SECTION 1: DESCRIPTIONS OF SURREALIST EXHIBITIONS
L’Exposition Anticoloniale 1931-32
The Paris Colonial Exhibition opened in May of 1931. It was a celebration of the French colonial project. Two members of the Surrealist group, Georges Sadoul and Louis Aragon, worked with Communist Party member André Thirion and the Communist influenced League Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression to produce an oppositional, anti-colonial exhibition on the Avenue Mathurin-Moreau that ran from September of 1931 to February of 1932: The Exposition Anticoloniale.
Thirion’s portion of the exhibition, which took up the entire first floor of their exhibition pavilion, focused on cultural concepts–the problems that people experienced under European imperialism and an introduction to Leninist ideas. (Palmero, 33) He adopted a highly conventional method of exhibition: panels and infographics, with an emphasis on photographs. (Palmero, 29) A banner featuring a quote from Lenin hung from the walls, and one series of panels, for example, showed a large map of the colonies, color-coded to show the difference in size between the holding countries and the held–England, for example, held territory 110 times its actual size. (Mileaf, 246)
Aragon and Sadoul’s portion of the exhibition, on the second floor, addressed questions about ceremonial objects and missionary work. The aesthetic of their exhibition was more unusual than Thirion’s–they presented a collection of statues with didactics that did not contextualize them, but instead described missionaries’ destruction of such objects. (Palmero, 30) The objects themselves were divided into four categories. They had a table of sculptures from Africa–”fetishes” and masks from funeral and festival practices–an Australian aboriginal table– with masks from a “secret society,” tom-toms, funeral statues, and a reproduction of a boat–and North American works, mostly from British Columbia, like tapestries and “totems.” (Mileaf, 247) They also juxtaposed these statues with cheap French religious statuettes, labeling them “European fetishes.” (Bardaouil, 7) A black madonna was positioned next to a half-naked dancing whore, with a black boy in clerical clothing begging for missionary alms in between. (Mileaf, 248)
“Exotic” songs were played on phonographs through the exhibition, and there were several scheduled lectures and chorus performances.
L’Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme 1938
In January of 1938, guests of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme were invited to put on evening attire and visit the Beaux Art Galerie in Paris. When they arrived, however, they didn’t find the 18th century, conservative decorations typical to the gallery. Instead, they were confronted with a series of odd constructions engineered by Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Salvador Dali, Wolfgang Paalen and others.
Outside the gallery itself, Dali installed the Taxi-Pluvieux. Inside a rented taxicab, a well-dressed, blonde, female mannequin was chauffeured by a second, male, mannequin. Over the course of the exhibition, the female mannequin especially decayed and her clothing fell apart, as she was covered with 200 Burgundy snails and rained on by a hose installed in the roof. The chauffeur wore goggles and a shark bone. (Filipovic 2003, 191)
The transitional space of the entrance hallways was converted into a semi-street. The walls were covered in photographs, posters, newspapers, and street name signs. There were sixteen more store mannequins here, each decorated onsite by a different surrealist, with mirrors, electric lights and other contraptions. (Filipovic 2003, 191-192)
This hallway brought the guests to the exhibition rooms–three rooms, converted into a “grotto.” The floor was covered in leaves and dirt, and the walls, ceiling, and elegant appointments were all covered with coal sacks, dripping a light coal dust. (Bardaouil) There was even a pool of water embedded in the floor. Juxtaposed with this outdoor environment, however, were interior elements–a bed, for example–and elements of transition between interior/exterior, public/private spaces, such as the uprooted revolving door taken from a department store.
The exhibition toyed with a variety of sensory experiences. There was very little light in the room–one light attached to an iron stove in the main hall, and another covered with women’s underwear. Instead, guests were given flashlights, or were forced to lean in closer to the works than they might be comfortable with.
There was also, however, a sonic aspect to the museum. Phonographs blasted recordings from asylums and German parade marches. The guests, however, did not parse these sounds, describing them as “stomping crowds” or “screaming birds” or simply as a “chaos.” (Filipovic, 197)
Surrealist Performativity:
The 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme also features some of the Surrealists’ explorations of séances and performativity. The movement’s fascination with hysteria “as a socially insurgent phenomenon”, spurred Hélène Vanel’s performance piece Acte Manqué (LaCoss, 38). Though not a member of the Surrealist group, Vanel was invited to participate in the Exposition; she worked closely with Dalí as she choreographed a piece which explored the social implications of hysteria exhibited in a public setting. She embodied a woman suffering from hysteria, as studied by male psychoanalysts at the turn of the century. Her hair, disheveled and long, covered her face. Her eyes were wide open and glaring, her body moved in convulsions across the room. The depiction was almost a caricature of the psychoanalyst’s prime subject, sexually frustrated, lewd, and insane. Dirt and rotten vegetation were spread on the floor and sullied her torn, white nightdress as she rolled frenetically on and off the bed. These apparently disjointed movements could be assimilated to the Surrealists’ écriture automatique, a gesture uncontrolled, exhibiting the performer’s unconsciousness. The effect of Vanel’s piece was supposedly frightening, as her performance carried the additional weight of the dark pall cast across the room.
1939 New York World’s Fair: Dalí and the “Dream of Venus”
In 1939, Dalí designed a pavilion, named the “Dream of Venus” for the New York World’s Fair. This exhibition responded to the Surrealists’ quest for an immersive audience experience, allowing its visitors to explore the insides of this erotic fun-house, however Dalí also took liberties with the movement’s esthetic and ethic.
