The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii

Transcription

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subversive
spaces
surrealism+contemporary art
to be decided regarding front
cover design
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Contents
Introduction
7
Sam Lackey
Psychic disturbance and interiority
13
in Surrealism and contemporary art
David Lomas
As long as I’m walking
65
Anna Dezeuze
List of Plates
97
List of Exhibited Works
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Director’s Foreword
Maria Balshaw
As a university art gallery with a modern and contemporary fine art
collection, collaborations that draw together academic investigation with
curatorial exploration are a vital part of our work. What we now see in
Subversive Spaces: Surrealism and Contemporary Art is notable for being one
of the longest and most fecund examples of such a partnership. In
September 2003 the conference Fantasy Space: Surrealism and Architecture
was held at The Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester.
This was the first event of the newly inaugurated AHRC Research Centre
for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacies, a collaboration between the
universities of Essex, Manchester and Tate. It was directed by Dawn
Ades, while David Lomas and Jennifer Mundy were responsible for its
activities at The University of Manchester and Tate respectively. Activities
included the organisation of conferences, symposia and seminars, as well
as artist residencies and publications, including the online journal Papers of
Surrealism. The diverse body of work associated with this Centre can be
seen at <http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/> and the Centre has received
new funding for its activities and will now focus on Surrealism and
Sexuality.
The exhibition Subversive Spaces: Surrealism and Contemporary Art was
conceived in response to the international interest in the original
conference and is the outcome of a long running and extraordinarily rich
series of conversations, debate and research between the academics within
the Centre, notably David Lomas, Julia Kelly and Anna Dezeuze, and
curators at the Whitworth Art Gallery, David Morris and Mary Griffiths.
The lynchpin for all this activity has been Samantha Lackey, whose role as
Research Fellow for the Centre and then as Curatorial Research Fellow at
the Whitworth has allowed us to develop a new mode of academic
engagement, which culminates in an internationally significant exhibition.
This mode of engagement, which takes the very best academic scholarship
and develops it into an ambitious and accessible exhibition, is central to
our commitment to embrace risk and innovation as the means to engage
and delight our audiences.
The exhibition presents some of the key intellectual propositions of the
research from the Centre; notably the generative connection between
Surrealism and contemporary art practice, the enduring significance of
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disturbed domestic interiors and the disordered spaces of the city. It also
goes considerably beyond any of our initial imaginings – with Gregor
Schneider’s Kinderzimmer standing as the apotheosis of a space we simply
could not have imagined at the outset. It is the intellectual context of a
university art gallery and a dedicated research centre that can allow such
exploration to thrive.
Exhibitions of the scale and ambition of Subversive Spaces can only take
place in collaboration with many other institutions, within the public and
private sector, whose generosity as lenders make it possible for us to put
together a genuinely challenging and international body of works. I would
like to extend very warm thanks to all lenders, particularly Francis Alÿs,
Arts Council Collection, Bolton Art Gallery, Călin Dan, Musée
Carnavalet, Rosemarie Castoro, Sadie Coles Gallery, Jane England
Gallery, Frith Street Gallery, Harry Gamboa Jr., Rainer Ganahl, MarieAnge Guilleminot, Van Horn Gallery, Jersey Heritage Trust, Georg Kargl
Gallery, Kiesler Foundation Vienna, The Kinsey Institute, Manchester
City Art Gallery, Victoria Miro Gallery, Musée d’Art moderne et
contemporain (Musées de la ville de Strasbourg), Musée national d’art
moderne (Centre Pompidou), Murderme Collection, John Rylands
Library, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Art Library, Gregor Schneider, Markus Schinwald,
George Shaw, Southampton City Art Gallery, Tate, Alex Villar, The
University of Warwick, Wellcome Collection, Anthony Wilkinson
Gallery, Francesca Woodman Estate and David Zwirner Gallery for their
commitment to, and support of, the exhibition.
This exhibition is the first of series of museum and gallery projects across
the North West that benefit from funding from the North West Regional
Development Agency, designed to support the international ambition of
the museum sector in the North West. Arts Council England, The Henry
Moore Foundation, The Moving Image and Touring Exhibition Service
(MITES) and the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen have also contributed
significant support toward the exhibition. Subversive Spaces will tour to
Compton Verney and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts and we thank
our partner institutions for their support and collaboration.
Subversive Spaces: Surrealism and Contemporary Art
An Introduction
Samantha Lackey
A woman sits in the back of a taxi, wrapped in a heavily patterned cloth,
her breasts exposed and her hand twisted at an impossible angle in front
of her. Her glazed eyes stare out from the tangled mess of her soaking wet
hair while snails crawl across her prone body and water cascades from the
interior ceiling of the vehicle, splashing over her torso and leaking from
the bottom of the car.
Parked in the courtyard outside the gallery, Salvador Dalí’s Rainy Taxi was
the opening provocation of the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition held
at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Paris. The remainder of the exhibition
featured, in addition to over 250 more conventional works: a corridor lined
with sixteen mannequins, each standing adjacent to a street sign placed on
the wall above their heads; a large room lit by a central brazier and carpeted
with sand and dead leaves, with an ornate and carefully made-up bed in each
of its four corners, including ‘one with a single leg in a reed fringed pool’;1
above this scene Marcel Duchamp’s 1200 coal sacks, each one filthy with coal
dust and stuffed with paper to give the impression of potentially lethal
imminent descent.2 The press response described the exhibition under the
following headlines: ‘Surrealism Dead, Exhibition Follows’; ‘Surrealism
Funeral’; ‘Surrealism at Its Last Gasp’, and accused the surrealists of a
bankruptcy of both morality and taste. André Breton, the self-proclaimed
leader of the Surrealist movement, responded to these criticisms ten years
later, on the eve of the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, with a
hindsight that interpreted the intimations of ‘gloom, suffocation and evil’ as a
premonition of ‘the insidious cruelty that was to come.’3 In his defence of the
interventionist installation strategies of surrealist exhibitions, perpetuated by
Duchamp’s 16 Miles of String which wound its way around the art works of
the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1942, New York, he suggested
simply that ‘all this has since assumed too much meaning.’4 Although
Breton’s stance was predicated on a desire to downplay accusations of bad
taste and pandering to art world cognoscenti, subsequent chroniclers of art
history have opposed this modesty by refusing to accept premature
declarations of the death of Surrealism.
Indeed, Surrealism’s intransigent refusal to quietly lie down and die
continues to frustrate attempts to sanitise and embalm our art-historical
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avant-gardes. While Cubism, Futurism, Orphism and their earlytwentieth-century contemporaries were content to admit to a job well
done and a permanent position in the institutionally sanctioned hall of
fame, Surrealism has been poked, prodded and repeatedly disinterred by
its champions and detractors. Its latest Lazarus act has been witnessed in
the heart of our museums as installation art has assumed prevalence over
other forms of contemporary art practice: its immersive,
phenomenologically-situated experience explicitly connected to those
innovations of Surrealist exhibitions.5
boulevards, provoked new anxieties that were unknown in the intimate
spaces of small towns and villages. Likewise the disorientating effects of
confinement felt in a crowd or in a narrow railway carriage were
understood as provoked by the experience of life in the modern city.
Symptoms of both conditions commonly included increased heartbeat,
trembling, sweats and shivers. Other complaints included the feeling of
vertiginous descent, confusion of scale and distance, and the desire to skirt
the edges of public spaces by sticking closely to the shelter provided by
adjacent houses and shops.
Yet perhaps we should take heed of Breton’s insistence on ‘too much
meaning.’ The rhetoric of surrealist resistance to the orthodoxies of
‘slippery-floored halls of museums’ echoes hollowly off the walls of today’s
art institutions, which enthusiastically contain Surrealism and its
installation strategies.6 Breton himself suggested: ‘The enchantments that
the street outside had to offer me were a thousand times more real.’7 So it
is to the surrealist engagement with the spaces that we live in, and move
through, rather than those of the exhibition, that Subversive Spaces:
Surrealism and Contemporary Art turns for its particular account of the
affinities between Surrealism and contemporary art. While the clues to
today’s curatorial choices were present in 1938 – in the mannequin
streetwalkers, each with their designated city street, and the single leg
emerging from the underwater pool in the bedroom – these theatrical
flourishes are read as hinting at the conceptual revisions of the experience
of our everyday spaces that were propounded by the Surrealists and are
recast in the context of contemporary life.
Subversive Spaces presents these familiar excesses of the subconscious in
their historical and contemporary manifestations. It uses the images of
Surrealism present in the popular imagination as a starting point for
drawing attention to a range of works that deal with the subject of space
and Surrealism in lesser-known manifestations. So we can see that the
acknowledgement of the anxiety produced by the experience of space
without limits is as malevolently present in the background of Yves
Tanguy’s dreamscapes as it is in Giorgio de Chirico’s empty plazas. The
contrast of the liminal city spaces of docks, railway sidings and wastelands
so favoured by the surrealists, against the confined spaces of the celebrated
and rapidly disappearing arcades of Paris, demonstrates an ambiguity of
spatial experience that is at once celebrated and decried. Perturbations of
scale familiar from the paintings of René Magritte are manifested in the
work of contemporary artists, and the fear of ascent or rapid descent is
repeatedly acknowledged in the recognition of the visual potency of the
staircase. Contemporary artists negotiate the city, protected by magical
coats or by the safety of gaps and crevices.
As such the exhibition is divided into two sections: ‘Psychic Interiors’ and
‘Wandering the City.’ Both explore the Surrealist preoccupation with
blurring the boundaries between our conscious and subconscious through
the acknowledgement of the ways in which layers of memory and fantasy
imprint themselves on the surface of our lives and our spaces for living. As
Anthony Vidler has shown, the attempts to outline a causal relationship
between the modern experience of space and pathologies of psychological
disturbance have proved an enduring trope in accounts of the dissolution
of a centred and stable subjectivity.8 From the late nineteenth-century
onwards the blurred demarcation between reality and the imagination was
expressed in the psychopathologies identified in the city dweller. The
prevalence of neurasthenia as the symptom of the alienating conditions of
modernity quickly diversified into a range of phobias, including
agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), and its counterpart, claustrophobia (fear
of enclosed spaces). The open spaces of the city, its squares and expansive
8
For David Lomas, curator of ‘Psychic Interiors,’ it is the spaces of the
family home and the temporary occupation of the uncanny hotel corridor
that provide the setting for his consideration of the Surrealist disruption
of space. From the subversive physical expression of the female hysteric,
barely contained within the overwrought pages of Max Ernst’s collage
novels, to the enthusiastic support shown by the Surrealists for the
eighteen-year-old parricide Violette Nozières, the domestic interior
provides a site for the exposure of libidinal excess and violent release.
Revolutionary potential and social critique rest together, hiding in
cupboards, under sofas, sticking a foot out from a wall to trip us up. They
remind us that the admonishment to play nicely is rarely heeded, crimes
of abuse and imprisonment lurk under the floorboards of our homes as
much as they are present in the alleys of our cities. Meanwhile in Anna
Dezeuze’s exploration of urban space within ‘Wandering the City,’ the
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fig.1
fig.2
crime scenes have been faithfully recorded in the forensically detailed
photographs of Eugène Atget. The Surrealist dérive is explored in its
aspect of playfulness, the legacies of alternative mappings recognised in
the seismographic tracings of the journeys of contemporary artists. Ruins,
wastelands, sewers and demolitions, the repositories of lives lived and the
remnants left behind, tell stories of attempted acts of resistance against the
order imposed by the city’s spaces.
legacy lives on in a contemporary engagement with its interests. As our
experience of the spaces around us is altered daily through the advent of
new technologies and new economies of globalisation, artists are
compelled to perpetuate a critical interaction with space. It is in these
multiple spaces of contemporary production that the ghosts of Surrealism
are to be found, stalking both our homes and our streets.
Between the confinement of the home and the desolation of open spaces
lies Kinderzimmer, the new work by the German artist Gregor Schneider,
commissioned as part of Subversive Spaces. Two dimly-lit children’s rooms
lie shrouded in darkness, while a film shows their place of origin, the
town of Garzweiler in Germany (fig.1 and fig.2). Kinderzimmer catches a
moment in time when the town of Garzweiler lay abandoned, awaiting
destruction for the purposes of opencast mining. The placing of
Schneider’s work within the framework of Subversive Spaces draws
attention to the artist’s long- established interest in the manipulation of
the physical and psychical spaces of the family home as well as
highlighting his interest in liminal and undefined space: the black void of
the gallery analogous to the wastelands of a mining-ravaged landscape.
1
André Breton, ‘Before the Curtain’ (1947), in
Franklin Rosemont, ed., What is Surrealism?
Selected Writings, London: Pluto Press, 1978,
p.274.
2
Lewis Kachur describes the exhibition in
greater detail in Displaying the Marvellous:
Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Surrealist
Exhibition Installations, Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, 2001, pp.22–101.
3
Breton, ‘Before the Curtain,’ op. cit.
4
Ibidem.
5
Claire Bishop cites the 1938 International
Surrealist Exhibition as a precursor for
installation art in Installation Art: A Critical
History, London: Tate, 2005. Brian O’Doherty
describes Marcel Duchamp’s Mile of String,
which looped and criss-crossed across the
Kinderzimmer stands as a stark reminder of the tenacious presence of
things that are supposed to be lost. While the revolutionary Surrealism
propounded by André Breton and his cohorts may indeed have died, its
10
11
display space of the 1942 First Papers of
Surrealism exhibition as a ‘precedent for the
will to actualize [pictorial space] of the late
sixties and seventies’. Brian O’Doherty, Inside
the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space
(1976), Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1999, p.72.
6
André Breton, ‘Surrealism and Painting’
(1928), in Surrealism and Painting, trans.
Simon Watson Taylor, Boston: MFA
Publications, 2002, p.3.
7
Ibidem.
8
Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art,
Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture,
Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001,
especially ‘Agoraphobia. Psychopathologies of
Urban Space,’ pp.25–50.
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Psychic Disturbance and Interiority in
Surrealism and Contemporary Art
David Lomas
fig.3
Douglas Gordon’s video installation Hysterical (1995) (pl.1) articulates
psychic disturbance with interior space. Based on archival medical footage,
Gordon returns us to the historical ‘scene’ of hysteria, an illness that
flourished in the Victorian era as a reaction to women’s stifling
confinement. Gordon’s source was an early medical film of neurological
conditions made in Turin in 1908.1 A woman, whose face is masked to
conceal her identity, is lowered to a bed by the professor and an assistant
after she has a hysterical convulsion. Gordon’s installation projects the
footage onto two large freestanding screens that abut at right angles like a
corner of a room. The same section of footage is played over and over as a
loop at different speeds on each of the screens. A single event is thus
bifurcated into two and made strangely out of sync. It may not be
coincidental that late nineteenth-century psychologists sought to explain
hysteria in terms of a splitting or doubling of the memory and personality.
In the same period, projection and the filmic screen were adopted from the
still novel technology of film as analogies for mental processes.2
Since the early 1990s, there has been a wave of interest in hysteria among
contemporary artists. Hysteria is a striking instance of a relationship
between psychic disturbance and space that recent artists have explored in
varying permutations of installation, video and performance. The
exhibition Subversive Spaces seeks to draw attention to affinities and, in
some cases, an ongoing artistic dialogue with Surrealism in the treatment
of such themes. Psyche and external space co-mingled in the Surrealist
imaginary. This essay provides a broader contextualisation of some of the
works, Surrealist and contemporary, included in the show.
Arch of Hysteria
fig.4
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The Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris was an epicentre for the hysteria craze in
the late nineteenth century. A Salon painting by André Brouillet (1887)
(pl.2) shows the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot presenting a hysterical
patient to a medical audience at the Salpêtrière. Similar demonstrations
were held for public audiences that were attended by leading cultural
figures of the day. Brouillet captures the element of spectacle that
attended these occasions. On the wall, behind the group of onlookers but
visible to the hysteric, for whom it acted as a visual cue, is a poster-sized
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reproduction of the arc de cercle pose. Also called ‘arch of hysteria’ is one of
the classic emblems of female hysteria. Supported only by the back of the
neck and heels, the rigidly extended body inscribes part of a circle. In the
most extreme form, the heels are drawn right back to touch the head with
the body forming a closed loop. A lithographic copy of Brouillet’s
painting hung above the couch in Freud’s consulting room.
