Even in an absurd age, surrealism retains an edgy appeal. Bryan Appleyard looks forward to the V&A’s exhibition, Surreal Things, and proof that design can be seriously funny.
Surrealism is a word the world was waiting for. Somehow, we needed a term that perfectly captured the very modern love of things that do not make sense – whether they are Salvador Dali’s lips sofa or, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Knights Who Say ‘Ni’. It’s a relief to escape from the quotidian demands of modernity into a silly or strange world. It’s a liberation. Or is it?
The word was coined by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917. It meant super-realism, something above reality. The idea came from Dada, a movement that was against meaning, art, sense and reality. Of course, at the time, in the midst of the pointless carnage of the First World War, to embrace meaninglessness made perfect sense. But it still does. The carnage of war goes on and now it is joined by a carnage of information – advertising, emails, texts, government ‘initiatives’. What better way to escape than by leaping through the doors of perception to another, even crazier land?
But, in fact, surrealism as a distinct artistic movement was the opposite of Dadaism. The Dadaists didn’t want anybody to find any insights in their silliness. Indeed, they celebrated the absurd for its own sake. That wasn’t good enough for the great French poet and thinker Andre Breton. In 1924 Breton co-founded the Bureau of Surrealist Research – a very un-Dada title indeed – and produced The Surrealist Manifesto.
On the face of it, Breton’s definition of surrealism, as ‘pure psychic automatism’, was consistent with Dada. But the remainder of the sentence gave the game away. The aim was to express ‘the real functioning of thought’. For the Dadaists, there could be no such thing.
Liberation, for Breton, meant escape from bourgeois reality into the deep historical truths of Marx and the psychic depths of Freud. It was a rational and meaningful project. Membership of the movement was strictly controlled, largely by Breton himself. This was a long way from Dada and, more importantly, a long way from what we now mean by surrealism.
‘The thing about surrealism that is often forgotten,’ says Ghislaine Wood, curator of the V&A’s Surreal Things exhibition, ‘is that it is supposed to be funny and humorous. It is about fantasy and escape and dreams, and, hopefully, that will come across.’
In our terms, she is obviously right; in Breton’s she is absolutely wrong. But, in fact, Breton’s austere control of the movement was always destined to fail. Dali, for one, didn’t fit. He may have been Freudian in intent, but, in practice, he was too playful and that giant ego would never submit to the anti-individualistic demands of Marxism. Furthermore, laughter, that most anarchic human habit, naturally accompanied the surrealist impulse. It has been suggested that modern irony was born in the trenches of the Great War – how could that monstrosity be taken seriously – and irony is just a sense that things aren’t quite what they appear to be. The ironic joke is, in reality, the surrealist joke.
‘How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Fish.’
Or: ‘What’s the difference between a duck? It’s got one leg both the same.’
The joke that subverts the joke, ironically, is the best joke of all. And the most surrealist.Monty Python, Green Wing, Eddie Izzard, Vic ‘n’ Bob, and other TV manifestations are liberated and made funny by the disconnection from the ordinary things of this world.
But there is a further problem with surrealism as a sober, solemn political movement. And it is this problem that is celebrated by the V&A exhibition. Basically, the moment you step away from the high arts – painting, sculpture – to the applied arts of design, subversion becomes a problem. The high artists made a good gag out of this by making articles that plainly did not work like an iron with a row of spikes or a fur teacup, intended as a lesbian icon rather than drinking utensil. But, if you are going to have real world surrealist design, then it must work. Dali’s sofa might be a gag, but at least you could sit on it.
And, of course, you could buy it, too. In a development that would have given Breton a seizure, the exhibition is to be accompanied by surrealist displays in Selfridges – a giant eyeball hanging in the main entrance and weird windows by the likes of John Galliano and Moschino. There will even be surreal chocolate from Choccywoccydoodah, and a surreal cafe menu from Les Trois Garçons.
This commercialization of the idea happened, as the exhibition shows, some time ago. The celebrated Paris designer Elsa Schiaparelli produced fantastically elegant – but surreal –dresses and there’s no reason why you couldn’t make a call on Dali’s lobster telephone. The truth is that surrealism has one great ‘unique selling proposition’: it is different and it can be talked about. You might see a superb Armani suit or Issey Miyake dress and say, ‘nice suit/dress’. But a lobster phone or a skeleton dress demands something more. Above all, they ask, ‘why?’ And, in trying to answer that question, you find yourself sucked into that super-real other world first imagined by Apollinaire.
‘If you are going to have real world surrealist design, then it must work’
What is the answer? This is like trying to explain a joke in that it tends to suck the fun out of the enterprise. But you can see, for example, that the laughter at the phone or the sofa is tinged with anxiety. A lobster, a mass of spines and claws, is the last thing you want to pick up when the phone rings. And the big red, sexy lips of the sofa may be welcoming but they also threaten to consume you if you sit on them. Entering the super-real may seem fun, but it is also scary and usually sexual in a way that is not sexy. Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined cup is an astonishing, threateningly intimate gesture and René Magritte’s painting of shoes that are also real feet calls into question our own reality by asking if we own or merely wear our bodies. Man Ray’s spiked iron – bitterly entitled Gift – threatens a desecration of one’s clothes, but also a flaying of one’s body.
Surrealism, therefore, may have been tamed, caged in the narrow confines of the well designed and the useful or in the conventions of TV comedy, but it can never quite lose its edge. Something of the nihilistic rebellion of Dada and the dark unconscious realms pursued by Breton and his followers, survives. To force your audience – or your customers – to turn away from the real must, in some sense, be an aggressive act. It is an act that suits our age, an age of conformity, control and information overload. Or perhaps it suits every age.
Perhaps the super-real, with its unusable cups, consuming sofas and malevolent irons, is our only true home.
Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design is at the V&A (www.vam.ac.uk) 29 March-22 July
Cadeau Audace, 1921/1974
© Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2007