SECTION 2: ANALYSIS OF THE POLITICAL AND AESTHETIC QUALITIES OF THE SURREALIST EXHIBITIONS 

Some have argued that the Surrealist exhibitions were exercises in aesthetics more than in politics. (Filipovic 2009) However, such arguments do not do justice to the Surrealist movement, which from its beginning aspired to a kind of revolution that was both aesthetic and political. Critical evaluations of these exhibitions from scholars like Lynn Palmero, Elena Filipovic and T.J. Demos reveal the profound political implications of the installations created by the Surrealists.

One of the most obviously political exhibitions was the Exposition Anticoloniale–its agenda is clear from its title alone. And yet, in her essay on the exhibition, Janine Mileaf argues that this exhibition was one of the ones that least fit the surrealist political praxis. Their exhibition, she argues, was too focused on instruction, too logical, not sufficiently irrational. (Mileaf, 248) But Lynn Palmero argues that the aesthetic choices that Louis Aragon and Georges Sadoul made in their portion of the exhibition, in contrast with those made by their communist co-organizer, André Thirion, revealed two different anticolonial stances and approaches. Whereas Thirion’s charts, photographic proof, banners, and slogans all pointed towards an overtly political Soviet model  in which the actions to be taken were clear, the Surrealist exhibition was humorous, open-ended, and ambiguous, asking more questions than it answered. (Palmero, 30)

In his 1975 description of the exhibition, Aragon wrote that he saw the exhibition as a chance, not only to make a political commentary, but also to display African, Australian, and American sculpture, not as ethnographic material but as art in its own right. (Palmero, 35) This decision, as Palmero observes, blends the political and the aesthetic–in making an aesthetic argument, it confounded the primitive/civilized hierarchies of the day, both in galleries and in justifications for colonial rule. (Palmero, 37-38)

The 1938 Exposition Internationale, too, can be read as an aesthetically formulated political challenge or question. Elena Filipovic suggests that this Exposition was partially a response to exhibitions like the 1937 Nazi Great German Art Exposition in Munich. The Great German Art exhibitions adopted modernist architecture to create and antiseptic, well-lit, white temple, akin to the clean German body and the Reich’s ideals of hygiene, social order, and masculinity. (Filipovic 2003, 184-186) The Paris Exposition, by contrast, challenged these exhibitions, forcing their guests into a dirty, dark space inhabited by a hysteric woman.

The lack of light, Filipovic suggests, undermined enlightenment ideas of light as knowledge, but also suggested a transgression, akin to André Breton’s suggested invasion of the museum in Nadja. (Filipovic, 193)

According to Krzyzstof Fijalkowski, much of the history of the Surrealist movement can be understood as one of displacements and returns.(Fijalkowski, 62) The 1942 New York installations shared a particularly powerful displacement as an underlying motivating force behind their dramatic interventions in the gallery space in the form of the geopolitical displacement suffered by the Surrealists with the rise of authoritarian regimes in Europe and the outbreak of the Second World War. However, in spite of these shared motivations, Duchamp and Kiesler developed installations that focused on almost diametrically opposing aesthetic and political principles. This is important because it reveals that the methodology of Surrealist installation was not based on a simple, one-dimensional aesthetic that interfered with mainstream gallery design but instead that surrealism was a movement that entertained multiple possibilities in terms of organization, all of which responded to both the aesthetic and political histories the organizers of the exhibition were contending with.

Dalí’s pavilion was conceived and constructed on the eve of World War II. The surrealist’s grotto challenged the other modernist, geometric constructions featured at the Fair: “Dalí’s pavilion expressed a complex iconography based on avant-garde art and psychoanalytic precepts, showing a world turned upside down and backwards – the ruins of classical Pompeii submerged in an oneiric living room” (Schaffner, 30). A few days before the “Dream of Venus” was inaugurated, Spain was declared a Fascist State; from Germany, Hitler ordered the destruction of the pavilion, however this demand “went unheeded in New York, where a massive fundraising campaign enabled the pavilion to open, along with the rest of the fair, on April 30, 1939, as a symbol of unvanquished national spirit” (Schaffner, 122, 32). Fascinated by the bustling cityscape, Dalí sought to make a work in praise of Manhattan: “It rose before me, verdigris, pink, and creamy-white. It looked like an immense Gothis Roquefort cheese. I love Roquefort.” Confected as his tribute to the most gloriously medieval of modern cities, Dalí’s Dream of Venus was a piece of cake, ready to consume itself” (Schaffner, 114). His proposal to the World Fair for a Surrealist House was attractive to the selection committee, which picked up on the “publicity potential and drawing power of surrealism” as proven in the previous Exposition internationale du surrealism (Schaffner, 40). In his proposal, Dalí presented in “over-simplified terms” the applications of surrealism to everyday life, so as to emphasize the movement’s universal attraction: “It is therefore possible to build a ‘Surrealist House’ that is hilarious entertainment and at the same time an authentic surrealist experiment” (Schaffner, 38). In June of 1939, the exhibit was featured as Vogue’s cover story.