Suspended in mid-air, defying the immutable laws of gravity, a hysteric in
the arc de cercle pose makes a dramatic entry in the final chapter of Max
Ernst’s collage novel Une Semaine de bonté (1934). In the penultimate
collage (pl.3), the intrinsic circularity of the pose is echoed visually by a
metal ring attached to a stone wall.3 Epitomising the core Surrealist
notions of convulsive beauty and the marvellous, the female hysteric is
raised by Ernst to the level of a symbol for Surreality. The Surrealist
leader, André Breton proclaimed: ‘Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will
not be.’4 A tensed bridge connecting these two points, the hyper-extended
body also brings to mind Breton’s account in the Surrealist Manifesto
(1924) of the Surrealist image or metaphor as a conductor joining two
realities of opposing charge. In a later essay celebrating Charcot’s hysteria,
Louis Aragon and Breton described it as ‘the greatest poetic discovery of
the nineteenth century.’5 As forms of expression, hysteria and poetry –
and, one can add, the dream likewise – are linked in the sense that they
articulate a dialectic of desire and repression that lies at the crux of the
whole Surrealist enterprise.
Taking up the hysteria theme, Dora Maar eschews the gendering of
hysteria as female in the work of her male Surrealist counterparts. Le
Simulateur (1936) (pl.4) is a composite of two photographs: a vaulted
ceiling from the Orangerie at Versailles, which is inverted to create a
disorienting, gravity-free space. Onto this is pasted the figure of a young
boy in shorts performing an acrobatic feat, a motif also found in other
pictures taken by Maar while she was living in Barcelona. The archedback body, a deliberate invocation of hysteria, is echoed by the
architecture, illustrating the contagious nature of convulsive beauty. It is
probable that Maar meant to impute a subversive potential to the
hysteric’s acrobatic antics. Le Simulateur represents a hysteric but also
represents the world upside down as it would be seen from the point of
view of the subject in the throes of a convulsion. The formal trope of
inversion can be interpreted as a desire to ‘turn things on their head.’
One would be hard put to find a more outré example of the arch of hysteria
than Salvador Dalí’s (fig.3). Not without humour, Dalí represents a woman
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in the throes of an ecstatic convulsion, wracked by a current of libidinal
energy that courses through her body before short-circuiting to the ground.
Her violent spasm has thrown open two drawers which form the trunk of
her torso and which spill out their contents of beans. A parabolic curve
formed by the hyper-extended body, the asymptote marked by a phallic
baguette, constitutes a kind of bodily ARCH-itecture. The origins of this
strange hybrid lie in Dalí’s reflections in an article in 1933 about Art
Nouveau architecture, a style whose flowering coincides with the heyday of
female hysteria. Dalí regards Art Nouveau as a ‘realisation of solidified
desires’ akin to the conversion symptoms of hysteria.6 He discovers echoes
of the contractures and convulsive fits of the Salpêtrière hysterics in a style
dominated by curves rather than straight lines. It is possible that Dalí’s
reprise of convulsive hysteria in this hyperbolic form in 1937 may be linked
with his response to the Spanish Civil War, as a counterpart to Picasso’s
Weeping Women or his own allegorical figure of Spain (1936). For Freud,
the hysterical arch registers a psychical conflict between repressive forces
and those striving to be expressed.
Louise Bourgeois, a foremost contemporary artist whose long career forms
a living bridge to Surrealism, has produced a number of works since the
early 1990s incorporating the arch of hysteria. The background to this
extensive body of works is a feminist recovery of hysteria, viewed as a
mute bodily protest. The majority of Bourgeois’ works on the hysteria
theme are single figure sculptures, the largest executed in bronze and
several smaller, doll-like ‘soft’ sculptures in fabric. They hang from the
ceiling, which could imply defiance or a more ambiguous sense of being
left dangling, a sadistic plaything. Cell: Arch of Hysteria (1992) (fig.4) is a
more complex installation that equips a headless and armless arched male
torso with a theatrical setting. Bourgeois remarked of this work: ‘I became
interested in the “arch of hysteria” of the period of Charcot and Gilles de
la Tourette. Except that in my Arch of Hysteria (1992) it’s not a hysterical
woman – that’s a nineteenth-century misconception – but a hysterical
man.’7 Seen from above, this installation resembles a large eye or aperture
of a camera, alluding to the regime of visuality that reigned at the
Salpêtrière, while the gesture of changing the sex of the hysteric points up
one of its blindspots: an inequality of gender and power between those
doing the seeing and the object of their fascinated gaze. It could be that in
so doing she also issues a rebuke to Surrealism for its exclusive focus on
female hysteria.
Markus Schinwald carries through Dalí’s incipient metamorphosis of a
body into furniture in an untitled sculpture (2006) (pl.5). Symmetrical
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mirroring by the conjoined Art Nouveau-style table legs combines to
create a hysterical arch. Reflected in the polished surface of the wooden
plinth, the work becomes a complete circle. Schinwald has produced a
series of still photographs of Contortionists (2003) (pl.6) whose doubled-up
bodies circle back to the scene of hysteria. The settings – hotel bedrooms,
reception rooms – contribute to a sumptuously staged appearance. The
freakish, crumpled bodies, gazing at which produces astonishment but
also discomfiture in the viewer, are most obviously in dialogue with Hans
Bellmer’s dolls, as well as Alberto Giacometti’s sprawling, helpless Woman
with Cut Throat (1932), and perhaps also (less obviously) with Dora
Maar’s doubled-over acrobats. Foregoing the tricks of photomontage and
the surrogate of a doll, Schinwald directs a live puppet theatre.
Family Secrets
A number of contemporary women artists have adopted a critical stance
towards the gender and power relations enshrined by the patriarchal
family. In the works highlighted here, chosen to illustrate a possibly
unexpected dialogue with Surrealism, this criticism takes the form of
exposure of dark secrets hidden behind a façade of normality.
Louise Bourgeois was strongly influenced by psychoanalytic ideas, but also
feminist critiques of psychoanalysis. Growing criticism of Freud for his
abandonment of the seduction theory of hysteria was given added weight
by Jeffrey Masson’s book, The Assault on Truth (1984), which claimed that
Freud had deliberately suppressed evidence for the reality of abuse. In
1982, Bourgeois published a photo-essay in the journal Artforum entitled
‘Child Abuse.’ Though it does not relate physical or sexual abuse by her
father, more a sense of betrayal upon learning of her father’s affair with a
nanny, it took its place among autobiographical narratives by feminist
writers in the period detailing experiences of abuse within the patriarchal
family. Bourgeois’ rage against the father is vented in a parricidal fantasy
in such works as Destruction of the Father (1974) and achieves visual form
in Peter Moore’s photograph of the phallic sculpture Fillette (1968) (pl.7)
hanging by a meat hook, which was reproduced in the abovementioned
essay. It complicates our view of the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, often
dismissed as misogynistic, to consider the relationship of his Doll as
presented in his publication, Les Jeux de la poupée (1938–49) (pl.8),
photographed similarly at the bottom of a staircase, and Fillette. The
forensic setting common to each of these images points to a more than
casual connexion, the resultant visual dialogue drawing out Bellmer’s antipatriarchal intent. He depicts the scene of abuse, while Bourgeois –
coming afterwards – punishes the father for his crime. Sarah Lucas has
16
photographed one of her Bunnies in a setting that also invites a visual
dialogue with these precursor artists.8 The staircase is a more than
incidental prop in each of the foregoing images. Freud stated that
mounting (or descending) stairs when it occurs in dreams almost always
has a gross sexual meaning as a representation of the sexual act. Staircases
lead from the parts of a house that are on public show to the more private
recesses of bedroom or basement. Staircases crop up regularly in Surrealist
imagery.
American photographer Anna Gaskell’s contemporary images of prepubescent girls in carefully staged narrative tableaux likewise prompt
comparisons with Bellmer, as well as other Surrealist artists. Untitled # 47
(Hide) (1998) (pl.9) presents a striking analogy with Dorothea Tanning’s
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943) (pl.10), except that disturbingly the two
children in nightdresses simulate an adult sexual act. Gaskell opts for
‘untitled’ as her title in order to keep the viewer in the dark. Qualifying it
with the word ‘hide’ infers a children’s game, but also intimates something
secret or hidden. The Agatha Christie setting, combined with bird’s eye
view and dramatic cross lighting, conjure a crime scene.
Rallying to the cause of Violette Nozières in 1933, the Surrealists
demonstrated their readiness to take a stance against the patriarchal
family. Nozières, who was accused of poisoning both her parents, claimed
that she had been repeatedly raped by an abusive stepfather in the years
before she murdered him. The prosecution, in the widely publicised court
trial, tried to cast aspersions on the character of the daughter, a Left bank
student, while playing up the supposed patriotism of the father. The
Surrealists, in contrast, wasted no time in denouncing the hated trilogy of
church, state and family in a hastily compiled dossier of poetic
testimonials to Violette Nozières that, because of censorship, had to be
published in Brussels.9 Breton even imputes a sinister motive to the
parents for naming their child ‘Violette,’ which he likens to ‘violer’
meaning to rape.
One of Max Ernst’s collages from La Femme 100 têtes (1929) (pl.11) is a
gloomy bedroom scene. Ernst titled it ‘L’Immaculée conception manque’
which translates as the ‘missed’ or ‘not quite immaculate’ conception. The
collage was based on an engraving of the photographic laboratory at the
Salpêtrière Hospital where the famous photographs of the hysterics were
taken. Ernst’s whimsical addition of a white rabbit conjures an Alice in
Wonderland scenario. However the presence of an adult male at the
bedside of a terrified-looking child suggests a more ominous scene of
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seduction or abuse. The issue is directly pertinent to the case of
Augustine, one of Charcot’s hysterics, whose photographs from the
Iconographie de la Salpêtrière were reproduced in 1928 by the Surrealists in
their journal La Révolution surréaliste, together with a rapturous evocation
of the hysterical attack. The case notes accompanying her photographs
record that the onset of her symptoms followed a brutal rape at knifepoint
by the father of a bourgeois family in whose care her mother had placed
her. Ernst perhaps meant to recall a more ignoble reality behind the
glamorous image of female hysteria.10
Paula Rego’s Baa Baa Black Sheep (1989) (pl.12) employs the innocuous
format of a nursery rhyme to portray a scene of seduction between an
adult and a child. The ram is a traditional symbol of lust. Rego also plays
on the connotations of the term ‘black sheep,’ meaning a disreputable
person, often with reference to a family. A wolf in sheep’s clothing has
sinister designs on a young girl whose Victorian dress recalls John
Tenniel’s original illustrations for Alice in Wonderland. Her hand gesture,
on the other hand, is decidedly ambiguous: does it signify childish
curiosity, or is it flirtatious? Rego seems to throw doubt on the innocence
and vulnerability that is automatically ascribed to children and women; at
any rate, the child is undaunted by the overbearing paternalistic creature.
The intimation of a precocious sexuality in Rego’s imagery is informed by
an awareness of psychoanalysis.
Another artist who discloses a disturbing darkness at the heart of the
family is German artist Gregor Schneider. Die Familie Schneider was a
project undertaken by Schneider at Whitechapel in East London in 2004.
Two adjacent terrace houses at 14 and 16 Walden Street were taken over
by the artist. Everything had been arranged so that the two houses were
exact replicas of each other down to the last detail. Models posing as ‘die
Familie Schneider’ were encountered in separate rooms of the house: mum
at the kitchen sink, dad in a shower masturbating. With a mounting sense
of alarm and apprehension, the visitor climbed to the upstairs bedroom,
there to be confronted by a body propped up beside a bed covered with a
black bin-liner. One supposes that this family member has asphyxiated
himself while engaged in an autoerotic activity. Schneider brings us faceto-face with a black nothingness, personified as the ghastly progeny of a
typical modern family.
Making a Scene
The Pleasure Principle (pl.13) was one of the works in a multi-part
installation by Sarah Lucas in the Freud Museum, London, in 2000. A
18
chair stands on a polished formal dining table (a serious breach of
etiquette); another stands on the floor beside it. Both chairs are kitted out
with underwear and indulge in an explicit sexual act. Libido overflows its
proper limits and runs riot in the Freud Museum. And it all transpires
beneath the nose of Freud, who gazes impassively from a photograph
placed on a nearby wall. Lucas creates a scene, an indecorous one, in the
house of psychoanalysis, which, since the writings of Jeffrey Masson, has
been much attacked for its repressions. Another of the works in Lucas’s
installation was titled Hysterical Attack. There is evidence that at the time
of writing his Studies of Hysteria (1895) Freud encouraged patients to act
out their hysterical symptoms in the consulting room. It is hard to escape
the impression that Lucas identifies at some level with these disruptive,
unruly hysterics.
Lucas’s burlesque furniture is a Trojan horse by means of which she
smuggles Surrealism into the staid Freud Museum. Hans Bellmer’s dolls
seem to have been one reference point for Lucas. Dorothea Tanning’s
revolutionary ‘soft’ sculptures from the 1970s, anthropomorphic sofas that
bristle with orgiastic erotic energy, propose an alternative female Surrealist
lineage.11 The least disputable influence, however, is that of Dalí whose
baroque vision of the body conflated with a chest of drawers in the
sequence of ‘anthropomorphic cabinets’ owes much to his combined
reflections upon Art Nouveau and hysteria. Lucas shares with Dalí an
‘arch’ black humour. It is tempting to locate a precise source for Lucas’s
The Pleasure Principle in Dalí’s 1934 etchings for Les Chants de Maldoror
(pl.14). The latter is an extraordinary book by an obscure nineteenthcentury author, Isidore Ducasse, who wrote under a pseudonym, the
Count of Lautréamont. The Surrealists were responsible for rescuing his
works from oblivion. Dalí’s brilliant illustrations reflect the trenchant
character of Lautréamont’s writing in which can be found, moreover, a
forerunner for the Surrealist idea of the exquisite corpse. André Masson,
who also drew inspiration from Lautréamont, unleashes violent
pandemonium in his drawing Revolt in the Kitchen (1942) (fig.5).
Giorgio de Chirico’s The Philosopher (1927) (pl.15) sits hunched over,
meditating upon a classical past that materialises as a jumble of books and
sculptural and architectural relics in his lap. The Surrealists admired the
dream-like qualities of de Chirico’s early Metaphysical painting, a major
influence on Surrealist painting. They fell out badly in the 1920s over de
Chirico’s attitude towards classicism. The Philosopher dates from after the
rupture, but still has clear affinities with Surrealism, as well as with de
Chirico’s earlier mannequins. In the exhibition, his tailor’s dummy head
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chief target was Minimalism, in a footnote to the essay, Fried drew
Surrealism into the fray. He cites the closed room and urban wastelands as
typical Surrealist spaces that are inherently theatrical; he also refers to
anthropomorphic objects or conglomerations of objects. How far
Surrealism can be regarded as a forerunner to contemporary installation
art, often overtly theatrical in character, is rather a moot point. A mode of
theatricality that Surrealism shares with certain works in this genre is a
conception of the artwork as a mise en scène of unconscious fantasies. Items
of furniture in installations by Lucas, Oursler, et al., are surrogate actors in
theatrical tableaux whose objective is spatial and psychic disruption.
fig.5
gazes blankly in the direction of Tony Oursler’s The Most Beautiful Thing
I’ve Never Seen (1995) (pl.16) where an upended sofa tramples on a similar
ovoid shape which has a human face projected onto it. An exotic,
Orientalist vision is turned back upon itself, wreaking havoc in a domestic
living room. At the other end of the room, a hyper-real human leg juts
inexplicably from a wall. Robert Gober’s sculpture Untitled (1989–92)
(pl.17) is queerly poised between the fleshiness of a real body and the
‘thingness’ of a sculptural object. It has an obdurate presence that makes it
difficult to ignore. Enigma, a key concept for de Chirico that was taken
up by the Surrealists, seems applicable to a work which poses far more
questions than it answers. Gober has related certain childhood memories
in connection with it. As one gingerly moves round the leg surveying the
bared expanse of skin exposed beneath the trouser leg, one becomes aware
of its vulnerability. Is this perhaps the father, a ‘dead’ father, whose
symbolic authority has been pulled from under his feet, enabling us to step
around or over him?
