SURREALISM BEYOND BORDERS: THE CATALOGUE

 SURREALISM BEYOND BORDERS: THE CATALOGUE

It's big. It's heavy. It's complex, full of short essays, lots of references. At first it is a bit confusing, so many parts that don't always add up to a single point or refer much to each other, a sort of maze of texts and images, crowding each other out. The catalogue certainly adds a lot of polemical weight to the exhibition, but seems to pull in many different directions. Many important manifestations of Surrealism get rather short shrift in order to fit in the global reach of this exhibition.

I have already mentioned in my previous post the very minimal showing of Czech material, I saw two photographs by Styrsky, one by Reichmann, one film by Svankmajer and one painting by Toyen. There's also a very interesting essay by Krzyzstof Fijalkowksi on the 1968 exhibition Princip Slasti. This last usefully contextualises the exhibition in relation to the very important Prague Platform, but also makes clear that the exhibition, while being the ground for new debates between the Paris and Prague surrealists, after a very long enforced silence, was not an exhibition of the Czechs at all, but entirely of the French surrealists. 

Krzyzstof is a friend and, while he is best known as a scholar, with an extraordinary track record for translating and editing important, but little known surrealist texts, he also frequently exhibits as a surrealist. There are other writers here who are either active within contemporary Surrealism or are close to and friendly with the movement, such as Abigail Susik. Abigail writes on Surrealism in Chicago, sympathetically and intelligently. There's many other writers who I have never heard of, and this is actually quite heartening, as it means there's a lot of people doing new work on under-researched areas rather than ploughing the same old furrow of Paris between the wars.

The general tone is rather more sympathetic to Surrealism than many exhibitions and many researchers, while their distance to Surrealism usually remains clear. It might be to, once again, point out that this is an exhibition about Surrealism, not a surrealist exhibition, and it is also an art exhibition, not an expression of surrealist endeavour 'in the round'. But a catalogue like this could be an opportunity to set right various shortcomings of the exhibition. For instance, although Octavio Paz does get mentioned a couple of times, there's no real sense of his importance or even of the nature of his writing. One could hardly expect a great deal about him on the walls, but an exhibition about Surrealism needs to look well beyond visual work or fall into the trap of considering it to be an art movement.

 I could only find one work by Matta in the exhibition, there is a second one in the catalogue, and I wondered if I'd somehow missed a room. Jorge Camacho seems wholly absent, as both artist and as writer,  although he gets a mention as mentor to Telemaque and is included in Long Distance, along with many others such as Zeller and Wald, Cogollo and many others.

Butoh, a configuration of modern dance, traditional Japanese theatre, Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty and Surrealism, is not mentioned, despite the attention to Japanese work here, and, given that this is first and foremost an art exhibition, it is understandable that there's be nothing up on the walls, it is less understandable that an essay on Surrealism in Japan should not at least refer to it.

Like with the exhibition itself, I will come back to the catalogue and add to, and revise my comments, but for the moment it is worth saying that this scattershot method of exhibiting is probably necessary in order to display the breadth of work, but inevitable the depth of what is shown suffers. It leaves plenty of scope for many more focused exhibitions and research publications.