The uncanny interior of the surreal house

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The Surreal House

Jane Alison et al.

A house, according to the surrealist standards of this book, is not what commonly is considered a home. The surreal house isn’t cozy, but creepy. As a work of architecture, it is intuitive rather than rational. As a furnished interior, it is cluttered and dusty and (to invoke several favoured surrealist modifiers) mad, haunted, convulsive and delirious. In other words, the surreal house is not really intended for human habitation but, rather, is a marvellous dwelling for the imagination.

Happily, the book itself is a potent resource and resort for a broad range of readers’ imaginations, so much so that it will probably afford many who browse through it an experiential understanding of Surrealism in general. Although produced to accompany the Barbican Art Gallery’s exhibition of the same name, The Surreal House stands on its own and – unlike an exhibition bound by time and space – is open indefinitely and for visits of any duration.

The Surreal Houseis open in another, crucial way, as well. Editor Jane Alison, who organized the Barbican installation, infused this volume with a whimsy that doctrinaire scholars of Surrealism often neglect. Even the four featured essays are written in a quasi-conversational style, and freely cite individuals whose work lies outside the achievements of Andre Breton and his Parisian circle. And the bulk of the writings are not essays at all: many comprise fewer than four hundred words, and are notably fragmentary and speculative—put in print to stimulate, rather than to persuade.

May Ann Caws poses the issue of housing the surrealist imagination. In doing so, she cites several people not ordinarily associated with Surrealism – artist Marcel Duchamp and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre among them. Caws considers the paradoxes of intimacy and openness, freedom and containment, the material and the metaphorical, and emphasizes the importance, in relation to Surrealism, of Gaston Bachelard’s writings on space. Bachelard’s 1958 book, The Poetics of Space, is concerned with the lived experience of architecture, especially of the home.

Brian Dillon provides brief and pithy meditations on the themes of environs, ruins, the vestibule, atmosphere, dust, the salon and the sanctum. With each, he associates works by visual and literary artists of varying levels of recognizance. For example, he considers Edgar Allen Poe in relation to environs and the gothic idea that apparently inanimate places are hauntingly animated. Considering the sanctum, Dillon points to miniaturized forms of surrealist space and cites Rene Magritte’s notorious painting of a nightgown with breasts, hanging in an open armoire (from 1937); and Claude Cahun’s lesser-known photographic portrait of herself, lodged inside a cupboard (dated 1932).

Exile—in relation to Marcel Duchamp, restlessness and surrealist exhibitions—is the tie that binds together Krzysztof Fijalkowski’s essay. Fijalkowski uses a surrealist perspective to interpret Duchamp’s wartime exile in New York, his self-imposed and fictional exile from making art, his seemingly endless succession of rented rooms and studios around Manhattan, and various exhibitions he participated in, including the first major post-Liberation Surrealist exhibition in Paris (in 1947 at Galerie Maeght). Doing so, he questions whether an art form rooted in estrangement ever could claim to be ‘at home’.

Dalibor Vesely’s essay uses Sigmund Freud’s London apartment, crammed with books and antique artefacts, as a point of departure for his exploration of the house as a labyrinthine construction and a metaphor for creativity.  Freud’s groundbreaking studies in psychoanalysis were of tremendous importance to Parisian Surrealists of the 1920s to the early 1950s, and are frequently cited by scholars of Surrealism. Vesely, however, also discusses the Vienna-based architecture firm of Coop Himmelb(l)au, whose late 20th-/early 21st-century practice mirrors the Surrealist automatism advocated by Breton, Salvador Dali and Man Ray, among others.

Thoughtful and stimulating as these varied written texts are, it is the book’s vast selection of photographic reproductions that most eloquently stirs the imagination and inspires an understanding of Surrealism’s relevance to daily life. Photographic representations of works in other media are of consistently high quality, vividly evoking sculptural works by Louise Bourgeois, Rebecca Horn, Joseph Cornell and Alberto Giacometti; installations by Bourgeois, Dali, Maurizio Cattelan, Ilya Kabakov and Edward Kienholz; and paintings by Magritte, Giacometti and Georges Malkine, among others.

The possibility of Surrealism as an imaginative analogue to everyday reality really hits home, however, in photographic images by Lee Miller (who had worked with Man Ray), Francesca Woodman, Paul Nouge and Maya Deren.  Miller’s Portrait of Space, near Siwa, Egypt (1937) is reproduced full-page as the book’s frontispiece. The effective surface of the image, its picture plane, is a violently torn window screen that also has a small, empty frame set into it. An unremarkable void of sand and sky can be seen through the screen, the gaping tear and the aperture of the frame. As such, it is the act of imaginatively seeing, creating the means through which reality is perceived, that renders the ordinary, extraordinary and communicates sur-reality.

All the texts in this book remain anchored in historic, Parisian Surrealism but are not afraid to expand upon that base. The confidence necessary for this kind of amplification was provided by a panel of project advisers who included Dawn Ades, Ramona Fotiade, David Lomas, Thomas Mical, Francois Penz and Dagmar Motycka Weston, in addition to Mary Ann Caws, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Brian Dillon and Dalibor Vesely. All engage in research, writing and curatorial projects involving avant-garde art, literature, film and architecture. Ades and Lomas are two of the co-directors of the UK-based Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacies. The book’s introduction is by Jane Alison. Last but not least, the book also contains a complete checklist of works from the Barbican exhibition, among them a handful of entries written by Alison, Fijalkowski and Fotiade, and one by James Williamson.

The Surreal House  by Jane Alison et al.is published by Yale University Press and Barbican Art Gallery 2010. 348 pp.  94 col / 93 mono illus, with many of each repeated in the catalogue section. ISBN 978-0-300-16576-0