Lucas creates an unseemly ‘scene’ in Freud’s house. It is instructive to
compare her intervention in this hallowed space, a domestic house that is
also synonymous with the psychoanalytic institution, with Terry Johnson’s
play Hysteria (1993).13 The occasion is Dalí’s visit to Freud in July 1938,
an event with more than enough scope for farce, but it is further
complicated by the uninvited presence of Rebecca, the daughter of one of
Freud’s original hysterics. Freud was less than a year away from death at
the time of Dalí’s visit and was already ill with cancer. In the play, Freud
is assailed by doubts about the past, in particular his repudiation of the
seduction theory. Rebecca’s mother had been notched up as a cure but it
transpires that she suffered a relapse and committed suicide after Freud
had informed her that the recollections of rape by her father that surfaced
in the therapy were merely a wishful fantasy – Johnson has evidently been
persuaded by Masson’s book. Rebecca re-enacts the course of her mother’s
treatment using the unexpurgated case notes, complete with a hysterical
attack, obliging a reluctant Freud to revisit a past that he would prefer to
bury. It is the volatile combination of a Surrealist and a hysteric that
suggests a parallel with Lucas’s installation.
In the essay, ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967), the modernist critic Michael
Fried singled out theatricality as the number one enemy of art.12 While his
Markus Schinwald shows the continued pull of this space for an artist
hailing from the city where psychoanalysis was born.14 Schinwald has
described 1st Part Conditional (2004) as ‘a film about the translation of a
psychological contortion into a physical convulsion.’15 It appears to allude,
in the form of a patently theatrical recreation, to the historical scene of
fin-de-siècle Vienna, birthplace of psychoanalysis. It may not be too
farfetched to read the bearded man as Freud while the stylised actions of
the female actress suggest a hysteric. Certain features of the piece
undermine the pretended objectivity of a reconstruction. The seamless
looping of the three-minute segment of film produces a disorienting,
endlessly repeating narrative that circles around the rooms of a bourgeois
apartment. A transference of properties occurs between the human actors
20
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– beads of sweat appear on the forehead of the outwardly impassive man
in response to the physical exertions of the woman – and with the
inanimate furniture – as the woman falls down in the course of her
stylised convulsion, a bookcase spills out its contents onto the floor.
Schinwald is one of many artists referring to the historical scene of the
invention of psychoanalysis, but reinterpreted in a way that accentuates
the element of dramatic performativity.
Voyage Around a Bedroom
In 1795, Xavier de Maistre was confined to his quarters in Turin as
punishment for having taken part in a duel. The experience of his world
shrinking to the scale of a single room gave rise to a remarkable
bookbook, Voyage autour de ma chambre (1795). The room comprised a
long rectangle of some thirty-six steps for the round trip. As he journeyed
about, he would traverse the length and breadth, diagonals and even
zigzags – every conceivable line in geometry (of a strictly Euclidean kind),
without following any rule or method. The items of furniture that
regularly punctuate his journey – writing desk, armchair, and bed – are
reliable friends that offer him succour during his imposed idleness. The
astonishing success of de Maistre’s idiosyncratic travelogue prompted its
author to pen another, even more Surreal-sounding sequel, Expédition
nocturne autour de ma chambre (1825).
De Maistre was not unduly discomfited by his enforced sequestration. He
is nurtured by his surrounds, at home in them. By contrast, the experience
(or perception) of confinement has provoked a more anxious response on
the part of a number of Surrealist and contemporary women artists for
whom the bourgeois home is seen as a constricting straitjacket. Some have
sought to escape the rule-bound adult world by reverting to childhood. In
the self-portrait photographs for which she is best known, the Surrealist
photographer Claude Cahun appears often to be play-acting or dressing up
for the camera. Recalling a children’s game, for Cahun these strategies
allow for a searching interrogation of gender and sexual identity. In SelfPortrait (in Cupboard) (1932) (pl.18), Cahun takes a nap on the shelf of a
capacious wardrobe that dwarfs her, making her look like a small child. It
seems probable that she is laying claim to the less socialised,
correspondingly freer space inhabited by children. Lucy Gunning’s video
Climbing Round My Room (1993) (pl.19) is another case in point. Viewed
high up on a wall, one sees a barefooted woman wearing a red dress edge
her way around the perimeter of a room without touching the floor, her
movements tracked by a hand-held video camera. Children delight in
leaping over the caverns between furniture, perching on bookshelves or
22
windowsills, and exploring hidden nooks and crannies. On the other hand,
it is only in a state of high emotion that someone is driven to climbing up
walls. This may imply a more anxious or fearful motivation.
The eccentric antics shown in Gunning’s video are not dissimilar to the
behaviour of wild animals placed in captivity. Anyone who has ever visited
a zoo is familiar with the dismal sight of large cats forlornly pacing around
the restricted confines of a cage. In the cramped quarters of a zoo
enclosure, animals exhibit stereotyped behaviours that Heini Hediger
described as ‘partial hypertrophies of the space and time pattern’ –
exaggerations or deformations of the normal tendency to perform certain
actions at a certain time and place.16 Constantly following the same tracks
in the same direction, zoo animals wear paths that form regular
geometrical configurations: straight lines, circles, a figure of eight.
Animals that are ground-dwelling in their native habitat will take to
climbing in captivity: Foxes are notorious for this. They also indulge in
other stereotyped activities like excessive grooming, the repetitive,
purposeless, and sometimes harmful nature of which resembles obsessivecompulsive disorder (OCD) in humans. A probable influence on Gunning
was Bruce Nauman’s ritualised performances of the late 1960s, such as
Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square
(1967–1968), an action carried out in the confined space of a studio. Later
works by Nauman, the Corridors or Double Steel Cage Piece (1974),
subjected the viewer to an actual experience of constriction and
claustrophobia that was no longer simply vicarious.
Francesca Woodman, whose photography has received belated
posthumous acclaim in the past decade, produced a substantial oeuvre
mostly depicting her naked in settings that suggest the relationship to
ambient space was a principal concern. House #4 2 (1977) (pl.20), is staged
within the rooms of a dilapidated house. Woodman poses for the camera
but looks furtive, as though trying to hide or escape, her partially blurred
body like a mere smudge against the background. In several of the
photographs, she makes to cover herself with sections of wallpaper that
hang loose from the wall. The impression of a body in the process of
merging with its surrounds has led to pertinent analogies with an article in
the Surrealist journal Minotaure on the subject of animal mimicry.17 Roger
Caillois refers primarily to the phenomenon of protective camouflage
whereby an organism takes on the background colour, pattern, or texture
of its environment – becoming, in effect, a kind of ‘sculpture-photograph.’
Caillois attributes the quest for invisibility not to any survival advantage it
may confer but to a desire for assimilation to space. There is, he states, ‘a
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probably reflects a firsthand acquaintance with Caillois’ writings on the
subject. A cat peers out from beneath a hole in the floorboards in this
picture, reinforcing the feeling of entrapment that constantly emanates
from her work. Varo and Toyen reveal a performative approach to selfrepresentation as their work’s central theme that is strikingly consonant
with more contemporary women artists.
The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), Charlotte Perkins Gilmore’s harrowing tale
of a woman’s descent into madness, presents telling parallels with the
portrayal of interiority and psychic disturbance in the work of these
women artists – notably Woodman, whose suicide inevitably colours
readings of her oeuvre. Labelled with ‘nervous depression – a slight
hysterical tendency’ by her physician husband, the main character in The
Yellow Paper is removed to a rented house in the country where she is
obliged to rest. During a three-month sojourn she is confined to a room
at the top of the house that was previously a children’s nursery equipped
with barred windows. A veritable madwoman in the attic, she is
tormented by a patterned yellow wallpaper within the room, which is like
a cinema screen onto which she projects her macabre visions. When at last
it comes time for the couple to return to their home she locks the door
and refuses to leave. The husband gains entry and finds her crawling on
all fours round and round the perimeter of the room.
fig.6
real temptation by space’ to which the mimetic insect succumbs. Caillois
discerns similar propensities in humans, citing studies of schizophrenia
that claim there is a progressive loss of temporal continuity and a resultant
dominance of spatiality. These unfortunate individuals lose themselves in
space, Caillois writes, they are literally ‘devoured’ by it. In Woodman’s
photographic oeuvre, this process is exacerbated to the point of an almost
complete dissolution of her subjectivity.
The Mexican Surrealist, Remedios Varo, portrayed herself merged with,
or emerging from, the walls of domestic rooms. In Luz Emergente (1962),
a figure whom one assumes to be the artist sinks into a fissure with
tattered wallpaper edges that encrypt a double image of the female
genitalia. Woodman was cognisant of Surrealism, an acknowledged
influence upon her photographic practice, but whether she knew this
work, or other comparable works by the Czech Surrealist Toyen, one can
only guess. In 1960, Varo produced a picture called Mimicry (fig.6) that
24
Wallpaper is a salient element of the scenography in the Victorian
bourgeois interiors evoked by Ernst’s collage novel La Femme 100 têtes
where, similarly, one might think of the florid patterns as a visual irritant
giving birth by a kind of paranoïac vision to the monstrous creatures that
inhabit the space. Woodman, we noted, tries to hide behind wallpaper in
a number of her photographs. Robert Gober is another contemporary
artist who has utilised wallpaper as a medium for his unconventional
imagery.
Un-homely
When is a house not a home? From the mid-1980s, Gregor Schneider
systematically altered the fabric of his family home, adding walls in front of
existing ones, creating a network of constrictive passages, ultimately
rendering the house uninhabitable. Precedents for his interventions in
domestic architectural spaces can be found in Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau and
the work of Gordon Matta-Clark. The phenomenology of space is at the
heart of Schneider’s art practice. A panicky sense of constriction is produced
by the experience of trying to negotiate the cramped corridors and dead
ends of Haus u r, the name he gave to the reconstructed family home. A
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space that ought to be reassuringly familiar arouses only diffuse feelings of
anxiety or dread (‘angst’). Schneider’s films highlight this experience, the
hand-held movie camera advancing and retreating like a mole blindly
exploring a subterranean universe. The uncanny (unheimlich or ‘unhomely’)
has become a much over-used word, especially in relation to Surrealism, but
in Schneider’s case it has an undeniable aptness. Freud described the fantasy
of being buried alive as the source of a peculiarly intense uncanny-ness.18
The cellar below ground level where shameful secrets are buried is the part
of the house that corresponds best to Schneider’s dismal vision. Doubling or
replication of space, a nigh ubiquitous strategy in his work, is another
powerful source of the uncanny. The Surrealist artist who has most in
common with Schneider in this regard is Magritte (see Man with a
Newspaper (1928) (pl.21)).
Kinderzimmer (2009), installed at the Whitworth Art Gallery,
Manchester, takes up several of the artist’s recurrent themes. Two
internally lit rooms displayed in a totally blacked out space are replicas of a
children’s nursery in Garzweiler, a village in the Rhineland and one of
many that have been cleared to make way for opencast coalmining.
Schneider photographed and documented the room after the house had
been evacuated, when it was already earmarked for destruction. It was a
house but no longer a home. Once again the original space is duplicated.
Its effect is to throw doubt upon the attribute of presence that we lend to
our being in space; in Derrida’s terms, space is placed under erasure (‘sous
rature’).19 Engulfed by total darkness, viewers of Kinderzimmer gain a
heightened awareness of their own precariousness. A remark by the
dissident Surrealist writer Georges Bataille seems pertinent: ‘Me, I exist –
suspended in a realised void – suspended from my own dread.’20 It is
paradoxical that a children’s nursery should be conducive to such a
profoundly unsettling vision.
Mona Hatoum’s Incommunicado (1993) (pl.22), a hospital cot in which the
spring base has been replaced with taut wire, similarly countermands a
comforting image of domesticity. Hatoum discloses an omnipresent threat
or actuality of cruelty and violence, or even torture, lurking within the
homely and poisoning it, a perception formed by the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.21 The daughter of Palestinian parents exiled by the conflict,
Hatoum is denied that reassuring umbilical relation to a place of origin
implied by the term homeland, and symbolised by an infant’s cot.
Manipulation of scale is integral to the disconcerting effect of Hatoum’s
Slicer (1999). An innocuous gadget that would normally be unobtrusively
tucked away in a kitchen drawer, an egg slicer, is rendered threatening by
26
dint of its enlargement. One wonders about the purpose of this grisly
device… Man Ray’s Gift (1921), a clothes iron to which he added a row
of tacks, has an affinity with Hatoum’s tampering with domestic utensils.
Collections of these oversized objects were displayed by Hatoum in 1999
and 2000 in installations titled ironically Home and Homebound.
Schneider plays with the room as an empty container. Robert Gober’s Tilted
Play Pen (1986) (pl.23), an item of furniture that might be found in a
children’s nursery were it not rendered unusable, induces a no less virulent
perturbation of space. This unconventional sculptural object warps the space
around it. Proximity to it occasions acute unease. Gober perhaps set out to
refute the idea of a normative orientation in a work that resolutely refuses to
be seen in perspective. It is a sort of anamorphic object. Amongst the
Surrealists, Dalí was the one most fascinated by anamorphoses, a form of
perspectival distortion, which he used to engender an array of soft forms
imbued with perverse, psychosexual connotations. It is possible that Gober’s
‘bent’ playpen was making a tilt at the family values militantly espoused by
conservatives in the culture wars of the 1980s.
Sleep/walkers
Writing in the Surrealist Manifesto, Breton regrets that ‘the dream finds
itself reduced to a mere parenthesis, as is the night.’22 Among the more
bizarre manifestations of a psychopathology of everyday life, sleepwalking
vividly illustrates the interpenetration of the dream and waking life. As
such, the subject held a self-evident appeal for the Surrealists. It also
catered to an appetite for dépaysement (estrangement) via a surreal
confusion of inside and outside.
Sleepwalking was avidly studied by physicians and psychologists in the
late nineteenth century. A survey of Charcot’s teachings on the subject
began by noticing that, as with all that belongs ‘to the domain of the
marvellous’ (a key term in the Surrealist lexicon), somnambulism is
shrouded in obscurity.23 In normal or physiological somnambulism, for
which the term noctambulism is reserved, there is no other evidence of
illness. This form occurs commonly in children and is rare in adults. It
occurs ordinarily in the middle of the night. After several hours of sleep,
suddenly the subject rises from his bed. For a variable period of time he
goes about the most diverse acts, of which no memory is conserved, before
returning to sleep. The subject seems always to be acting out a dream (‘un
rêve en action’). Somnambulism was also a recognized concomitant of
hysteria. One of the Salpêtrière hysterics leapt from a window while
sleepwalking and then ran about in the garden below. The ground at the
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time being frozen she gathered up snow like flowers for an invisible
bouquet. Most sleepwalkers travel no further than their bedroom, but
there were reports of individuals travelling long distances whilst in a fugue
state. Charcot coined the term ‘ambulatory automatism’ for such cases.
The very terminology shows what a rich terrain psychology offered to
Surrealism, and adds to the conviction that undirected walking is an
extension of the Surrealist notion of automatism.
Cinema in the period of the Surrealists was replete with images of
sleepwalkers. Nosferatu (1922), a vampire movie that gripped their
imagination, contains a scene in which Ellen (wife of the main
protagonist) dressed in a flowing white nightdress with arms raised glides
along a moonlit balustrade, having sensed the imminent peril of her
husband who is faraway in the castle of Count Orlok. Her gestures and
staring eyes strangely echo the vampire who at that very moment
approaches his sleeping victim. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1926) features
a somnambulist, Cesare, who is enslaved by the insane director of a
mental asylum, Caligari. The latter transports Cesare to a town where he
presents him as a fairground attraction, Caligari’s real motive being to
perform an experiment in which he induces the somnambulist to carry out
murders under hypnotic suggestion. Such themes were prevalent in
literature familiar to the Surrealists. In Les Chants de Maldoror, a cricket –
one incarnation of the anti-hero, Maldoror – spreads a hypnotic fluid
through the sewers casting the whole city into somnambulic torpor. André
Breton said this cricket accompanied him and Ernst on a nighttime walk
through Paris.