However, not all Surrealists congratulated this popular and mediatized attention granted to the “Dream of Venus”: André Breton banished Dalí “from the ranks of official surrealism in 1939” (Schaffner, 60). Indeed, as the war split up the members of the avant-garde, certain artists, like Dalí, found themselves working outside of the movement’s original headquarters – Paris, France. Nonetheless, Dalí’s desire to reinvigorate the impact of Surrealism abroad was met with some pushback, most notably from conservative critics. The committee in charge of the Amusement Zone forbade Dalí to present a sculpture of naked Venus with the head of a fish, underlining the role of myth as explored in the Surrealist movement. Upon returning to Europe shortly after the construction of pavilion, Dalí published “Declaration of the Independence of the Imagination and of the Rights of Man to His Own Madness”, delivering “a little slap” to American democracy, while defending the Greeks and their “truculently Surrealist mythology” (Schaffner, 114). In essence, Dalí’s psychoanalytical and psychological allusions, “like guilt, fear of castration, a wish to go back to the womb”, explored by the Surrealist movement, found new meaning in a decontextualized, capitalist, setting (Schaffner, 114).

Kiesler’s Surrealist gallery represents a movement in the work of the Surrealists towards the mythological in response to the grim reality of their homelessness. By replacing the cold, modernist exhibition space with a biomorphic, womb-like environment in which the visitor is meant to experience a kind of aesthetic unity, Kiesler’s installation attempted to bring the Surrealist object into a habitable space within the museum. To understand where this move comes from within the broader history of Surrealism, it is necessary to consider first the development of the Surrealist engagement with the constructions of home through the 1930’s and the 1940’s. Wary of the rise of European nationalism, the Surrealists engaged in an anti-

nationalist politics in the 1930’s which manifested in the design of Surrealist installations. Their politics of homelessness were soon reinforced by the geopolitical reality of their actual homelessness. Eventually, the situation worsened to the point of the exile of many Surrealists to America, a country which did not even appear on the Surrealist map of the world. (Demos, 92) One response to this displacement drew on the long-standing Surrealist interest in the mythological as a way of disavowing the reality of their homelessness, constructing aesthetic environments that could serve as homes for the creative output of the Surrealists.(Demos, 93) One method by which the Surrealists attempted to accomplish this was through the annihilation of mediating elements between the visitor and the exhibition space, instilling an almost magical return to a state of prelinguistic unity between the visual and the experienced. This strategy is embodied in the radical framelessness of Kiesler’s installation. The cold gallery space was reconceived as a maternal, canny environment through the abolition of the frame and the general biomorphic design elements. The pulsating light simulated the rush of blood through the body and the concave walls suggested a uterine form. (Demos, 94)  At the same time, the sound of trains suggested that journeying through the exhibition was akin to travelling. (Fijalkowski, 69) In light of this, Kiesler’s installation can be best understood as an attempt to deal with the geopolitical homelessness of the Surrealist movement by creating a gallery space that transported visitors and the work of the surrealists into a utopian home. Kiesler drew on key features of the Surrealist movement to create an aesthetic inversion of the political reality of the Surrealists at the time, redefining the displacement of the Surrealists by attributing to it utopian possibilities.

On the contrary, Duchamp represents an alternative response to the geopolitical homelessness of the Surrealists, operating on principles of de-mythologization and radically denying the possibility of an escape into aesthetic unity through the forceful restoration of the frame.(Demos, 109) It is essential to realize that this disruption was not simply a dadaist or nihilist protest against the gallery space, but rather a highly politicized response to the historically specific conditions in which the installation was produced. Already apparent in the political resonances of its name, First Papers of Surrealism was unwilling to ignore the fact of exile for the sake of presenting Surrealist art. Cognizant of the geopolitical barriers that the Surrealist

movement was forced to deal with, Duchamp recreated them in a distinctly Surrealist way with his labyrinth of string, insisting on a politicized aesthetics of the uncanny instead of an illusory if comforting mythological aesthetic home. Operating on the same logic as the readymade, Duchamp’s installation played the role of a Surrealist frame, interfering in the aesthetic experience of the viewer by interrupting the process of observation. (Demos, 109)  The frequent comparisons of this installation to a labyrinth are more than coincidental, as the effects it engendered in its visitors were in many ways similar to the decentering disruptions in location and identity associated with the labyrinth in the 20th century.  Both the visitor and the objects themselves were subjected to this process of destabilization, with any idealistic supposition about the unity between the art object replaced by a powerful revelation of the contingency involved in the creation and display of art objects. The abstract notion of the displacement and exile of the Surrealist artists was materialized in the form of an all-encompassing, difficult-to-navigate installation that like the 1938 exhibition before it brought the reality of the geopolitical situation underlying the exhibition into the exhibition space itself. The space of the gallery became at the same time unviable in the conventional sense and visible.(Fijalkowski, 68) This is a kind of intervention that is totally in line with the general processes of Surrealism, as it employs disorienting aesthetic creations that augment the experience of a reality otherwise inaccessible to the human senses rather than attempting to replace that reality with an impossible home. Obliterating the neutrality and ideality of the objects within a gallery space, Duchamp created a powerful “de-structuring anti-architecture” that served as both an ontological critique of the institution and an apt reflection of the uncomfortable political position of the Surrealist movement in the 1940’s. (Demos, 116) In many ways, Duchamp’s homeless aesthetics represents the pinnacle of a Surrealist installation technique that combined remarkable aesthetic innovation with powerful political implications.