|
The main reaction seems to be disappointment, in both popular and
specialised press. Expectations primed by the wild mythology of
those movements were left cruelly unfulfilled. Both the mass magazines
and the specialised magazines complained that the museum, in tendering
an orderly and historical survey, had controverted the principles
they made to elucidate. Not even the so-called hippie demonstration
at the opening, complete with stink bombs, satisfied the hungry
press. Time found it a comedown from the bad old days when more
than 2,000 people rampaged at the 1938 surrealist international,
and quoted Dali’s peevish comment that ‘Unfortunately,
many of the young people today have no information. Dada was a protest
against the bourgeoisie, yes, but by the aristocracy, not by the
man in the street.’ By contrast, Newsweek, a shade more liberal,
quoted Dali in his other, more ingratiating voice: ‘The hippies
are the Dadaists and Surrealists of today. Dada and Surrealism still
live, they still have teeth.’
This is what everyone, or nearly everyone, still wants to believe,
and why the more serious critics of the show could not bring themselves
to accept William Rubin’s calm historical and stylistic approach.
Nicolas Calas, himself an old surrealist and the most justified
critic, chastised Rubin for having attempted to excise dada and
surrealist art from its poetic matrix. ‘It is in the name of
style that he undertakes to emasculate Surrealism,’ Calas writes,
point out that, historically, Surrealism was a reaction to movements
which interpreted perception in terms of images produced according
to Impressionist, Cubist or Expressionist assumptions. ‘To
images of the perceived, Surrealism opposes images of the mind’s
eye.’ The intellectual basis of Surrealism and its consequences
in more recent art are ignored, Calas complains, when an ‘art
for art’s sake’ approach is salient. Images of the mind’s
eye go far beyond the stylistic limits imposed by the museum.
Another critic, John Perreault, could not forgive the museum for
having failed to suggest, either in its installation or its catalogue,
the extent to which Surrealism was involved with revolution, political
and otherwise. For him it was a grievous occasion since it served
to place both movements in the limbo of dead art history, where
he does not wish them to be.
Yet, there they are, neatly ensconced and catalogued, blandly remarked
by thousands and the subject of countless university papers. Who
is to be blamed? How could it have happened, especially since the
conditions of moral disgust that kept alive both movements do not
seem to have altered appreciably?
I’m afraid there is no one to blame, since the history this
exhibition signals is not one but many histories, some of which
are still open, but others of which are irrevocably closed. The
great adventurism of the intellectuals around Breton in the political
era, for instance, has only the weakest of response in artistic
circles today. No amount of hopeful propagandising has been able
to bestir the same passionate political stance that once ripped
through the ranks of the Surrealists. The butchery that inspired
George Grosz and John Heartfield is still around, but the responses
are considerably muted – witness Rosenquist’s F-III
at the Metropolitan Museum.
Even the shocking spectacle, at which the old masters were masters,
has little hope of success today. Supposing the museum had tried
to re-create the atmosphere of scandal so dear to Breton’s
heart? Who would have been scandalised? Scandal is a way of life
so much taken for granted in America that the best-intentioned artist
would be hard put to find a root definition of the term.
If the two movements were, in at least one of their histories,
ethical movements, designed to dose society homeopathically (‘the
art of curing founded on resemblances’), their success was
also their failure, for the cure goes on and on, but the diseases
also go on and on. And what is more, the resemblances are so close,
by this time, that no one can pretend that art and society are distinct
entities.
What so many expected of this exhibition was catharsis. What they
got was an honest evaluation of a simple question: did the procedures
of the Dadas and Surrealists ever result in art? Inevitably the
answer is yes, and no amount of romantic hope and anti-bourgeois
passion can demolish that fact. Perhaps it is sad that so many marvellous
men or so many men of marvels could be tricked by history into making
the opposite of what they claimed; but they were and did.
It is true that of the many histories the movements engendered
the one that interests the museum is the history of inherent style,
viewed mor or less aesthetically. That is why Rubin included so
many superb works by Miró, and quite a few by Picasso, as
well as very carefully chosen items by Arp, Hausmann, Man Ray, Schwitters,
Picabia and Gorky, while overlooking scores of active members in
the surrealist confraternity in Paris both before and after the
Second World War. It is also why the little didactic anthology on
surrealist techniques is largely dominated by Max Ernst.
But why should it be otherwise? There is always a history within
history of art, and it is the history of individual works that in
any setting, at any time, speak of the power of their creator. That
Miró belongs as much to the interior history of painting
– painting as much to the line of Matisse as to the line of
Breton, doesn’t diminish his surrealist powers or the sources
which inspired him.
In presenting this interior history isolated from all the other
histories, the museum is not attempting to embalm two living movements,
but to assert the far-reaching character of the works of art these
movements sponsored. The absence of invention in installation will
not dim the impact of Miró’s paintings of the 1920s,
or Grosz’s World War I collages. The childish disappointment
registered by writers and art students shows them to be victims
of romanticism. A good dialectician, as Breton often was, would
understand that no synthesis is ever final. Antithesis – that
part of the Hegelian and Freudian dialectic most cherished by lovers
of Surrealism – is only a part of the story. And the story
goes on; but it will go on from here, or it will not go on at all.
|