In Communicating Vessels (1932), Breton tangentially connects
somnambulism with a favourite Surrealist pastime of strolling, with the
casually interjected remark: ‘As I was walking along the Rue du FaubourgSaint-Honoré with Les Amants somnambules under my arm.’24 This leads
Breton to reflect upon the equivalence between his mental state during his
perambulations around the streets of Paris and the dream state, the only
real difference being that ‘here I am lying down, sleeping, and there I am
really moving around in Paris.’ The work in question, reflecting Breton’s
penchant for Gothic novels, was Edmont et Juliette, ou les Amants
somnambules (1820), by Melle Carreau (pseud. Melle Van hove). It ought
to be recalled as well that during the so-called ‘époque des sommeils’ for a
short while the group dabbled in hypnosis. Breton has left a vivid
recollection of these chaotic episodes. On one occasion, at a party in a
large, dimly lit house, some ten people had fallen into a hypnotic slumber
at the same moment. The bizarre comings and goings of these
28
fig.7
somnambulists, each trying to
outdo the other with prophecies
and gesticulations, reminds
Breton of the famous convulsionaries of Saint-Médard. On
the 2nd October 1922, the
Surrealist leader wrote to Man
Ray requesting him to photograph the trance sessions and, in
particular, Robert Desnos: ‘at the
moment where asleep he raises to
the onlookers his startlingly
troubled eyes’ (fig.7).25
Somnambulism is referred to
explicitly in the titles of
Surrealist images by Victor
Brauner, Max Ernst and others.26
Its presence may be suspected in
other works where it is not
overtly signposted. The usual solution to the kinds of incongruities
presented by Surrealist paintings is to claim that the picture is a dream or
nightmare, but in some instances they may be better understood as
inhabited by sleepwalkers. Dorothea Tanning’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
(1943) (pl.10) is set in an eerie hotel corridor with a uniform row of
doors, the furthest of which is ajar. A girl with long tresses propped
against a doorframe has eyes closed. She holds a petal from a giant
sunflower that rests at the top of a staircase. Is she awake or asleep? A
second child stands rigidly facing in the opposite direction to the first.
They both have a dishevelled appearance as if they had just stirred from
sleeping. Noctambulism is more common in childhood. In an essay on
‘The Most Recent Tendencies in Surrealist Painting’ (1938), Breton
remarked cryptically: ‘the most startling scene in a modern ‘gothic novel’
might well consist of an encounter between a somnambulist and a female
hotel thief (souris d’hôtel) in a corridor.’27 The ubiquitous naked women
that populate Paul Delvaux’s canvases are always wide-eyed and impassive,
seemingly untroubled by their nakedness. How are we to explain their
presence in the banally suburban setting of Street of the Tram (1938)
(pl.24)? Are they not aimless sleepwalkers too? Sleepwalkers trespass over
the usual boundaries of public and private space, signified in Street of the
Tram by the transparent walls of a room. They overstep the limits of the
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homely or domestic and are thus uncanny, as well as being so by virtue of
their automatic actions. The hotel, a privileged locus in the Surrealist
imaginary, is a liminal space, neither fully public nor private.
Recent exhibitions have testified to a resurgence of interest among
contemporary artists with sleep and dreams, and even sleepwalking.
Australian artist, Rosslynd Piggott, made La Somnambule (1996–97)
(fig.8) after returning from an extended stay in Paris in 1994 and 1995.
Two handmade silk garments face each other on a horizontal axis
transected by an oval sheet of Perspex that Piggott describes as like a
mirror without backing (‘une glace sans tain’).28 One might interpret the
work as a spatial representation of a psychical structure consisting of the
conscious and unconscious separated by this partition. Breton, in the
Manifesto of Surrealism, reported a curious phrase, ‘a man is cut in two by a
window,’ that seemed to represent the partitioning of his own mind.
Piggott has painstakingly unraveled the cross threads from the lower
section of one of the dresses, leaving a diaphanous fringe composed of the
remaining vertical threads. Some of the removed threads cling to the
garment opposite it, which is covered with tiny clothes hooks. Suspended
by nylon, the installation hovers weightlessly in space, conveying an
impression of ghostliness. The garments themselves were modeled on oldfashioned nightdresses that Piggott found in a flea market in Paris. The
elongated arms bring to mind a straightjacket and by association a
nineteenth-century photographic history of female madness, not excluding
the Salpêtrière hysterics in their white hospital gowns. La Somnambule
coincides very exactly with the spate of works, noted before, reassessing
the legacy of Salpêtrière hysteria. Perhaps it is these ghostly
somnambulists whose lost footsteps (‘pas perdus’) are resurrected?
fig.8
30
Further recent examples could be cited testifying to the reprise of this core
Surrealist theme. Instead, my last sleepwalker, a photograph by George
Platt Lynes, The Sleepwalker (1935) (pl.25), was included in the landmark
show, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York, in 1936. Recalling Breton’s phrase, we might say that Platt
Lynes depicts a man ‘cut in two.’ The space above a rectangular partition
is occupied by a crouching figure – asleep, possibly dreaming – while the
same model is shown standing or striding in the space beneath. The
image is a composite of two negatives, whose point of suture is marked by
the horizontal plane. Employing a montage technique, the photographer
has created an elegant visual equivalent to the linguistic conjunction
‘sleep/walking.’
31
1
2
3
4
La neuropatologia (1908), Roberto Omegna
and Camillo Negro. Gordon viewed the film
in London at the Wellcome Institute library
on a compilation titled ‘The Origins of
Scientific Cinematography.’
Around 1900, Freud began to use the term
screen memory. The term projection refers to
the relocation externally of an idea or
perception that is internal to the subject.
The actual source of Ernst’s collage material in
these images has yet to be discovered: it does
not appear to have been the well-known
Salpêtrière iconography.
André Breton, Nadja (1928), trans. Richard
Howard, New York: Grove, 1960, p.160.
5
‘Le Cinquantenaire de l’hystérie’ [The Fiftieth
Anniversary of Hysteria], La Révolution
surréaliste, no. 11, 15 March 1928, p.21.
6
Salvador Dalí, ‘Concerning the Terrifying and
Edible Beauty of Art Nouveau Architecture’
(1933), The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí,
trans. Haim Finkelstein, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998,
pp.193–200.
7
Louise Bourgeois, Destruction of the Father,
Reconstruction of the Father. Writings and
Interviews 1923–1997, ed. Marie-Laure
Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, London:
Violette Editions, 1998, p.249.
8
Sarah Lucas, How Little Can Sex Deliver?
(1998).
9
André Breton et. al., Violette Nozières,
Brussels: Editions Nicolas Flamel, 1934.
10
More recently, the playwright Anna Furse, in
Big Hysteria (1991), sought to restore a voice
to Augustine.
11
See the exhibition catalogue Weich und
Plastisch. Soft-Art, ed. Erika Billeter,
Kunsthaus Zurich, 1979–80.
12
Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood,’ Artforum
5, June 1967, pp.12–23.
13
Terry Johnson, Hysteria, or Fragments of an
Analysis of an Obsessional Neurosis, Royal Court
Theatre, 1993.
14
See Mignon Nixon, ‘On the Couch,’ October,
113, Summer 2005, pp.39–76.
15
As reported in the exhibition ‘Held Together
with Water’: Art from the Verbund Collection’,
Vienna 2007.
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16
Heini Hediger, Wild Animals in Captivity,
London: Butterworths Scientific Publications,
1950, p.76.
17
Roger Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary
Psychasthenia,’(1935) trans. John Shepley,
October, 31, Winter 1984, pp.17–33.
18
Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”,(1919)
Pelican Freud Library 14, London: Penguin,
1986, p.366.
19
See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore and
London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1976.
20
Georges Bataille, ‘Sacrifices’ (July 1933), in
Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939,
trans. Allan Stoekl, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986, p.130.
21
See Gannit Ankori, ‘Mona Hatoum: Nomadic
Bodies, Exilic Spaces,’ in Palestinian Art,
London: Reaktion, 2006, pp.121–54.
22
André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans.
Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann
Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
1972, p.11.
23
Jean-Martin Charcot, ‘Leçon XXVII: ‘Des
somnambulismes,’ in Cliniques des maladies du
système nerveux, vol. 2, ed. Georges Guignon,
Paris: Progrès médical, 1892–93.
24
André Breton, Communicating Vessels (1932),
trans. Mary Ann Caws, Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1990, p.103.
25
André Breton, La Beauté Convulsive, exh. cat.
Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1991, p.110.
26
An early work by Ernst is entitled L’Ascenseur
somnambule (1920). Victor Brauner in the early
1940s painted several works in which a female
somnambulist is paired with ectoplasms (the
substance in which spirits materialise). Clovis
Trouille was responsible for a surrealist
potboiler titled La Momie somnambule (1942).
27
André Breton, ‘The Most Recent Tendencies
in Surrealist Painting’ (1939), in Surrealism
and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor,
New York: Harper & Row, 1972, p.149.
28
The very first automatic poem in Breton and
Soupault’s collection, Les Champs magnétiques
(1920) is titled ‘La Glace sans tain.’
plate 1
Douglas Gordon
Hysterical
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plate 2
André Brouillet
Clinical Demonstration
at the Salpêtrière
plate 3
Max Ernst
Une Semaine de bonté, ou
Les Sept éléments capitaux
34
35
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plate 4
Dora Maar
Le Simulateur
36
37
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Page 38
plate 5
Markus Schinwald
Untitled.
plate 6
Markus Schinwald
Contortionists (Rachel)
38
39
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plate 7
Peter Moore
Louise Bourgeois’ Fillette in the
Artist’s Studio. Photo by Peter
Moore © Estate of Peter
Moore/VAGA, New York, NY
40
41
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plate 8
Hans Bellmer
Les Jeux de la poupée
(The Games of the Doll)
42
43
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Page 44
plate 9
Anna Gaskell
Untitled (Hide) # 47
plate 10
Dorothea Tanning
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
44
45
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Page 46
plate 11
Max Ernst
‘L’Immaculée Conception
Manquée (‘The Not Quite
Immaculate Conception’)
from La Femme 100 têtes
plate 12
Paula Rego
Baa Baa Black Sheep.
46
47
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plate 13
Sarah Lucas
Pleasure Principle
plate 14
Salvador Dalí
Plate from Les Chants
de Maldoror by Comte
de Lautréamont
48
49
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plate 15
Giorgio de Chirico
The Philosopher
50
51
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plate 16
Tony Oursler
The Most Beautiful
Thing I've Never Seen,
plate 17
Robert Gober
Untitled
52
53
plate 18
Claude Cahun
Self-Portrait
(in Cupboard)
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plate 19
Lucy Gunning
Climbing Round
My Room
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plate 20
Francesca Woodman
House #4, Providence,
Rhode Island
plate 21
René Magritte
Man with a Newspaper
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plate 22
Mona Hatoum,
Incommunicado
58
59
plate 23
Robert Gober,
Tilted Play Pen
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previous page:
plate 24
Paul Delvaux
La Rue du tramway
[Street of the Tram]
right:
plate 25
George Platt Lynes,
The Sleepwalker
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As Long As I’m Walking…
Anna Dezeuze
fig.9
‘As long as I’m walking, I’m not…’ This the beginning, and the refrain, of a
long list compiled by Francis Alÿs over the late 1980s and early 1990s on a
board lying around his Mexico City studio, and in a number of typed
memos (fig.9). Among the activities in which the artist does not engage as
long as he’s walking figure some dishonest actions (‘I’m not stealing’ or ‘I’m
not cheating’), a few everyday vices like ‘smoking’ and ‘drinking,’ as well as a
wide range of ways of feeling and behaving including ‘crying’ or ‘hiding.’
Constantly revising and lengthening this incomplete list, Alÿs enumerates a
potentially endless number of negative definitions of walking. Walking for
Alÿs emerges as a strategy of avoidance, though it is not a strategy of
escapism: his urban wanderings are a far cry from romantic communions
with nature, or from the primitivist search for exotic or authentic
experiences away from the city or in remote regions of the globe. Rather,
Alÿs’s practice is inscribed in a trajectory of twentieth-century art and
culture which associates walking with forms of critique and subversion
firmly grounded within the experience of the modern city.1 When the Dada
artists inaugurated this short history by organizing a walking excursion to
the unremarkable, semi-abandoned church grounds of Saint–Julien-lePauvre in Paris in 1921 (fig.10), they set the tone: they would only visit
such ‘places that truly do not have any reason to exist’ and are thus utterly
devoid of ‘picturesque,’ ‘historical interest,’ or ‘sentimental value’ (fig.11). By
insisting, like Alÿs, on what walking is not, the Dada artists simultaneously
opened a new path for what art could be. This fruitful paradox lies at the
heart of walking and wandering tropes in twentieth- and twenty-first
century art, as the artists’ rejection of rules and conventions has been
coupled with seminal reflections on the modern subject’s identity and
relation to the world. As artists have continued to explore the paradoxical
states of walking – without ‘knowing’ and without ‘owning,’2 and without
searching for ‘historical interest’ or ‘sentimental value’ – other paradoxes
have emerged and multiplied. Self-discovery may go hand in hand with selfeffacement, and a celebration of the boring commonplace can flip over into
a potentially revolutionary critique of the everyday.
… I’m not making
As Alÿs suggests, walking does not lead to ‘making’ anything. For the
Dadaist anti-artists, it involved above all refusing to make any kind of art.
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where Alÿs’s claim that he is ‘not making’ joins another term in his list,
‘not adding.’ Having been trained as an architect, Alÿs explains that his
‘first impulse was not to add to the city, but more to absorb what already
was there, to work with the residues, or with the negative spaces, the
holes, the spaces in-between.’3 Walking as ‘not making’ or ‘not adding’
thus becomes an attitude to the world, which entails neither the
traditional creation of new (valuable) objects, nor the avant-garde
destructive aspiration to a tabula rasa from which to build future utopias.
‘Drop everything … Set off on the roads.’4 André Breton’s motto from the
1920s suggests an opposition – between things, activities, attachments on
the one hand, and the freedom of the unknown on the other hand –
which would become a familiar trope with novels such as Jack Kerouac’s
famous On the Road of 1957. For the Surrealist Breton, the unknown road
was a combination of both ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ paths,5 which he would
explore in 1924 by setting off on foot, with his friends Louis Aragon, Max
Morise and Roger Vitrac, on a trip from Paris to Blois in which nothing
was planned in advance. ‘The absence of all goal,’ according to Breton, led
figs.10
For others, the target would be architecture – the erection of intimidating
hard volumes, the occupation and control of space, and by extension the
regimenting of subjects through buildings and urban design. From the
1950s onwards, artists would become less concerned with fighting against
art or architecture, and become more interested in exploring the new
spaces beyond traditional media. Having walked out from the confines of
medium-specificity, artists were also able to engage more freely with
everyday life. In this context, ‘not making’ would continue to operate as a
generic and generative imperative against the production of objects: this is
figs. 11
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them away from reality into ‘ever more troubling’ ‘fantasies.’6 The
excursion became ‘an exploration at the limits between waking life and
dream life.’ This fragile boundary was one of the Surrealists’ central
concerns of the time, as they developed new means to probe into the
subconscious through hypnosis and automatic writing. Like the
subconscious lurking behind our conscious thoughts, fantasies are waiting
to ‘rise from under our steps’ through aimless wanderings. The
‘picturesque’, ‘historical interest’ or ‘sentimental value’ that the Dadaists
sought to reject was replaced by the Surrealist merveilleux or ‘marvellous’:
at any turn of the road, the banal could be transfigured through the
mysterious workings of the imagination. This is why the Surrealists were
attracted to Eugène Atget’s turn-of-the-century photographs of Paris, and
why Breton invited Jacques-André Boiffard to provide photographs for his
1928 novel Nadja (pl.27). It is precisely because they are devoid of any
spectacular quality that these austere black and white views of street
corners, empty squares and everyday shop fronts suggest the potential to
find the marvelous in even the most boring, banal locations. Night-time
lent itself particularly well to these discoveries, as the whole city itself
starts dreaming, revealing its dark, hidden secrets. Brassaï shared the
Surrealists’ love of noctambulist explorations of Paris, wandering from
brightly lit, mirrored cafés and shabby brothel rooms, through empty train
stations and industrial sites standing eerily quiet after the frantic activity
of the day, to sleepy residential quarters in which workers were dreaming
of a better future (pl.26).