The 1939 World Fair’s overarching theme was “The World of Tomorrow” and sprawled across Queens in New York City. The pavilion was located in the Amusement Zone of the Fair: “a carnival midway. A surrealist spectacle in its own right, it was the fair’s unconscious, libido, and alter ego all rolled into one” (Schaffner, 32). The visitor entered the stucco pavilion through an arch constituted of two female legs clad in multicolored striped stockings; Dalí sculpted our atavistic impulses and fears in this aphrodisiac scenery: “Man is entitled to the enigma and the simulacrums that are found in the great vital constants: the sexual instinct, the consciousness of death, the physical melancholy caused by ‘time-space’” (Dalí qtd in Schaffner, 110). At the top of the skeletal arch was perched a reproduction of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, illustrating the Surrealists’ interest in revisiting and revising Classical canons. This reproduction was molded into the grotto’s wall, which was made three-dimensional by an excrescence of coral reef. Female torsos protruded from wall openings, while actual female models lounged at the feet of the Venus facsimile. This lackluster position could be found throughout the installation, reminding the viewer that s/he was observing Venus’ dream life. The oneiric scenery was divided into two main sections: In the “terrestrial” part of the pavilion, the goddess was represented lying in bed, bare-chested and surrounded by lavish satin sheets, flower branches, and mirrors. Above the goddess stood a muse silencing the audience, so as to not awake the sleeping creature. In the “aquatic” or “wet” section of the pavilion were represented Venus’ dreams in water. A large aquarium tank was filled with “filtered New York City tap” water, a piano – “its keyboard is a supine woman” – typewriters, telephone earpieces, seaweed, mummified cows, amongst other heterogeneous elements (Schaffner, 90, 84). Live mermaids, called “Living Liquid Ladies”, (ie. models in crustacean flippers and fishnets) swam in the tank, playing with the objects left in the water (Schaffner, 14). Then, “above this aphrodisiac spread, and continuing out into the corridor, hundreds of black umbrellas were hanging, like bats, from the ceiling”; the corridor itself was covered by paintings and other installations, featuring recognizable elements from Dalí and surrealist imagery, namely melting clocks, a man with a birdcage torso, and lobsters (Schaffner, 20). In the final chamber was a New York taxicab inside of which a contraption prompts rain; on the rooftop are two bare-chested and laughing women, surrounded by ivy wreaths.
Finally, this experimental and esoteric exhibition was complemented by a photo series Dalí made in collaboration with the American photographer, Murray Korman. Together, the artists staged and captured Venus’ dreams. Dalí posed as an art director, placing his models in provocative stances, lightly clad in velvet gowns, jewelry, and lobsters. Photographer Eric Schaal also documented the pavilion, immortalizing its otherwise ephemeral existence. Replete with the Dalí’s most iconic imagery, the Venus Pavilion helped introduce the Surrealist movement to an American audience, though not always perceived in “such a charming light” (Schaffner, 138).
First Papers of Surrealism and The Guggenheim Gallery Exhibition 1942
In late 1942, two important exhibitions of Surrealist art in exile opened up in New York City that demonstrated essential features of the way that Surrealist installations were designed. In Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery, Frederick Kiesler was responsible for designing installations to house Guggenheim’s collection of Surrealist and Abstract art. (Demos, 91) For the Surrealist gallery, he created an extensive installation with the ultimate goal of removing barriers between the viewer and the works of art being displayed.
The most striking way in which this was accomplished was through the removal of frames from the paintings in the gallery, which were floated on wooden arms projecting from the walls. The walls, in turn, were made concave, and, along with the ceiling of the space, painted black in order to minimize the disruption of the audience’s experience of the art objects being displayed. The floors were painted turquoise, and the two main walls of the gallery were lit according to a timed pattern in which one side of the gallery would be illuminated for a few minutes, followed by several seconds of darkness and the illumination of the opposite side of the gallery for the same amount of time.(Demos, 92) This periodicity helped to establish a womblike, biomorphic space that operated on the principles of a pseudo-mythical aesthetic unity between space, viewer, and art object. The space was completed with a soundtrack of passing trains and the inclusion of biomorphic, multi-function furniture units for visitors to sit on. (Fijalkowski, 69)
This stood in stark contrast to the other prominent New York exhibition of Surrealist art in 1942, which was organized by André Breton in the large ballroom of the Whitelaw Reid mansion. First Papers of Surrealism, named after the immigration paperwork that artists seeking asylum in the United States were required to file, featured the work, of over fifty Surrealist artists from around the world. (Demos, 91) However, the exhibition space was dominated not by these paintings, but by an extensive string installation by Marcel Duchamp. Frequently compared to a labyrinth, Duchamp’s installation served the opposite purpose as Kiesler’s, creating extreme barriers to both movement and sight within the exhibition space. Not only did the dense network of string obscure the recesses of the ballroom to the attendees of the exhibition, but it also interfered with their ability to observe the paintings themselves, essentially functioning as a kind of hyperbolic exaggeration of the frame. The web of string, which likely consisted of approximately one mile of twine, was tightly stretched across the walls and chandelier of the ballroom, the partitions between the paintings and the paintings themselves, interfering with the audience’s attempts to see the displayed art in a way that produced a profoundly decentering effect.(Fijalkowski, 68) Both the visitor to the gallery and the works within the gallery experienced radical displacement as a result of Duchamp’s drastic intervention in the gallery space, which operated on principles of obstruction, causing many of the featured artists to complain that their work was not being properly displayed and exemplifying the bold way in which Surrealists transformed the exhibition space.