The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii
Transcription
The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii
The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:05 pm Page 1 subversive spaces surrealism+contemporary art to be decided regarding front cover design The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:05 pm Page 2 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 99 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:05 pm Page 4 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 4 5 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:05 pm Page 6 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 6 7 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:05 pm Page 8 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 9 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:05 pm Page 10 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. The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 12 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 12 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 13 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 14 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 14 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 15 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 16 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 17 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 18 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 19 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 20 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 21 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 22 – 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 23 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 24 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 25 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 26 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 27 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 28 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 29 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 30 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 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 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. 32 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 32 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 33 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 34 plate 2 André Brouillet Clinical Demonstration at the Salpêtrière plate 3 Max Ernst Une Semaine de bonté, ou Les Sept éléments capitaux 34 35 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 36 plate 4 Dora Maar Le Simulateur 36 37 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 38 plate 5 Markus Schinwald Untitled. plate 6 Markus Schinwald Contortionists (Rachel) 38 39 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 40 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 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 42 plate 8 Hans Bellmer Les Jeux de la poupée (The Games of the Doll) 42 43 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 44 plate 9 Anna Gaskell Untitled (Hide) # 47 plate 10 Dorothea Tanning Eine Kleine Nachtmusik 44 45 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm 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 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 48 plate 13 Sarah Lucas Pleasure Principle plate 14 Salvador Dalí Plate from Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont 48 49 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 50 plate 15 Giorgio de Chirico The Philosopher 50 51 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 52 plate 16 Tony Oursler The Most Beautiful Thing I've Never Seen, plate 17 Robert Gober Untitled 52 53 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii plate 18 Claude Cahun Self-Portrait (in Cupboard) 54 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 54 plate 19 Lucy Gunning Climbing Round My Room 55 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 56 plate 20 Francesca Woodman House #4, Providence, Rhode Island plate 21 René Magritte Man with a Newspaper 56 57 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 58 plate 22 Mona Hatoum, Incommunicado 58 59 plate 23 Robert Gober, Tilted Play Pen The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 60 24/3/09 2:06 pm Page 60 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm Page 62 previous page: plate 24 Paul Delvaux La Rue du tramway [Street of the Tram] right: plate 25 George Platt Lynes, The Sleepwalker 62 63 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm Page 64 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. 64 65 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm Page 66 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 66 67 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm Page 68 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 69 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm Page 70 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 70 71 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm Page 72 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. 73 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm Page 74 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 75 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm Page 76 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 77 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm 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 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm 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 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm 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 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm Page 84 plate 29 Francis Alÿs (In collaboration with Rafael Ortega) Railings 84 85 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm Page 86 plate 30 Humphrey Spender Children's Slide in Queen Park plate 31 George Shaw Scenes from the Passion – The Slide 86 87 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm Page 88 plate 32 Eugène Atget Porte de Montreuil, zone des fortifications, 20ème arrondissement 88 89 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm Page 90 plate 33 Gordon Matta-Clark Conical Intersect plate 34 Rainer Ganahl Bicycling Broadway, New York 90 91 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii plate 35 Sophie Calle Suite Vênitienne (Please Follow Me) 92 24/3/09 2:07 pm Page 92 plate 36 Marie-Ange Guilleminot Nuit Blanche 93 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm Page 94 plate 37 Asco Asshole Mural plate 38 Calin Dan Sample City 94 95 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm 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° The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii plate 41 Guy Debord The Naked City 98 24/3/09 2:07 pm Page 98 plate 42 William Anastasi Subway Drawing 99 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm Page 100 plate 43 Alex Villar Temporary Occupations 100 101 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 24/3/09 2:07 pm 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. Courtesy of the artist 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. The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 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 Whitworth Art Gallery only) Eugène Atget, Rue de la Parcheminerie March 1913. Albumen print, 17.8 x 