, to highlight the importance of the house and of architecture in our imaginations. I simply needed a few more poetic sparks leaping across the gap!

The Surreal House at Barbican Art Gallery, London until 12th September
John Bock installation and performance, The Curve at Barbican until 12th September
www.barbican.org.uk for exhibition related events