Brassaï’s night-time photographs locate the city’s unconscious primarily in
two spaces: that of leisure, and, that of repose. These two spheres can be
considered as opposites of labour, which Breton felt was the real enemy of
freedom. In this context, walking as a way of ‘not making’ extends the
refusal of artistic work to all forms of work. ‘Walking, in particular
drifting, or strolling, is already – within the speed culture of our time – a
kind of resistance.’7 Alÿs’s recent statement directly echoes Walter
Benjamin’s discussion of the modern urban walker par excellence: the turnof-the-century Parisian flâneur.8 For Benjamin, the flâneur’s slow and
purposeless walks directly contradicted capitalism’s cult of
‘industriousness.’ As he points out, ‘down with dawdling!’ was in fact a
watchword in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s famous theory of assembly-line
efficiency. Following in the flâneur’s dawdling footsteps, and Breton’s
explicit indictment of all work as nothing less than ‘servitude’
(asservissement),9 the Situationists in the 1950s would consciously develop
a range of activities in opposition to productive time, including their
68
dérives or drifts around Paris, which sought to systematize flâneurie into
an organised game of disorientation and discovery.10 ‘It is our thesis that
cities should embody a builtin (sic) play factor. We are studying here a
play-environment relationship,’ wrote Ralph Rumney in his 1957 picturestory-style ‘psychogeographic’ map of Venice’ (pl.28).11 Reconfiguring the
city as a playground, the Situationists ultimately sought to transform
everyday experience entirely: as urban dwellers became involved in a
‘CONTINUOUS DERIVE’ as Gilles Ivain hoped,12 divisions between
work and play would be abolished, and circulating in the city would
become an experience of pleasure and adventure.13
Playing games, and hanging around with friends, are activities we often
associate with the freedom of childhood and adolescence, before work and
responsibilities start shaping our lives. In Railings, an adult Alÿs seems to
be playing a child’s game, as he runs a stick along metal railings that often
surround squares and houses in London, and creates a sequence of
rhythms and sounds (pl.29). Though British contemporary artist George
Shaw claims to have been inspired by Humphrey Spender’s Mass
Observation photographs of children playing in 1930s Bolton (pl.30), the
playgrounds and non-places carefully depicted in his paintings of the
council estate where he grew up evoke the boredom and
disenfranchisement of adolescence (pl.31). A comparison of Alÿs’s and
Shaw’s works suggests very different ways of wasting time. Where Alÿs’s
performances suggest mobility and possibility, Shaw’s melancholy
paintings evoke an inability to escape from the spatial and social
constraints of working-class reality. The relation between working and
‘not making,’ however, is not clear-cut. The Baudelairian flâneur,
according to Benjamin, was either a ‘gentleman of leisure’ who could
afford the luxury of idleness, or was in fact actively participating in the
production of new commodities (such as literature and journal articles).
Meanwhile, it has been suggested that the unemployment (forced states of
‘not making’) visited onto the late 1970s British working class youths of
Shaw’s generation led to a vibrant music scene.14
This tension between melancholy and potential rebellion is suggested in
the in-between spaces depicted by Shaw, playgrounds and passages that
resonate with the terrains vagues so beloved by the Surrealists. The terrain
vague is a space that ‘has no reason to exist’ like the church grounds of
Saint-Julien-Le-Pauvre – it is an abandoned space that has lost its
function. It often lies at the boundaries between city and countryside
because it is located at the city limits, or because it is overgrown by weeds.
The ‘Zone’ or precarious settlements on the edges of Paris were an
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extension of the terrain vague; this is where the Surrealists enjoyed visits
to the flea-markets, and where the Paris chiffonniers sifted through the
capital’s garbage to salvage and re-sell used rags and spare parts (pl.32).
Images of the ‘Zone’ figure prominently in the album of Atget
photographs that belonged to the Surrealist Man Ray.15 ‘The whole Zone
will disappear,’ Atget had written on the back of one of the images, thus
suggesting a thematic link between these images and his interest in the
demolitions in the centre of Paris.16 For Benjamin, as for the Surrealists,
disappearance and destruction conjured a sense of infinite possibility as
much as imminent loss. According to Benjamin, the Surrealists were in
fact ‘the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the
“outmoded”,’17 as it telescopes past and futures within a single dialectical
image. As Pamela Lee has suggested, this same logic would much later be
put into play by American artist Gordon Matta-Clark when he bored a
large conical hole into a building (scheduled for destruction) in order to
allow a glimpse into another historical transformation of the Paris
landscape: the razing of the old marketplace, the Halles, and the
construction of the Centre Georges Pompidou (pl.33).18 Outmoded
arcades, houses and shacks about to be demolished, or abandoned terrains
vagues, all function in the same way as Boiffard’s or Atget’s photographs –
as voids filled with ghosts to come.
… I’m not choosing
Surrealist writings such as Breton’s Nadja or Aragon’s Paysan de Paris
suggest a close association between walking and liberation from
constraints. Visiting the park at the Buttes-Chaumont one night with
Breton and Marcel Noll, Aragon hears ‘the sound of chains falling, at the
first step towards the dark heart of the garden.’19 Unshackled, and
suddenly free, the walker sometimes loses his footing. Hesitating at the
threshold of the Passage de l’opéra, Aragon feels ‘the ground tremble’ and
‘suddenly’ becomes ‘like a sailor on board of a ruined castle.’20 Similarly,
the Buttes-Chaumont nightwalkers are also transformed into ‘sailors’ of a
‘car in shreds,’ and a part of themselves is already ‘shipwrecked.’21 Falling,
drifting uncontrollably, teetering on the verge of destruction and
disappearance, the walker may regret the chains that used to anchor him
to past certainties. If ‘I’m not choosing,’ as Alÿs puts it, then who is? Or
rather, as Breton asks in the first line of Nadja: ‘Who am I?’22
York (pl.34).23 This vertiginous abdication of control is only one of the
ways in which the walking, driving and cycling wanderer has shaken the
foundations of a centralised and coherent subjectivity. If the Surrealists’
appeal to the unconscious unhinged the oppositions between inside and
outside, or between self and other, that structure our sense of identity, the
resulting overlapping ‘in-between’ space between the ‘mental landscapes’
mentioned by Breton24 and the real landscapes that surround us has been
probed further by many practices from the Situationists onwards. Within
this in-between space, I will focus here on the ambiguous figure of
flâneuse, and the close relation between walking and photography.
‘Who is the real Nadja’? The question posed by Breton as his relationship
with the mysterious Nadja unravels later in the novel, seems to echo the
‘Who am I?’ with which the book starts. Breton wonders whether Nadja is
‘the always inspired and inspiring creature who enjoyed being nowhere but
in the street, (…) at hand to be interrogated by any human being
launched upon some great chimera,’ or whether she is, rather, ‘the one
who sometimes fell, since, after all, others had felt authorized to speak to
her, having only seen in her the most wretched, and the least protected of
women.’25 Following this opposition, Breton’s feelings oscillate
ambivalently between admiration and a (disturbingly cruel) repulsion.
Breton’s acknowledgement of the dangers to which Nadja is exposed
reveals the vulnerability of the flâneuse at the very point that constitutes
her freedom. She puts herself ‘à la portée’ – at hand, in the reach of – the
best and the worst, adventures and misfortunes, thrills and dangers. By
simply walking in the streets, the flâneuse has traditionally been associated
with both victims of violence and prostitutes, and there is no doubt that
the male flâneur must surely struggle considerably less to maintain both
his freedom and his ‘dignity’ – the term Breton uses to designate this
inalienable core of subjecthood that Nadja loses when she is attacked
verbally and physically. When Nadja ‘falls,’ it is not into the metaphoric
vertigo of consciousness celebrated by Aragon: it is with the violent thud
of a body landing on the ground.
Nadja’s attempt, recounted by Breton, to cover his eyes as he was driving
along a road one night has recently been revisited by contemporary artist
Rainer Ganahl, as he rode his bicycle against the Manhattan traffic while
holding a camera with both hands in his 2006 Bicycling Broadway, New
More recently, women artists and writers have revisited the role of the
flâneuse, as if to retrieve Nadja’s voice from the ventriloquising Breton.
Throughout the 1980s, French artist Sophie Calle developed a number of
pieces in which she deliberately probed her power and vulnerability as a
flâneuse by focusing on the act of following or being followed. Her Suite
vénitienne involved her following a man through the streets of Venice
(pl.35). At the mercy of chance, trusting her intuitions, driven by dread
and desire, Calle appears as a contemporary Nadja for whom the street is
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the site of the unexpected. In her active role as a follower, however, Calle
knowingly revels in the flâneur’s ambivalent position. As Yve-Alain Bois
has pointed out, much of Calle’s oeuvre is articulated through the figure
of the proxy, inviting us to trace her ‘real’ self in a maze of false identities,
intimate confessions, and literary personages.26
A decade later, another French artist, Marie-Ange Guilleminot, took up
the surrealist trope of the sleep/nightwalker by wandering the streets of
Bilbao at night, wearing a light-reflective white coat that she had designed
(pl.36). A ghostly figure haunting empty streets and roads, Guilleminot
looks fragile; at the same time, however, the coat appears to act as a
protective armour of light within the threatening darkness. She is at once
present and absent, at once exhibiting and losing herself in an unknown
city. Guilleminot recalls that she took these walks because she was
suffering from insomnia. As walking is used as a substitute for sleeping,
sleepwalking appears as a therapy rather than a pathology, as a means of
retaining one’s sanity rather than losing it.
Calle’s and Guilleminot’s mises-en-abyme of the flâneuse, I would argue,
operate less as critiques of male patriarchy than as suggestions that the
male flâneur himself was always less controlling, and more endangered,
than he appeared. From the beginning, according to Elizabeth Wilson,
‘the flâneur effaces himself, becomes passive, feminine.’27 Benjamin’s own
understanding of the male flâneur, as Tom McDonough has underlined,
focused on his ambivalent position: once he had given up any pretense of
distanced observation and become undistinguishable from the crowd, the
flâneur let himself be caught up in a ‘libidinal tangle in which pursuer and
pursued lost their clear polarities,’ and power relations could be reversed at
any time.28 This is precisely why, according to McDonough, the
posthumous publication of Benjamin’s essay on the flâneur in 1967 would
resonate so effectively with a contemporary European and American
climate in which ‘the social transparency that guaranteed a confident
appropriation of space for the masculine, bourgeois subject’ was being
threatened from many directions.29 To the general anti-authoritarian
rebellion and the anti-patriarchal feminist movements of the time I would
add the challenges to the flâneur’s whiteness posed by civil rights
movements and ethnic minorities who sought to express themselves in the
public realm of the street. Challenging stereotyped images of poor ethnic
minorities in Los Angeles, Harry Gamboa Jr. and the other members of
the Chicano artist group Asco staged, in the late 1970s, street actions in
which they made visible both the city’s unglamorous ‘other,’ and the
‘other’ non-white, male flâneur (pl.37).
72
Asco’s ‘reliance on photography as a means of documentation,’ as Amelia
Jones has argued, ‘points to a shift in cultural productions toward
aggressively and self-consciously mediated renderings of the body/city
relation.’30 While Jones rightly suggests that this ‘self-conscious’ shift was
inaugurated in the 1980s by artists such as Calle, it was preceded by a
long history linking flâneurie and photography. The self-effacing flâneur of
the nineteenth century ‘makes of himself a blank page upon which the city
writes itself,’31 according to Elizabeth Wilson, by acting as a recorder of
urban reality. If the modern city both created and fed the demand for the
flâneur’s short journalistic pieces, the receptive surface of the camera film
provided the most direct analogy for the ‘blank page’ he had become.
Walking and taking photographs (and later filming) seemed to have
become equivalent ways of engaging with the city and interrogating the
very nature of reality and its mediation.
Although Benjamin, the great philosopher of modernity, contributed crucial
reflections on the role of photography as well as his famous discussion of
the Baudelairian flâneur, he never explicitly drew out the relations between
the two. One point of intersection lies in Benjamin’s famous
characterization of Atget’s photographs as ‘scenes of the crime,’ which
resonates with his analogy between the flâneur, the detective and the
criminal.32 Both discussions were contributions to Benjamin’s project of
debunking picturesque myths about the city by warning that ‘every corner’ is
potentially the ‘scene of a crime,’ and that ‘every passer-by’ could be a
‘criminal.’ Just as Baudelaire’s flâneur rejected the certainties provided by
popular ‘physiognomies’ of city dwellers, which acted as ways of taming the
threatening crowds of the modern metropolis, Atget refused to present
tourist views of Paris. Instead of the familiar identifiable city ‘types,’
Baudelaire turned to the mysterious ‘man of the crowd’ of Edgar Allan
Poe’s crime story; instead of the cheery spectacles and monuments of Paris,
Atget offered empty staircases, squares, and café terraces. For the Surrealist
poet Robert Desnos, Atget certainly displayed ‘the attention to detail of the
Parisian flâneur,’ and another critic wrote that Atget had written Aragon’s
Paysan de Paris a quarter of century before the Surrealist novel.33 Benjamin,
for his part, resolutely placed Atget as a precursor of Surrealist photographs
(such as Boiffard’s illustrations for Nadja), praising the ways in which they
establish ‘a salutary estrangement between man and his surroundings,’ thus
replacing intimacy with an ‘illumination of detail.’34 This distance, of course,
is where the operation of the outmoded is made possible: once nostalgia has
been left behind, the viewer/flâneur is able to invest the detail, the signs of
the city with his own meanings, like a detective making sense of a mystery.
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The photographer-as-detective, for Benjamin, could reveal this mystery
buried in his snapshot through the use of captions. Benjamin was
particularly drawn to the way in which Boiffard’s photographs for Nadja
were captioned with passages from Breton’s text. In this narrative, image
and text cannot, it seems, be considered separately. This combination of
image and language re-emerged, in a new form, in the conceptual art of
the late 1960s and 1970s. In his short history of walking in
contemporary art, Francesco Careri pinpoints a crucial shift in the 1960s
away from the literary-based artistic practices Surrealism and
Situationism towards the sculpture-based forms of Minimalism and
Land Art, in which the artist’s or spectator’s walk introduces a temporal,
performative dimension within the spatial and formal parameters of
three-dimensional art.35 Significantly, however, this introduction of time
and performance within the visual arts occurred predominantly through
language and the kind of amateur-like, deliberately ‘banal’ photograph
that Boiffard seemed to have developed for Breton. Certainly, the
pseudo-objectivist desire to empty conceptual artworks from any
personal expression of emotion or opinion seems a far cry from the
semi-autobiographical games of Breton or Aragon. A 1969 work by
Rosemarie Castoro may read like a diary entry, accompanied with a set
of documentary photographs, but betrays little of the artist’s actual
motivations or state of mind – a task has been decided upon and simply
followed through (pl.39). Nevertheless, I would like to argue here that
by turning to language and photography, conceptual artists may have
come closer to Surrealism than they realized. Indeed, as Margaret
Iversen has suggested, it is precisely this new kind of ‘performative
photography’ – in which the camera, ‘treated like an instrument of
discovery,’36 follows the artist in an task-based, yet open-ended process,
that resonates with the ‘performative realism’ of Breton’s Nadja, a novel
deliberately ‘left ajar, like a door.’37
It is perhaps only, however, since artists such as Calle adopted the textimage model to create ‘self-conscious’ fictions that conceptual art’s
narrative potential has come to the fore. Francis Alÿs often compares his
walks to tales or fables, and a number of authors have suggested that he is
in fact involved in ‘fictionalising the real.’38 Meanwhile, the flâneur of
Călin Dan’s 2003 Sample City, who walks through the streets of Bucharest
with a door on his back, is akin to the melancholy simpleton of traditional
folk tales who unwittingly stumbles upon buried truths (pl.38). Like
Calle’s and Guilleminot’s personal fictions, Alÿs’s or Dan’s interest in
fables and folklore seems to herald a shift, in the last decades, away from
74
the often tautological relation to reality of late 1960s conceptual practices.
While this turn does not signal a return to the Surrealist’s ideal of the
merveilleux, it certainly takes its place within the Surrealists’ own
‘fictionalisations’ of reality.
