An Erotic Revolution Made Tame by Time

[Dave Monroe]

>From Michael Kimmelman, "An Erotic Revolution Made
Tame by Time," New York Times, Friday, February 8th,
2002 ...
 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's big new "Surrealism:
Desire Unbound" begins logically enough (shall we say
"logically" about a Surrealism show?) with Dada and de
Chirico; it ends with the vast international
Surrealist exhibition organized by André Breton and
Marcel Duchamp in 1959. 

[...]

Surrealism, which has given license to thousands of
incontinent psyches, bequeathed to art history a trove
of oversize phalluses, flaccid pocket watches,
fur-lined teacups, locomotives steaming out of
fireplaces, mustachioed Mona Lisas and pubic faces
that are today as charming and tepid as they were once
conceived to be appalling and crazy.

Success neutered the movement decades ago. Breton was
distressed by his offspring's popularity: you can't
remain a revolutionary when everybody is on your side.
The Surrealists, having opened everybody's eyes to the
essential weirdness of everyday life, fostered the
demand for ever greater anomalies, relegating their
own work to the quaint status of bowler hats and
antique sewing machines. Now much of it looks small
and slightly embarrassing. 

What remains raw from those early years, as you see at
the Met, are only a few images, mostly violent or
repulsive: the knife through the eyeball in the Dalí
and Buñuel film; Dalí's "Anthropomorphic Bread," half
scatological, half sexual; Giacometti's "Woman With
Her Throat Cut"; Hans Bellmer's mangled mannequins and
trussed and masked women. True violence and revulsion
abjure commercial assimilation. 

Otherwise, we can still smile at some of the old
jokes. The Surrealists at least recognized the
hilarity of their sanctimonious nonsense. They told
everybody to loosen up, but only the Soviets were more
bureaucratic, issued more manifestoes or cracked down
more vigorously on perceived disloyalists. They wrote
their own ironic, ready- made reviews, mocking their
critics by pre- emptively denouncing the movement as
moribund and juvenile. The Surrealists even published
their own official lexicon and conducted sex surveys.

Their tacit sexism demonstrated the movement's abiding
adolescent spirit. Some of the funniest images in the
exhibition (perhaps not intentionally funny) are
photographic mementos, snapshots of the great
Surrealist men in their jackets and ties, puffing on
pipes, bourgeois gentlemen trying to look casually
sophisticated beside the inevitable beautiful female
colleagues and companions, obligatorily topless. It
was a short step from those pictures and that ethos to
the world of Hugh Hefner cavorting in his silk pajamas
at the Playboy mansion. 

[...]

Surrealism, basically a literary movement, has always
supported a vast industry of art criticism, there
invariably being more to say than look at.

[...]

Realism, which dominates the show, was the natural
mode for what you might call narrative Surrealism
because it allowed artists to paint something familiar
so that it looked unfamiliar. Photography was even
better for this purpose: photographs were presumed to
depict only the real world. Some of the memorable
works in the exhibition are photographs and
photomontages .... 

[...]

At offhand provocation, the young artists of
"Sensation" are duffers by comparison. Generations of
minor insurrectionists, sadomasochistic performance
artists and tortured teenage poets have tried to
emulate the Surrealists — above all because of sex.
Sex was the true religion of the Surrealists, and this
has made them irresistible not just to copycat artists
but also to a vast public that includes beer
advertisers, book publishers, fashion magazine
designers, greeting card makers and refrigerator
magnet manufacturers. To see this exhibition is to
realize how inescapable Surrealism has become.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/08/arts/design/08KIMM.html

And see as well ...

Mundy, Jessica, ed.  Surrealism: Desire Unbound.
   Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001.

http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7117.html

"Surrealism: Desire Unbound"
February 6, 2002 – May 12, 2002
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, 2nd floor
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={694886C2-280A-11D5-93F2-00902786BF44}

'Cos I know some of you migt be interested, is all ...

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