22.5cm. Musée Carnavalet (The Whitworth Art Gallery only) Eugène Atget, Passage du PontNeuf (Pont-Neuf Arcade) 1912. Albumen print, 21.8 x 17.9cm. Musée Carnavalet (The Whitworth Art Gallery only) 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 (The Whitworth Art Gallery 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 Whitworth Art Gallery only) 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. Albumen print, 21.9 x 17.8cm. Musée Carnavalet, (The Whitworth Art Gallery only). (pl.32) Eugène Atget, Porte de Montreuil, zone des fortifications, 20ème arrondissement (Porte de Montreuil, fortifications zone, 20th arrondissement) 1912. Albumen print, 18 x 22.2cm. Musée Carnavalet (The Whitworth Art Gallery only) Eugène Atget, Poterne des Peupliers, zone de fortifications, chiffonniers, 13ème arrondissement (Poterne des Peupliers, fortifications zone, ragpickers, 13th arrondissement) 1910. Albumen print, 17.8 x 21.8cm. Musée Carnavalet (Compton Verney and Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts only) Eugène Atget, Poterne des Peupliers, zone de fortifications, chiffonniers, 13ème arrondissement (Poterne des Peupliers, fortifications zone, ragpickers, 13th arrondissement) 1913. Albumen print, 17.8 x 21.9cm. Musée Carnavalet (Compton Verney and Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts only) Page 104 Eugène Atget, Ivry – Terrasse, Porte d’Ivry, extra muros (IvryTerrace, Porte d’Ivry, extra muros) 1910. Albumen print, 18.1 x 21.8cm. Musée Carnavalet (Compton Verney and Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts only) Eugène Atget, Coin de la rue de la Parcheminerie (Corner of the Rue de la Parcheminerie) April 8 1913. Albumen print, 22.5 x 17.6cm. Musée Carnavalet (Compton Verney and Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts only) Eugène Atget, Porte de Montreuil, zone des fortifications (Porte de Montreuil, fortifications zone) 1910. Albumen print, 18.1 x 22cm. Musée Carnavalet (Compton Verney and Sainsbury Centre for Visual 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) 1913. Albumen print, 17.2 x 22.1cm. 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, 21.7 x 17.7cm. 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 1913. Albumen print, 21.8 x 17.6cm. Musée Carnavalet (Compton Verney and Sainsbury Centre for Visual 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 11.9cm. Centre Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for Industrial 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, National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for Industrial Creation. Purchased 1994 (The Whitworth Art Gallery only) 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 (The Whitworth Art Gallery 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 Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for Industrial Creation. Gift of Mme. Gilberte Brassaï 2002 (The Whitworth Art Gallery only) Brassaï, Statue du maréchal Ney dans le brouillard (Statue of the Maréchal Ney in the Fog) 1932. Gelatin silver print, 56.7 x 40.6cm. Centre Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for Industrial 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 Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for 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, National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for Industrial Creation. Purchased 1994 (Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts only) Brassaï, Jardins du Luxembourg (The Luxembourg Gardens) 1931. Gelatin silver print, 28.5 x 22.5cm. Centre Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for Industrial Creation. Gift of Mme. Gilberte Brassaï 2002 (Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts only) Brassaï, Le Canal de l’Ourcq c.1932. Gelatin silver print, 23.5 x 17.5cm. Centre Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for Industrial Creation. Purchased 1994 (Compton Verney only) Brassaï, Passage du Palais-Royal 1932, Gelatin silver print, 23.5 x 29.5cm. Centre Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for Industrial Creation. Gift of Mme. Gilberte Brassaï 2002 (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, National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for Industrial 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 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 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 photograph, 25.4 x 20.5cm Ariadne Parade 1969. Vintage photograph, 25.4 x 20.5cm Ariadne Stein 1969. Vintage photograph, 25.4 x 20.5cm 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. Scottish National Gallery of 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. Scottish National Gallery of 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 Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for Industrial Creation. Gift of M. Carlo Perrone 1999 (The Whitworth Art Gallery only) 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 minutes 53 seconds. Courtesy of the artist (pl.34) Ariadne Splatter 1969. Vintage photograph, 25.4 x 20.5cm 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. Courtesy of the artist (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 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 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 Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for Industrial Creation. Original negative purchased 2004. (pl.4) Dora Maar, Study for 29 rue d’Astorg (29 Astorg Street) c.1936. Gelatin silver print, modern reprint, 2004, 18 x 13cm. Centre Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for Industrial Creation. Original photomontage purchased 1990 Dora Maar, Sans titre [Onirique] (Untitled [Dreamlike]) 1935. Gelatin silver print, modern reprint, 56.6 x 38cm. Centre Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for 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 Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for Industrial Creation. Purchased 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 Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for Industrial Creation. Purchased 1996 Henri Michaux 1899–1980, Dessin mescalinien (Mescaline Drawing) 1959. Indian ink on paper, 32 x 24cm. Centre Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art – Centre for Industrial Creation. Gift of Daniel Cordier 1976 (The Whitworth Art Gallery only) 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 Whitworth Art Gallery, 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 minutes 12 seconds. Courtesy of the artist Gregor Schneider, Kinderzimmer 2009. Installation. Specially commissioned by The Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester for Subversive Spaces: Surrealism and Contemporary Art (The Whitworth Art Gallery only) 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 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 Humphrey Spender, Streetlife, Children at Play (Peep) 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 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 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 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 minutes 26 seconds. Courtesy of 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 The Subversive Spaces Catalogue corrected ii 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 The University of Manchester 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 The University of Manchester 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