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Friday, October 15, 2021
HAPPY FRIDAY! iT'S ANDY BIGGS AGAIN and 'HE'S ALL FIRED-UP' ALL IN THOSE FAR-RIGHT SPOTS...and still fighting splitting his time
EXHIBITION @ METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: "Surrealism Beyond Borders"
Exhibition Overview
"A telephone receiver that morphs into a lobster. A miniature train that rushes from a fireplace.
These are just a few of the familiar images associated with Surrealism, a revolutionary idea sparked in Paris around 1924 that asserted the unconscious and dreams over the familiar and every day. While Surrealism could generate often poetic and even humorous works, it was also taken up as a far more serious weapon in the struggle for political, social, and personal freedom, and by many more artists around the world.
Nearly from its inception, Surrealism has had an international scope, but knowledge of the movement has been formed primarily through a Western European focus. This exhibition reconsiders the true “movement” of Surrealism across boundaries of geography and chronology—and within networks that span Eastern Europe to the Caribbean, Asia to North Africa, and Australia to Latin America. Including almost eight decades of work produced across 45 countries, Surrealism Beyond Borders offers a fresh appraisal of these collective concerns and exchanges—as well as historical, national, and local distinctions—that will recast appreciation of this most revolutionary and globe-spanning movement.
#SurrealismBeyond
The exhibition is made possible by the Barrie A. and Deedee Wigmore Foundation.
Additional support is provided by the Placido Arango Fund, the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund, Alice Cary Brown and W.L. Lyons Brown, the John Pritzker Family Fund, and The International Council of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
It is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Modern.
The catalogue is made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Doris Duke Fund for Publications.
Preview the Exhibition
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THE CRITIC'S REVIEW
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/arts/design/metropolitan-museum-surrealism-exhibition.html
Getting a Grip on Unreality
These 10 standout artists — from Colombia to Egypt to Japan — redrew the map of Surrealism, the 20th century’s most provocative art movement. They and dozens more are reunited at the Metropolitan Museum.
In dreams you can go anywhere; in dreams no place is too far. “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” a round-the-world tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a map of another globe: a planet redrawn by artist-mapmakers, where old geographic assumptions no longer make sense. Melting watches, men in bowler hats? You can keep them. In this show the classics of Surrealism — that lobster telephone! — cede the center stage to desires and nightmares from Haiti and Puerto Rico, Japan and Korea, Egypt and Mozambique.
In these distorted reflections we see Surrealism as an all-pervasive approach to artistic freedom, where Europe has no monopoly on your desires.
Six years in the making, “Surrealism Beyond Borders” has been organized by Stephanie D’Alessandro at the Met and Matthew Gale at Tate Modern in London, to which the show will travel next year. As in recent shows like “International Pop,” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, or “Postwar,” at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, this new show conceives of Surrealism as not quite a movement, but a broad, tentacular tendency. Its forms and its aims mutated as they migrated, and therefore simple narratives of this-one-influenced-that-one won’t cut it. This is something grander, messier, and much more compelling: an unstable cartography of images and ideas on the move, blowing across the globe like trade winds of the subconscious. . .
. . .Here’s what comes through most in “Surrealism Beyond Borders”: This was something more than a Parisian artistic movement with later (and lesser) foreign followers, in the way of Impressionism or Cubism.
Surrealism was more like an epidemic: an ambient, variable, self-propagating language of refusal that artists like these could direct as needed. At their local bourgeoisie, or their local dictator. At the church, or at the colonists. At any constraints on the human subconscious, and on human freedom."
------Rita Kernn-Larsen, Denmark
Dream Power
Surrealism was born in Paris in 1924, but the group projected itself across Europe from the start, and staged nearly a dozen official exhibitions abroad...
Scientific Surrealism
But even before the first international show, artists abroad were bridling against the movement’s Parisian bosses...
Shoes in Waiting
Image
Perhaps more than painting, Surrealism’s most representative works of art are objects: curious little fetishes, usually made of found materials and sized to hold in your hands, that collided with everyday good taste...
Freedom to Doodle
Another classic Surrealist technique: automatism, or unchoreographed doodling, through which artists believed they could escape the fetters of conscious composition to reveal a truth beyond rationality...
New Form of Nationalism
Anyway, where was Surrealism’s greatest influence beyond Europe in the 1930s?..
A Tool for Liberation
Surrealism was a profoundly anticolonial movement — and long after it had stultified in metropolitan France, its oppositional languages found their highest expression in the Caribbean...
An Experimental Partnership
Image
For many Surrealists working under dictatorships, the medium most amenable to experimentation and dissent became photography...
Revolution, First and Always
The movement’s anticolonial potential reached as far as southeastern Africa, where artists in Angola and Mozambique commingled with Surrealists fleeing Salazar’s Portugal...
Drawn by One Hundred Hands
Perhaps this show’s most extraordinary reassessment happens closest to home. Ted Joans, born in Southern Illinois in 1928, discovered Surrealism as a child and applied its uncanny techniques to spoken-word poetry and free jazz...
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