… I’m not reaching
It is specifically because photography, according to Rosalind Krauss,
effects a ‘transformation of the obduracy and fixity of the “real” into a field
of representations’ that it has ‘a major function’ within Surrealism.39
Because ‘a photograph is a photochemically wrought impression of an
event,’ it operates as an indexical, rather than a symbolic sign, an
‘externalized, reified trace’ of its referent.40 This physical, causal relation to
its referent is, according to Krauss, what allows the photograph to
participate in the Surrealists’ desire to redefine meaning ‘as a chance
concatenation of associative fragments’ that is both a ‘function of
subjectivity’ and ‘a function of external space,’ caught up ‘in a continual
process of reference.’41 The open-ended indeterminacy of walking –
suggested by Alÿs’s claim that he is never ‘reaching’ anything as long as
he’s walking – similarly encourages a perception of urban reality that is
neither static nor fixed. For the Situationists, the dérive was above all a
‘technique of hasty passage through varied ambiances’ – a collage-like
succession of perceptions and impressions that the walker encounters as
units of experiences.42 The urban walker is in fact always involved in two
simultaneous activities: a total immersion in his environment, and an
attempt to interpret the city as a set of signs to be decoded. As Siegfried
Kracauer put it, these signs are like images in a dream: they keep changing
and transforming themselves.43 For Thierry Davila, dreamwork and
flâneurie ‘possess the same liquidity’ – a fluidity, I would add, that allows
them to be subsumed within a fluid, ‘liquid’ or ‘soluble’ city.44
Water metaphors abound in Aragon’s Paysan de Paris, from his repeated
reference to people drifting on wrecked rafts, to his dream vision of the
cane and umbrella shop in the Passage de l’opéra as an underwater world
inhabited by a swimming siren. As Careri has argued, the Surrealists
offered a vision of the city as a kind of ‘amniotic fluid’ which would be
expanded by the Situationist concept of the dérive, a drifting through
liquid space ‘without direction, at the mercy of the waters.’45 This is why,
argues Careri, the image of the island and archipelago became central to
the Situationist maps (pl.41), as it more recently has for contemporary
urbanism’s interest in the ways in which ‘urban voids’ (terrains vagues as
well as the smallest empty nooks and crannies) penetrate the solid fabric
of contemporary cities like a ‘continuous fluid.’46
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Liquidity could also be considered a characteristic of the inter-lacing,
intertwining lines traced by walkers as they move around the city. These
lines cannot be reduced to any order or geometry – their twists, turns and
knots are an implicit critique of the straight lines of buildings, blocks and
avenues. Through an endless chain of metaphors, these lines run from
dripping to drawing, from tracing to sewing, from weaving to unraveling,
extending from pathway to labyrinth, and from island to archipelago. Yet
at no point do these lines become expressive in a painterly way: while
organic, they remain mechanical, while compulsive, they retain a clear
logic. This of course brings to mind the automatism of the Surrealists,
who endeavoured to find devices through which to make manifest the
subconscious outpourings of the self and the world. Just as the Surrealists
let their feet be carried by chance, and turned their hands into vectors of
the mind’s frenzied thoughts, William Anastasi lets the uneven vibrations
of the New York subway dictate the patterns of his Subway Drawings
(pl.42), and Katie Holten’s crochet wall patterns map the durations of her
journeys (pl.40). The horizontal planes of writing, walking, dripping and
drawing all duplicate the horizon of the liquid city.
Writing in 1997 about the re-emergence of walking and travelling in
contemporary practices of that time, James Meyer alerted readers that
‘[u]nprecedented mobility and migration, the expansion of multinational
companies and entertainment oligarchies, the spread of communication
technologies and digital networks, the formation of the European
Commonwealth and the International Monetary Fund’ had recently
‘propelled a globalization of culture.’47 Within this new global context, the
very boundaries of the liquid city have arguably been stretched to the point
of irrelevance. Indeed, the liquid city could be said to have been supplanted
by what Zygmunt Bauman has termed ‘liquid modernity’ – a globalizing
phenomenon, driven by an ever more mobile capital, that ‘liquifies,’ so to
speak, traditionally stable units and structures, whether it is work or
family.48 In this new context, as Marcus Verhagen has recently underlined,
the contemporary artist cannot claim a marginal status by simply
celebrating his or her nomadic practices: ‘Today the most powerful are
nomadic.’49 Writing a decade apart, Meyer and Verhagen agree that artists
such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose work is framed by their mobile existences
as artist-travelers, tend to embrace this globalised reality uncritically.
At the same moment as Meyer was advocating the need to ‘locate travel
itself within historical and institutional frameworks,’ Andrea Phillips was
addressing a related problem within the critical discourse of cultural
theory in the early 1990s, as she deplored the ways in which ‘[r]ecent
76
dialogues on nomadism, diaspora, journeying, flight, mapping, space and
“non-space”, site and “non-site”’ tend to bypass ‘geographical and
historical specificity in favour of transitory, fluctuating, psychic
experience.’50 For Phillips, it is the very idea of passage that has been
distorted: whereas Benjamin had emphasized the dialectics of passage as a
place for critical encounters with history and space, contemporary
discourses have privileged a ‘literal floating signifier of rootlessness.’51 Such
a rootlessness, as it is displayed in artistic practices, is according to
Verhagen ‘in line with the neoliberal ideal of open, deregulated markets,
in which flows of goods, people, capital and information are unimpeded
by red tape, trade barriers or cultural difference.’52
From this rather grim starting point, all three authors suggest different
paths for the contemporary flâneurs and flâneuses of the last decade. For
Meyer, artists such as Renée Green and Christian Philipp Müller have
developed a ‘critical nomadism’ which ‘locates the mobile self within a
periodised, discursive schema’ in order to underline that direct experience
is always-already mediated with history and culture.53 (The Baudelairian
and Surrealist flâneurs take their place in this history of nomadism
alongside Kerouac’s Beat traveller as well as the Romantic nature walker.)
Verhagen for his part detects a return to the ‘local,’ in reaction to
globalisation, in the work of artists such as George Shaw, who privilege a
single place in the way as Atget had at the turn of last century. For
Verhagen, however, this attachment to the local is a form of escapism, and
only artists who pay attention to ‘the differential gears of globalization,’54
with its frictions, contradictions and difficulties, can truly claim to resist
the flows of ‘liquid modernity.’ Phillips’s argument provides a synthesis of
these different perspectives within the very practice of walking. The
‘precision of the feet,’ she argues, literally grounds walking within specific
historical, geographical, emotional and cultural conditions.55 The flâneur
and flâneuse are marked by gender, race and class, and the spaces they
traverse are neither neutral nor safe. Walking offers ‘a dialectic of passage’
in a process of ‘stopping, starting, constant decision-making.’56 Faced with
obstacles and difficulties, the walker operates within a ‘space’ of
‘difference’ that allows the possibility of ‘resistance.’57 Davila has similarly
argued that the walker’s gesture requires ‘an immersion in a context, an
insertion in a specific framework’ in which it retains its own ‘intensity’ and
‘rhythm’ in order to stage a momentary displacement, disjunction, or
rupture within a given situation.58
Thus the wanderer’s vulnerability to the frictions that exist within the
flows of modernity and globalised post-modernity turns out to be his, or
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Page 78
By focusing on this specific trajectory, I will
not be addressing the practices of walking in
the countryside associated with Romantic
literature or Land Art. For a survey of walking
in general, cf. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A
History of Walking, London: Verso, 2001. For
a comprehensive survey of walking in
twentieth-century art, cf. Thierry Davila and
Maurice Fréchuret eds., Les Figures de la
marche: un siècle d'arpenteurs, exh. cat., Antibes:
Musée Picasso, 2000.
her, greatest strength. For French sociologist Michel de Certeau, the act
of walking is paradigmatic of all practices of everyday life because the way
the wanderer’s teeming, interlacing trajectories resist being subsumed
within the city plan is precisely the way in which everyday life should be
understood as individual behaviours within a set of given constraints and
order.59 As Amelia Jones put it, works such as Asco’s produce ‘subjects of
postmodern space who embrace its ambiguities and disorientations (and their
own) rather than erasing, suppressing, or otherwise attempting to master
them.’60 The walking protagonist of Dan’s Sample City certainly reveals the
‘differential gears’ of globalisation operating in Bucharest as he traverses a
collage of neighbourhoods and atmospheres in the changing city. As Alÿs
strikes the London railings, he is registering with his body their historical
existence as barriers erected to distance passers-by. Similarly Alex Villar’s
Temporary Occupations involve him jumping over barriers or hiding
between two buildings, in order to appropriate – at least provisionally –
the many inaccessible spaces of the city (pl.43). As the wanderer inserts
his or her gesture in the fabric of the everyday, a physical connection with
a place becomes a social, political, historical relation to the world.
1
4
André Breton, Entretiens, 1913–1952, avec
André Parinaud, Paris: Gallimard, 1952, p.75
(my translation).
I would like to conclude here that walking practices from Surrealism,
through Situationism and conceptual art to contemporary art, have been
reducible to neither a bottomless mise-en-abyme of reality through
endlessly shifting signs, nor an ecstatic communion with the urban
delirium of signification. From the beginning, the Baudelairian flâneur
was haunted by the illegibility of the city, the secrets harboured by fellow
passers-by, and the suspicion that any one of them could be a criminal. If,
as Alÿs suggests, trying to be a blank page on which the city would write
itself involves ‘translating things instead of producing things,’61 it is
important to acknowledge that some zones of opaqueness will always
remain untranslatable.62 This very ambivalence is what has allowed the
role of the flâneur to be parodied and appropriated by his ‘others,’ and to
be interpreted in sometimes contradictory ways. As Aragon noticed
through his café window in the Passage de l’opéra, ‘there are as many
kinds of walks as there are clouds in the sky.’63 By using the word
‘démarches,’ Aragon is in fact referring to the very physical ways in which
people hold themselves as they walk. Grounded in such physical
particularities, each unique wandering practice nevertheless remains as
light, and fleeting, as a passing cloud.
5
Ibidem.
6
Ibid, pp.75–76. All the following quotes are
on p.76.
7
Francis Alÿs, ‘Conversation with Russel
Ferguson,’ in Russel Ferguson et al., Francis
Alÿs, London: Phaidon, 2007, p.31.
78
2
3
8
9
10
The word ‘owning’ is scribbled in pencil on
one of the undated drafts for Alÿs’s list,
displayed on a worktable at the exhibition
Francis Alÿs, in the Sammlung Goetz, Münich,
26 May–11 October 2008.
‘Rumours: a Conversation between Francis
Alÿs and James Lingwood,’ in Francis Alÿs,
Catherine Lampert and James Lingwood eds.,
Francis Alÿs: Seven Walks, London, 2004–2005,
exh. cat., London: Artangel, 2005, p.44.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second
Empire in Baudelaire’ (1938), trans. Harry
Zohn and Quentin Hoare, in Charles
Baudelaire: a Lyric Poet in the Era of High
Capitalism, London: New Left Books, 1973,
p.54.
André Breton, Nadja (1928), Paris: Gallimard,
1964 (second edition), p.77. (Unless otherwise
specified, all translations are mine.)
Cf. Guy Debord, ‘Théorie de la dérive,’
Internationale situationniste, 2, December 1958
http://i-situationniste.blogspot.com/2007/04/
theorie-de-la-derive.html accessed
19/10/2008.
11
Ralph Rumney, ‘The Leaning Tower of
Venice,’ Ark, no. 24, 1958. In this dérive
around Venice, Rumney followed his friend, the
Beat writer Alan Ansen, referred to as ‘A’ in the
text.
12
Gilles Ivain, ‘Formulaire pour un urbanisme
nouveau,’ Internationale situationniste, no. 1,
June 1958, http://i-situationniste.blogspot.com
79
/2007/04/ formulaire-pour-un-urbanismenouveau.html accessed 19/10/2008
13
Guy Debord, ‘Positions Situationnistes sur la
circulation,’ Internationale situationniste, no. 3,
http://i-situationniste.blogspot.com /2007/04/
positions-situationnistes-sur-la.html accessed
19/10/2008
14
Shaw has explicitly referred to some of these
music developments. I am indebted for these
insights to Elisa Oliver, former student at
Manchester University.
15
My thanks to Susan Laxton for informing me
of the contents of this album, held at the
George Eastman House in Rochester, New
York. Cf. also Laxton, Paris As Gameboard:
Man Ray's Atgets, exh. cat., New York:
Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University,
2002.
16
This note is written on the back of Atget’s
photograph Poterne des Peupliers, Zone de
fortifications – Chiffonniers, 13ème
arrondissement, 1913, Musée Carnavalet
collection, Paris, Ph. 8363.
17
Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last
Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’
(1929), in One-Way Street, trans. Edmund
Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, London:
Verso, 1985, p.229.
18
Cf. Pamela M. Lee, ‘On the Holes of History:
Gordon Matta-Clark’s Work in Paris,’
October, 85, Summer 1998, pp.65–89.
19
Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris (1926),
Paris: Gallimard, 1953, p.175. (my translation)
20
Ibid, p.61.
21
Ibid, p.175.
22
Breton, Nadja, op. cit., p.9.
23
Ibid, p.176.
24
Ibid., p.179.
25
Nadja, trans. Richard Howard, London:
Penguin, 1999, p.113 (slightly modified
translation). Cf. ibid, pp.131–132.
26
Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Paper Tigress’ (2003),
October, 116, Spring 2006, pp.35–54. On the
practice of ‘following’ in Surrealism, Calle’s
Suite Vénitienne, and other practices, cf. Emma
Cocker, ‘Desiring to be Led Astray,’ Papers of
Surrealism, Issue 6, Autumn 2007, online
journal: http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/
papersofsurrealism/journal6/index.htm
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Page 80
27
Elizabeth Wilson, ‘The Invisible Flâneur,’
New Left Review, 191, January–February 1992,
p.110.
42
Guy Debord, ‘Rapport sur la construction des
situations’ (1957), quoted by Davila, Marcher,
créer, op. cit., p.31.
28
Tom McDonough, ‘The Crimes of the
Flâneur,’ October, 102, Autumn 2002, p.107.
43
29
Ibid, p.120.
30
Amelia Jones, Self/Image: Technology,
Representation, and the Contemporary Subject,
London and New York: Routledge, 2006,
p.106.
Die Erkenntis der Städte ist an die Entzifferung
ihrer traumhaft hingesagten Bilder geknüpft.
Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Aus dem Fernster
gesehen’ (1931), in Strassen in Berlin und
anderswo (1964), Berlin: das Arsenal, 1987,
p.41 (my translation).
44
Davila, Marcher, créer, op. cit., p.56.
45
Careri, Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, op. cit.,
p.104.
46
Ibid, p.182.
47
James Meyer, ‘Nomads: Figures of Travel in
Contemporary Art’ (1997) in Alex Coles ed.,
Site-specificity: the Ethnographic Turn, London:
Black Dog Publishing: 2000, p.10.
48
Zymunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity,
Cambridge: Polity, 2000. I am borrowing this
reference from Marcus Verhagen, ‘Nomadism,’
Art Monthly, 300, October 2006, p.8.
31
Wilson, ‘The Invisible Flâneur,’ op. cit., p.110.
32
Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of
Photography’ (1931), in One-Way Street, op.
cit., p.256.
33
34
35
36
37
38
Robert Desnos, ‘Emile (sic) Adget (sic),’
Merle, May 1929, quoted by Ian Walker, City
Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and
Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris,
Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2002, p.97; Waldemar George, ‘Photographie:
Vision du monde,’ Arts et métiers graphiques, 1
March 1930, quoted by Walker, p.98.
49
Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography,’
op. cit., p.251.
Ibid, p.9.
50
Francesco Careri, Walking as an Aesthetic
Practice, Barcelona, Mexico City and
Amadora: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2005,
pp.124–125.
Andrea Phillips, ‘A Path is Always Between
Two Points,’ Performance Research, vol. 2, no.
3, September 1997, p.9.
51
Ibid, p.12.
52
Verhagen, ‘Nomadism,’ op. cit., p.10.
53
Meyer, ‘Nomads,’ op. cit., p.11.
54
Verhagen, ‘Nomadism,’ op. cit., p.10.
55
Phillips, ‘A Path is Always Between Two
Points,’ op. cit., p.13.
56
Ibidem.
57
Ibid, p.16.
58
Davila, Marcher, créer, op. cit., p.176.
59
Cf. Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du
Quotidien, vol. 1: Arts de faire (1980), Paris:
Gallimard, 1990, Ch. VII: Marches dans la
ville.
60
Jones, Self/Image, op. cit., p.120.
61
‘La Cour des Miracles: Francis Alÿs in
Conversation with Corinne Diserens,’ in
Francis Alÿs: Walking Distance from the Studio,
exh. cat., Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum, 2004,
p.101.
62
Cf. Verhagen, ‘Nomadism,’ op. cit., p.10.
63
Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, op. cit., p.101.
Margaret Iversen, ‘Following Pieces: On
Performative Photography,’ in James Elkins
ed., Photography Theory, London and New
York: Routledge, 2007, p.93.
Iversen borrows the term ‘performative
realism’ from Denis Hollier, ‘Surrealist
Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows,’
October, 69, Summer 1994. Breton’s Nadja is
quoted here by Iversen, p.92.
Cf. Thierry Davila, Marcher, créer:
Déplacements, flâneuries, dérives dans l’art de la
fin du XXè siècle, Paris: Editions du Regard,
2002, p.79; Corine Diserens refers to Alÿs’s
‘fictionalized reality’ in ‘Borders and Subway
Exits,’ in Francis Alÿs and Cuauhtémoc
Medina, When Faith Moves Mountains,
Madrid: Turner, 2005, p.160.
39
Rosalind Krauss, ‘Nightwalkers,’ Art Journal,
vol. 41, no. 1, Spring 1981, pp.37, 35.
