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THE SUBTERRAREAN SKY The Surrealists wanted to transform the world and liberate human creativity from the constraints of reason. They see a slumbering primordial force in the borderland between the unconscious and the conscious, between dream and wakefulness. Only by surrendering and letting go of control can we release impulses that cannot be controlled. Art and poetry are seen as key to cultivating our minds towards a truer reality and setting in motion forces that may change everything.
It is now a hundred years since the first Surrealist manifesto was written in 1924 by the French writer and pivotal figure André Breton. He agitates to bring together dream and life into a truer, absolute reality – a sur-realité. A diverse group of artists, thinkers, and poets of the time gathered around the manifesto in interwar Paris. From its centre in the French capital, the ideas of Surrealism spread internationally, not least to the former colonies and other places undergoing rapid social and political change. Surrealists work across genres, experimentally and activistically, and adhere to an ideology and an approach rather than an art movement. They will break the mould of what art can be and what subjects it can address.
The Subterranean Sky seeks the historical roots of Surrealism and traces its living, diverse influence across art history, into contemporary art. The exhibition borrows its title from texts by French poets Jean Genet and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. Moderna Museet’s collection is presented in dialogue with works from other art collections, libraries and archives, with a particular focus on film, literature, and the performing arts.
AS IN A WOOD Surrealists insist on the value of the fantastic and the imaginary – a reality beyond the physically visible. They see modern society as a soulless treadmill in which man has lost touch with his original intuitive powers. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, with its focus on repressed emotions and memories, is a crucial influence. For the Surrealists, the only possibility for human development is to free oneself from inhibited, rational thinking.
Surrealists work across genres, seeking expressions that are ephemeral and untested, in performance, dance, and sound. Experimental cinema from the 1920s to the 1940s was innovative and would influence Hollywood feature films. Filmmaker and choreographer Maya Deren emphasises the camera as a voyeuristic instrument, develops trick film techniques and plays with movement and spatiality. André Breton likened the experience of the new film medium to an excursion into unknown territory – like getting lost in a meandering forest.
In 1929, the French writer Georges Bataille launched the concept of l’informe – the formless – in an attack on the bourgeois elevated art object. Artists must work without restraint and search for subjects in low and taboo areas. But what can boundless and formless art look like? A unifying feature of the Surrealists is precisely the enigmatic contradiction. Their hallucinatory imagery can be as pedantically rendered as an older allegorical painting, each individual object loaded with hidden meanings. The recurring motif of machines testifies to their fascination with new science and technology, but the constructions have no practical use. They are complex, absurd innovations created for their own sake.
NETWORKS IN TIME AND SPACE Surrealism is never an artistic style limited to a specific time or place, but rather a mobile cultural network where radical values are shared. From the outset, the attitude is explicitly anti-authoritarian, anti-colonial, and anti-racist. The horrors and futility of war are given themes for the Surrealists of the interwar period. Their subversive ideas emerged from anarchism and grew in parallel with a larger leftist movement of the time.
The new anthropology and psychology that interest the Surrealists is in part based on the study of cultures other than the European. Indigenous art from mainly Oceania and North America is perceived by them as more genuine and characterised by other traditions and values. Many of the ideas of Paris Surrealism thus flow back to the source when they reach the former colonies. Over time, the impulses find different expressions in increasingly influential cultural scenes internationally, such as in the Caribbean, Latin America, North Africa, East Asia, and the United States. Personal encounters are also crucial for how ideas intersect and spread further, as in the exchange between the artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and the Russian revolutionary Lev Trotsky during his exile in Mexico.
The Surrealists are not limited by linguistic, national or even temporal boundaries. They proclaim as their predecessors the artists of previous generations who explored the fantastic and the grotesque, such as Giuseppe Arcimboldo or Hieronymus Bosch. The old masters seem to share the same burlesque and carnivalesque attitude where hierarchies are turned upside down and reason is suspended. The late 19th century symbolists, such as Odilon Redon and Edvard Munch, with their depictions of the supernaturally beautiful, dark, and bizarre, are also among the role models. But where the symbolists use high-minded mythological symbolism and want to create art that is valid for all eternity, the Surrealists, by contrast, want to work spontaneously and take the unguarded viewer by surprise.