40
Ibid, p.35.
41
Ibid, p.36.
80
plate 26
Brassaï
‘Nuits Parisiennes’
Minotaure
81
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Page 82
plate 27
Jacques-André Boiffard
Nous nous faisons servir dehors
par le marchand de vin…
(We have our dinner served
outside by the wine seller...)
plate 28
Ralph Rumney
The Leaning Tower of Venice
82
83
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Page 84
plate 29
Francis Alÿs
(In collaboration
with Rafael Ortega)
Railings
84
85
24/3/09
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Page 86
plate 30
Humphrey Spender
Children's Slide in
Queen Park
plate 31
George Shaw
Scenes from the Passion
– The Slide
86
87
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Page 88
plate 32
Eugène Atget
Porte de Montreuil,
zone des fortifications,
20ème arrondissement
88
89
24/3/09
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Page 90
plate 33
Gordon Matta-Clark
Conical Intersect
plate 34
Rainer Ganahl
Bicycling Broadway,
New York
90
91
plate 35
Sophie Calle
Suite Vênitienne
(Please Follow Me)
92
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Page 92
plate 36
Marie-Ange Guilleminot
Nuit Blanche
93
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Page 94
plate 37
Asco
Asshole Mural
plate 38
Calin Dan
Sample City
94
95
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Page 96
plate 39
Rosemarie Castoro
Ariadne Looking for
a Good Man
96
97
plate 40
Katie Holten
It Started on the
C Train or 137.5°
plate 41
Guy Debord
The Naked City
98
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Page 98
plate 42
William Anastasi
Subway Drawing
99
24/3/09
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Page 100
plate 43
Alex Villar
Temporary Occupations
100
101
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Page 102
List of plates
Fig. 1
Gregor Schneider, Garzweiler,
1990/91. Courtesy of the artist.
© Gregor Schneider/VG BildKunst. Bonn
Fig. 2
Gregor Schneider, Garzweiler,
1990/91. Courtesy of the artist.
© Gregor Schneider/VG BildKunst, Bonn
Front cover
Hans Bellmer, Les Jeux de la
poupée (The Games of the Doll),
1938–49. Photograph coloured
with aniline, 12.4 x 9.4cm.
Musée national d’art moderne,
Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris.
© ADAGP, Paris and DACS,
London 2009
this was at the beginning of the list
text as it was the front cover. I have
now added (pl.8 and front cover) to
the list version instead. To conform
with the back cover entry.
Fig. 3
Salvador Dalí, Hysterical Arch,
1937. Ink, 55.9 x 76.2cm.
Salvador Dalí Museum,
St. Petersburg, Florida.
© Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador
Dalí Foundation, DACS,
London 2009
Fig. 4
Louise Bourgeois, Cell (Arch of
Hysteria), 1992–3. Steel, bronze,
cast iron and fabric, 302.2 x
368.3 x 304.8cm. Collection
Centro Andaluz de Arte
Contemporáneo, Seville. Photo:
Peter Bellamy. © DACS,
London/VAGA, New York,
2009
Fig. 5
André Masson, Revolt in the
Kitchen, 1942. © ADAGP,
Paris and DACS, London 2009
Fig. 6
Remedios Varo, Study for
Mimetismo [Mimicry] 1960.
Pencil on paper, 18.4 x 18.5cm.
Frey Norris Gallery,
San Francisco. © DACS
London 2009
Fig. 7
Man Ray, Photograph of
Robert Desnos, 1912. From
André Breton, Nadja (Paris,
1928). © Man Ray
Trust/ADAGP, Paris and
DACS, London 2009
103
Fig. 8
Rosslynd Piggott.? La
Somnambule, 1996–97. Silk,
hooks, coat hangers, Perspex,
stainless steel. Art Gallery of
New South Wales. Courtesy of
the artist
Fig. 9
Francis Alÿs, As Long as I’m
Walking… 1992. Typescript.
Courtesy of the artist
Fig. 10
Excursions et visites Dadapremière visite, 1921. Collective
flyer. Inv. 2001.07.01. © Musée
d’art et d’histoire – Saint-Denis.
Photograph: copyright reserved
Fig. 11
Visite à Saint-Julien-Le-Pauvre,
1921. Anonymous photograph,
Inv. 95.22.28. © Musée d’art et
d’histoire – Saint-Denis.
Photograph: copyright reserved
Exhibited Works in
Subversive Spaces:
Surrealism and
Contemporary Art
Unless indicated otherwise
works will be shown at all
venues: The Whitworth Art
Gallery, Compton Verney and
Sainsbury Centre for Visual
Arts
Francis Alÿs b.1959, Railings,
2004. Video. Includes: Park
Crescent, 3 minutes 25 seconds,
Sample I, 1 minute 35 seconds,
Onslow Garden, 1 minute 21
seconds. Courtesy of the artist
and David Zwirner Gallery
(pl.29)
William Anastasi b.1933,
Subway Drawings 1968–2008.
Pencil and pen on paper.
Includes:
10.23.04 Robert Barry
103>96>14/, Pencil on paper,
28.5 x 18.9cm
Nov 8, 2008 Simone Subal
11·11411·14, Red pen and
pencil on paper, 28.5 x 19cm
12: 20 11.10.04 Wryan
Kranarsky · Michael Strauss
12·14·04 bus Mad ave 927 110
Bvd, Pencil on paper, 28.5 x
19.1cm
Roma 11.16.07 American
Academy, Pencil on paper,
25.8 x 18cm
Roma Nov 8 ’07 Nov
Sightseeingbus 17:00, Pencil on
paper, 25.8 x 18cm
Roma Nov 12 ‘07, Pencil on
paper, 25.9 x 18cm
9.11.08 Michael + Amy
Chapman, Paula Cooper [carl
andre exhibit], Pencil on paper,
28.5 x 19.1cm
10.20.04 Merce Cunningham
103 > 18, Pencil on paper, 28.5
x 19cm
9.28.07 Denise Green Canal >
77, Pencil on paper, 28.2 x
19.2cm
Louis Aragon 1897–1982 and
André Breton 1896–1966, ‘Le
Cinquantenaire de l’hystérie,
1878–1928’ (‘The Fiftieth
Anniversary of Hysteria’), La
Révolution surréaliste, no. 11,
March 1928. Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Art Archive
(The Whitworth Art Gallery
only)
Asco, Patssi Valdez, Gronk,
Willie Herrón, Harry Gamboa
Jr., Asshole Mural 1977.
Photograph. Modern digital
reprint. Dimensions variable.
Courtesy of Harry Gamboa Jr.
Eugène Atget 1857–1927, Coin
de la rue Beaubourg après les
démolitions (Corner of the Rue
Beaubourg after demolitions)
1908. Albumen print, 17 x
21.2cm. Musée Carnavalet (The
Whitworth Art Gallery only)
Eugène Atget, Rue de la
Parcheminerie après la démolition
(Rue de la Parcheminerie after the
demolition) 15 March 1913.
Albumen print, 17.9 x 21.7cm.
Musée Carnavalet (The
Eugène Atget, Rue de la
Parcheminerie March 1913.
Eugène Atget, Passage du PontNeuf (Pont-Neuf Arcade) 1912.
Eugène Atget, Ancien passage du
Pont-Neuf (Former Pont-Neuf
Arcade) March 1913. Albumen
print, 22.3 x 18cm. Musée
Carnavalet (The Whitworth Art
Gallery only)
Eugène Atget, Porte d'Ivry,
fortifications, 13e arrondissement.
Terrasse, extra muros (Porte
d’Ivry, fortifications, 13th
arrondissement. Terrace, extra
muros) 1910. Albumen print,
18 x 22cm. Musée Carnavalet
only)
Eugène Atget, Porte d'Asnières,
passage Trébert, chiffonniers,
17ème arrondissement (Porte
d’Asnières, passage Trébert,
ragpickers, 17th arrondissement)
1913. Albumen print, 17.5 x
22cm. Musée Carnavalet (The
104
24/3/09
2:07 pm
Eugène Atget, Porte d'Asnières,
zone de servitude, passage Trébert,
17ème arrondissement (Porte
d’Asnières, zone of servitude,
passage Trébert, 17th
arrondissement) 1913. Albumen
print, 22 x 17.7cm. Musée
Carnavalet (The Whitworth Art
Gallery only)
Eugène Atget, Porte de
Montreuil, zone des fortifications,
20ème arrondissement (Porte de
Montreuil, fortifications zone,
20th arrondissement) 1913.
Musée Carnavalet, (The
Whitworth Art Gallery only).
(pl.32)
Montreuil, zone des fortifications,
20ème arrondissement (Porte de
Montreuil, fortifications zone,
20th arrondissement) 1912.
Albumen print, 18 x 22.2cm.
Eugène Atget, Poterne des
Peupliers, zone de fortifications,
chiffonniers, 13ème
arrondissement (Poterne des
Peupliers, fortifications zone,
21.8cm. Musée Carnavalet
(Compton Verney and
Arts only)
Eugène Atget, Poterne des
Peupliers, zone de fortifications,
chiffonniers, 13ème
arrondissement (Poterne des
Peupliers, fortifications zone,
(Compton Verney and
Arts only)
Page 104
Eugène Atget, Ivry – Terrasse,
Porte d’Ivry, extra muros (IvryTerrace, Porte d’Ivry, extra muros)
(Compton Verney and
Arts only)
Eugène Atget, Coin de la rue de
la Parcheminerie (Corner of the
Rue de la Parcheminerie) April 8
(Compton Verney and
Arts only)
Montreuil, zone des fortifications
(Porte de Montreuil, fortifications
zone) 1910. Albumen print, 18.1
x 22cm. Musée Carnavalet
(Compton Verney and
Arts only)
Sir Charles Bell 1774–1842,
Anatomy and Philosophy of
Expression as Connected with the
Fine Arts, Book published by
George Bell and Sons, London,
1844, 3rd edition [1824].
Private collection
Eugène Atget, Chiffonniers,
Porte d’Asnières, cité Valmy,
17ème arrondissement
(Ragpickers, Porte d’Asnières, cité
Valmy, 17th arrondissement)
(Compton Verney and
Arts only)
Eugène Atget, Passage de
Choiseul, 2ème arrondissement
(Choiseul arcade, 2nd
arrondissement) 1907–1908.
Musée Carnavalet (Compton
Verney and Sainsbury Centre
for Visual Arts only)
Eugène Atget, Passage de
Choiseul, 2ème arrondissement
(Choiseul arcade, 2nd
arrondissement) 1907–1908.
Albumen print, 20.7 x 18cm.
Musée Carnavalet (Compton
Verney and Sainsbury Centre
for Visual Arts only)
Eugène Atget, Chantier de
démolition, rue de la
Parcheminerie (Demolition site,
Rue de la Parcheminerie) August
(Compton Verney and
Arts only)
Hans Bellmer 1902–1975, Les
Jeux de la poupée (The Games of
the Doll) 1938–49. Gelatin silver
proof coloured with anilin and
glued onto cardboard, 12.4 x
9.4cm. Centre Pompidou,
National Museum of Modern
Art – Centre for Industrial
Creation Purchased 1996
Hans Bellmer and Paul Eluard
1895, Les Jeux de la poupée (The
Games of the Doll) 1949,
Photographs by Hans Bellmer,
Book published by Les Editions
Premières, Paris, 1949, Scottish
National Gallery of Modern Art
Archive. (pl.8 and front cover)
Jacques-André Boiffard
1902–61, Nous nous faisons servir
dehors par le marchand de vins …
(We have our dinner served
outside by the wine seller…)
c.1928. Gelatin silver print, 17 x
Creation. Purchased 2003 (The
Whitworth Art Gallery only).
(pl.27)
Louise Bourgeois b.1911, ‘Child
Abuse’ 1982. Photo-essay in
journal, Artforum, December
1982. The Whitworth Art
Gallery, The University of
Manchester
105
Brassaï (Halász Gyula)
1899–1984, Le Pont Royal
1932–1933. Gelatin silver
bromide print, 40 x 50.8cm.
Musée Carnavalet
Brassaï, La Tour Saint-Jacques
1932–33. Gelatin silver print,
29 x 22cm. Centre Pompidou,
Creation. Purchased 1994 (The
Brassaï, Le Viaduc d'Auteuil la
nuit (The Viaduc d’Auteuil by
Night) c.1932. Gelatin silver
print, 28 x 21.7cm. Centre
Pompidou, National Museum
of Modern Art – Centre for
Industrial Creation. Gift of
Mme. Gilberte Brassaï 2002
only)
Brassaï, Sortie des trains, Gare
d'Orsay (Train Exit, Orsay Rail
Station) c.1931–2. Gelatin silver
print, 29.5 x 23.5cm. Centre
only)
Brassaï, Statue du maréchal Ney
dans le brouillard (Statue of the
Maréchal Ney in the Fog) 1932.
Gelatin silver print, 56.7 x
Creation. Purchased 1987
(Sainsbury Centre for Visual
Arts only)
Brassaï, Toilette dans une maison
de passe, rue Quincampoix
(Having a Wash in a Brothel, Rue
Quincampoix) c.1932. Gelatin
silver print, 35 x 27.5cm. Centre
Industrial Creation. Acquired by
the State 1983 (Sainsbury
Centre for Visual Arts only)
Brassaï, Première nuit Young: ‘Le
jour est trop court’ (Young ‘First
Night’: ‘The Day is Too Short’)
c.1932. Gelatin silver print,
27.5 x 21cm. Centre Pompidou,
Creation. Purchased 1994
Arts only)
Brassaï, Jardins du Luxembourg
(The Luxembourg Gardens) 1931.
Gelatin silver print, 28.5 x
Creation. Gift of Mme.
Gilberte Brassaï 2002
Arts only)
Brassaï, Le Canal de l’Ourcq
23.5 x 17.5cm. Centre
Industrial Creation. Purchased
1994 (Compton Verney only)
Brassaï, Passage du Palais-Royal
1932, Gelatin silver print,
23.5 x 29.5cm. Centre
(Compton Verney only)
Brassaï, Les Grandes Moulins de
Paris, Quai de la gare (The Great
Mills of Paris, Quai de la Gare)
c.1934–36. Gelatin silver print,
30 x 23cm. Centre Pompidou,
Creation. Gift of Mme.
Gilberte Brassaï 2002
(Compton Verney only)
André Breton 1896–1986,
Nadja 1928. Book published by
Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1964
[1928]. The Whitworth Art
Gallery. The University of
Manchester
24/3/09
André Breton et al, Violette
Nozières. Book published by
Nicolas Flamel, Brussels, 1933.
Scottish National Gallery of
Modern Art Archive
Ariadne Drip 1969. Vintage
photograph, 25.4 x 20.5cm
André Breton, L’Amour fou
(Mad Love) 1968 [1937]. Book
published by NRF, Paris, 1969.
The Whitworth Art Gallery,
The University of Manchester
Ariadne Parked Cars 1969.
Vintage photograph, 25.4 x
20.5cm
Pierre-André A. Brouillet
1857–1914, Une Leçon clinique à
la Salpêtrière (A Clinical Lesson
at the Salpêtrière) 1887.
Lithograph by Abel Lurat after
Brouillet’s painting for the
Salon of 1887, 29.2 x 39.1cm.
Wellcome Library, London.
(pl.2)
Sophie Calle b.1953 and Jean
Baudrillard 1929–2007, Suite
vénitienne. Please follow me.
Book published by Éditions de
l’Étoile, Paris, 1983, The
Whitworth Art Gallery. The
University of Manchester.
(pl.35)
Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob)
1894–1954, Self-Portrait (in
cupboard) 1932. Modern reprint,
10.5 x 9.3cm. Courtesy of the
Jersey Heritage Collections.
(pl.18)
Rosemarie Castoro b.1939,
Ariadne Looking for an Honest
Man 1969. Photographs by W.
Dawes. Courtesy of the artist
Includes :
Flyer for Street Works 1969.
Paper, 28 x 21cm
Ariadne Looking for an Honest
Man 1969. Paste-up for
publication in ‘0 to 9’
supplement to no. 6 (July 1969)
dedicated to ‘Street Works I’,
28 x 21.5cm. (pl.39)
2:07 pm
Ariadne Traffic 1969. Vintage
Ariadne Parade 1969. Vintage
Ariadne Stein 1969. Vintage
Rosemarie Castoro, How to
make an atoll out of Manhattan
Island 1969. Photographs by W.
Dawes. Courtesy of the artist
Includes:
How to make an atoll out of
Manhattan Island 1969. Pasteup for publication in ‘0 to 9’
supplement to no. 6 (July 1969)
dedicated to ‘Street Works I’,
n.p., 28 x 21cm
Rosemarie Castoro, Atoll Arm
Crook 1969. Vintage
photograph, 27 x 17cm
Rosemarie Castoro, Atoll RC as
Instrument 1969. Vintage
photograph, 26 x 17cm
Rosemarie Castoro, Atoll Park
1969, Vintage photograph,
17 x 26cm
Rosemarie Castoro, Handout
for ‘How to Make an Atoll out of
Manhattan Island’ 1969. Paper,
9 x 10.5cm
Rosemarie Castoro, Atoll Corner
1969. Vintage photograph, 17 x
26cm
Rosemarie Castoro, Gates of
Troy 1969. Photographs by W.
Dawes, Courtesy of the artist
Page 106
Includes:
Troy Man Approach 1969.
Vintage photograph, 24.6 x
20cm
Troy Sam’s Pizza 1969. Vintage
photograph, 20 x 25.3cm
Troy Cars 1969. Vintage
photograph, 26 x 17.6cm
Giorgio de Chirico 1888–1978,
The Philosopher 1927. Oil on
canvas (central section of a
triptych), 114 x 87cm. The
Whitworth Art Gallery, The
University of Manchester.
Presented by Sir Michael
Sadler, through the National
Art Collections Fund in 1931
(O.1931.1). (pl.2)
Salvador Dalí 1904–1989,
Untitled (Composition with Chair
and Inkstand) from Les Chants de
Maldoror, (The Songs of
Maldoror) 1934. Heliogravure
with drypoint, 33.1 x 25.3cm.
Modern Art (The Whitworth
Art Gallery only)
Salvador Dalí, Illustrations in
the book, Les Chants de
Maldoror (The Songs of
Maldoror) by Comte de
Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse)
1846–1870. Heliogravure,
Published by Skira, Paris, 1934.
Modern Art Archive. (pl.14)
Călin Dan b. 1955, Sample City
2003. Video, 11 minutes 45
seconds. Courtesy of the artist.
(pl.38)
Tacita Dean b.1965, Bubble
House Location Photograph 1999.
Colour print 2005, 24 x 30cm.
Courtesy of the artist and Frith
Street Gallery
Guy Debord 1931–1994, The
Naked City, Illustration de
l’hypothèse des plaques tournantes
en psychogéographie (The Naked
City: Illustration of the hypothesis
of the turntables in
psychogeography) 1957. Poster,
35.5 x 48.5cm. Musée d’Art
moderne et contemporain de
Strasbourg (The Whitworth Art
Gallery only). (pl.41)
Rainer Ganahl, Bicyling
Broadway II 2006. Video, 32
minutes 47 seconds. Courtesy of
the artist
Paul Delvaux 1897–1994, La
Rue du tramway (Street of the
Tram) 1938–39. Oil on canvas,
90.3 x 131.3cm. Scottish
National Gallery of Modern
Art. (pl.24)
Robert Gober b. 1954, Untitled
1989–92. Wood, wax, leather,
cotton and human hair, 30 x 16
x 51.5cm. Tate. Purchased 1992
(pl.17)
Max Ernst 1891–1976, ‘Ce
singe, serait-il catholique, par
hasard?’ (‘This monkey, would he
be catholic by any chance?’) 1929.
Cut-out prints on paper on
cardboard, Original collage for
the collage novel by Max Ernst,
‘La Femme 100 têtes’ (The
Hundred-Headless Woman),
1929, 20.7 x 22cm. Centre
Industrial Creation. Gift of M.
Carlo Perrone 1999 (The
Max Ernst, Une Semaine de
bonté (A Week of Kindness) 1934.
Collage novel, Book published
by editions Jeanne Bucher,
Paris, Manchester City Galleries
(pl.3)
Max Ernst, La femme 100 têtes
(The Hundred Headless Woman)
1929. Translated by Dorothea
Tanning b.1910. Book
published by George Braziller,
New York, 1981. Private
collection. (pl.11)
Rainer Ganahl b. 1961, Bicyling
Broadway I, 2006. Video, 59
the artist (pl.34)
Ariadne Splatter 1969. Vintage
106
107
Anna Gaskell b.1969, Untitled #
47 (Hide) 1998. Photograph on
paper, 73.6 x 90.8cm. Tate.
Presented by Jay Jopling/White
Cube and Casey Kaplan 1999.
(pl.9)
Robert Gober, Tilted Play Pen
1986. Wood, enamel, paint,
91.1 x 141.9cm. Private
collection, London (pl.23)
Douglas Gordon b.1966,
Hysterical 1995. Video, 30
minutes. Southampton City Art
Gallery. (pl.1)
Marie-Ange Guilleminot
b.1960, Nuit Blanche (White or
Sleepless Night) 1995. Video,
coat (Le Manteau de Lumière
[The Coat of light]), handbag.
(pl.36 and back cover)
Lucy Gunning b.1964, Climbing
Round My Room 1993. Video, 7
minutes 30 seconds. Arts
Council Collection, Southbank
Centre, London. (pl.19)
Mona Hatoum b.1952,
Incommunicado 1993. Metal cot
and wire, 126.4 x 57.5 x
93.5cm. Tate. Purchased with
funds provided by the Gytha
Trust 1995. (pl.22)
Mona Hatoum, Slicer 1999.
Steel and plastic, 104.00 x 117.5
x 93cm. Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Art.
Purchased with assistance from
The Art Fund and the
Knapping Fund 2005
Katie Holten b.1975, It Started
on the C Train or 137.5° 2002.
Wool and crochet, Variable
dimensions. Courtesy of the
artist and Van Horn,
Düsseldorf. (pl.40)
Frederick Kiesler 1890–1965,
Interior View of the Endless House
Model 1958. Photograph by
G.Barrows. Vintage silver
gelatin print, 16 x 23.1cm.
Austrian Frederick and Lillian
Kiesler Private Foundation,
Vienna
Frederick Kiesler, Interior View
of the Endless House Model 1959.
Original colour photograph,
12.5 x 17.5cm. Austrian
Frederick and Lillian Kiesler
Private Foundation, Vienna
Frederick Kiesler, Interior View
of the Endless House Model 1958.
Original vintage print, 20.5 x
25.3cm. Austrian Frederick and
Lillian Kiesler Private
Foundation, Vienna
Frederick Kiesler, Study for
Endless House 1950. Pen on
paper, 21.2 x 27.4cm. Austrian
Frederick and Lillian Kiesler
Private Foundation, Vienna
Frederick Kiesler, Study for the
windows of Endless House 1959.
Coloured pencil on paper, 35.3
x 43.7cm. Austrian Frederick
and Lillian Kiesler Private
Foundation, Vienna
Sarah Lucas b.1962, The
Pleasure Principle 2000. Table,
six chairs, underwear, lights,
Table, dimensions variable.
Courtesy Murderme. (pl.13)
Sarah Lucas, How Little Can
Sex Deliver? 1998. Photograph,
102 x 76cm. Courtesy of the
artist and Sadie Coles HQ
London
Dora Maar (Henrietta
Théodora Markovitch)
1907–1997, Le Simulateur (The
Simulator) c.1936. Gelatin silver
print. Modern reprint, 2004,
29.5cm x 23.5cm. Centre
Industrial Creation. Original
negative purchased 2004. (pl.4)
Dora Maar, Study for 29 rue
d’Astorg (29 Astorg Street)
modern reprint, 2004, 18 x
13cm. Centre Pompidou,
Creation. Original
photomontage purchased 1990
Dora Maar, Sans titre [Onirique]
(Untitled [Dreamlike]) 1935.
Gelatin silver print, modern
reprint, 56.6 x 38cm. Centre
Industrial Creation. Original
photomontage purchased 1991
René Magritte 1898–1967, Man
with a Newspaper 1928. Oil on
canvas, 127.9 x 94cm. Tate.
Presented by the Friends of the
Tate Gallery 1964. (pl.21)
Matta (Roberto Sebastián
Echaurren) 1911–2002, La
pierre philosophale (The
Philosopher’s Stone) 1942.
Graphite lead and wax crayon
on paper, 58.3 x 73.6cm. Centre
1985 (Sainsbury Centre for
Visual Arts only)
Gordon Matta-Clark
1943–1978, Conical Intersect
1974. 16mm film transferred to
DVD, 17 minutes 52 seconds.
Centre Pompidou, National
Museum of Modern Art –
Centre for Industrial Creation.
Purchased 1994. (pl.33)
108
24/3/09
2:07 pm
Gordon Matta-Clark, Sous-sols
de Paris (Paris Undergrounds)
1977. 16mm film transferred to
DVD, 25 minutes. Centre
1996
Henri Michaux 1899–1980,
Dessin mescalinien (Mescaline
Drawing) 1959. Indian ink on
paper, 32 x 24cm. Centre
Daniel Cordier 1976 (The
Peter Moore 1932–1993, Louise
Bourgeois’ ‘Fillette’ in the artist’s
studio 1968. Vintage
photograph, 25.1 x 20.3cm.
Courtesy of Barbara Moore.
(pl.7)
Tony Oursler b.1957, The Most
Beautiful Thing I’ve Never Seen
1995. Video, 6 minutes 23
seconds, sofa and mannequin,
210 x 220cm. Tate. Purchased
1995. (pl.16)
George Platt Lynes 1907–1955,
The Sleepwalker 1935. Modern
print 2008, 24.1 x 19cm. The
Kinsey Institute for Research in
Sex, Gender and Reproduction,
Inc. (pl.25)
Paula Rego b.1935, Baa Baa
Black Sheep 1989. Etching with
aquatint, 52 x 38cm. The
University of Manchester
(P.22756) (Compton Verney
and the Sainsbury Centre for
the Visual Arts only). (pl.12)
Ralph Rumney 1934–2002, The
‘Leaning Tower of Venice’ 1957.
Published photo-essay in
journal, Ark, Journal of the Royal
College of Art, no. 24, 1958,
England and Co. Gallery,
London. (pl.28)
Page 108
Markus Schinwald b.1973,
Untitled 2006. Wood, metal, 76
x 100 x 80cm. Georg Kargl Fine
Arts, Vienna. (pl.5)
Markus Schinwald,
Contortionists (Rachel) 2003.
C-print, 100 x 250cm. Private
collection Geyer, Vienna,
Austria. (pl.6)
Markus Schinwald,
Contortionists (Vicky) 2003.
C-print, 100 x 100cm. Private
collection, Austria
Markus Schinwald, 1st Part
Conditional 2004. Video, 3
minutes. Courtesy Georg Kargl
Fine Arts, Vienna and Gio
Marconi Gallery, Milan
Gregor Schneider b.1969, Die
Familie Schneider (The Schneider
Family) 2004. Video, 13
the artist
Gregor Schneider,
Kinderzimmer 2009. Installation.
Specially commissioned by The
University of Manchester for
Subversive Spaces: Surrealism and
Contemporary Art (The
George Shaw b. 1966, Scenes
from the Passion: The Swing
2002/3. Humbrol enamel on
board, 77 x 101cm. The
University of Warwick.
Purchased through the
Contemporary Art Society
Special Collection Scheme, with
funds from Arts Council
Lottery Fund, 2004
George Shaw, Scenes from the
Passion: The Slide 2002/3.
Humbrol enamel on board,
77 x 101cm. Private collection,
London
Humphrey Spender 1910–2005,
Children's Slide in Queen Park
c.1937–8. Modern silver gelatin
print, 30.5 x 40.6cm. On loan
from Bolton Museum &
Archive Service. Collection
purchased by Bolton Council
with the assistance of the V&A
Purchase Grant Fund. (pl.30)
Humphrey Spender, Wasteland
as Children's Playground
Purchase Grant Fund
Humphrey Spender, Streetlife,
Children at Play (Peep)
Purchase Grant Fund
Yves Tanguy 1900–1955,
Echelles (Ladders) 1935. Oil on
canvas on board, 21.6cm x
26.7cm. Manchester City
Galleries
Humphrey Spender, Wasteland
as Children's Playground
Purchase Grant Fund
Dorothea Tanning b.1910, Eine
Kleine Nachtmusik 1943. Oil on
canvas, 40.7 x 61cm. Tate.
Purchased with assistance from
The Art Fund and the
American Fund for the Tate
Gallery 1997. (The Whitworth
Art Gallery and Compton
Verney only). (pl.10)
Photography credits
Plate 7: © Peter Moore: Plates 9,10,16,17,21,22:
© Tate, London 2008; Plate 23: Geoffrey
Clements; Plate 41: Musées de la Ville de
Strasbourg, M.Bertola
Image credits
Plate 1: © Douglas Gordon; Plates 3, 4, 8, 10, 11,
21: ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2009;
Plate 5: Courtesy of the artist and Georg Kargl
Fine Arts, Vienna; Plate 6: Courtesy of the artist
and private collection Geyer, Vienna; Plate 7: ©
Estate of Peter Moore; Plates 9, 12, 16, 17, 22,
23, 34, 36, 38, 39, 42, 43: Courtesy of the artist;
Plate 13: © Sarah Lucas; Plate 14: © Salvador
Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, DACS,
109
Alex Villar b. 1961, Temporary
Occupations 2001. Video, 6
the artist. (pl.43)
Francesca Woodman 1958–81,
House # 4, Providence, Rhode
Island 1976. Gelatin silver estate
print, 20.3cm x 25.4cm.
Courtesy George and Betty
Woodman and Victoria Miro
Gallery, London. (pl.20)
Francesca Woodman, From
Space2 Series, Providence, Rhode
Island 1977. Gelatin silver estate
print, 20.3cm x 25.4cm.
Courtesy George and Betty
Woodman and Victoria Miro,
London
London, 2009-03-23; Plates 15, 24, Plate 33:
DACS, London, 2009; Plate 18:Courtesy of the
Jersey Heritage Collection; Plate 19: Courtesy of
the artist and Matt’s Gallery; Plate 20: Courtesy
George and Betty Woodman and Victoria Miro,
London; Plate 25: Courtesy of the Estate of
George Platt Lynes; Plate 29: Courtesy of David
Zwirner, New York; Plate 30: Courtesy of the
Bolton Museum & Archive Service; Plate 31:
Courtesy of the artist and Anthony Wilkinson
Gallery; Plate 32: © Eugène Atget/Musée
Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet; Plate 37: © Harry
Gamboa Jnr.; Plate 40: Courtesy of the artist and
Van Horn, Düsseldorf; Plate 41: © Musée d’Art
Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, Cabinet
d’Art graphique
24/3/09
2:07 pm
Page 110
Subversive Spaces: Surrealism + Contemporary Art
published to coincide with the exhibition
7 February–4 May 2009
(Kinderzimmer 7 February–31 May 2009)
The Whitworth Art Gallery
13 June–6 September 2009
Compton Verney
Warwickshire
29 September–13 December 2009
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
University of East Anglia, Norwich
Acknowledgements
Dawn Ades, Patricia Allmer, Quentin Bajac, Agnes de la Beaumelle, Dove Bradshaw,
Andrew Causey, Caroline Collier, Mark Crinson, Jill Constantine, Tim Craven, Elena
Crippa, Tacita Dean, Matthew Gale, Petra Gebinger, Marie-Jeanne Geyer, Clare
O’Dowd, Pascale Dubreuil, Patrick Elliott, Andreas Gerads, Katie Holten, Amelia
Jones, Julia Kelly, Roger Malbert, Sandra Martin, Dale McFarland, Philippe-Alain
Michaud, Sharon-Michi Kusonoki, Jane Moore, Jennifer Mundy, Anna Mustonen, Val
Nelson, Didier Ottinger, Alfred Pacquement, Gavin Parkinson, Monika Pessler, Raul
Ortega, Ann Françoise Reynaud, Rowan de Saulles, William Schupbach, Ann Simpson,
Daniel Smith, Gillian Smithson, George Shaw, Lifen Jiao Sorensen, Helen Stalker,
Michael Taylor, Sarah Whitfield, Anthony Wilkinson, Wendy Williams, Janet Wolff.
Exhibition curators: Anna Dezeuze and David Lomas
Exhibition organisers: Sam Lackey, Mary Griffiths and David Morris
The Whitworth Art Gallery
Oxford Road
Manchester M15 6ER
0161 275 7450
www.subversivespaces.com
www.manchester.ac.uk/whitworth
© the artists, authors and The Whitworth Art Gallery
Design: aquarium – www.aquariumgd.co.uk
Printed by: BAS Print Group
110

The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii

Transcription

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