Visual Art
‘IT’S AN ALL-SINGING, ALL- DANCING BLOCKBUSTER OF A SHOW’ Hitlist THE BEST EXHIBITIONS *
✽✽ Chicks on Speed: Don’t Art, Fashion, Music Typically irreverent and provocative show-and-tell from the riot grrl art collective. See review, page 89. Dundee Contemporary Arts, until Sun 8 Aug. ✽✽ Gerard Byrne: Images or Shadows of Things Ongoing series of photographs that point towards the complicated relationship between time, appearance, and the photographic document. The Common Guild, Glasgow, until Sat 26 Jun. ✽✽ Johan Grimonprez Grimonprez’s Double Take explores identity and gothic doubling through the subject of a Hitchcock impersonator. Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 11 Jul. ✽✽ Christoph Buchel: Last Man Out Turn Off Lights Extraordinary installation by Buchel, which creates a fictitious scenario from the detritus gathered from an exploded plane. Tramway, Glasgow, until Sun 18 Jul. ✽✽ Jimmie Durham: Universal Miniature Golf The renowned American sculptor delivers a typically arresting response to his surroundings. Glasgow Sculpture Studios, until Sat 4 Sep. ✽✽ Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880–1900 This major exhibition focusing on works by this influential school of painters continues to draw crowds. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, until Mon 27 Sep. ✽✽ Another World Major survey of the great works of the surrealists, featuring paintings from the likes of Picasso, Miró, Dalí and Magritte. See preview, left. Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, Sat 10 Jul–Sun 9 Jan.
Max Ernst, ‘La Joie de Vivre’ (The Joy of Life)
Welcome to the mad house As a major exhibition of surrealist works bursts onto the Edinburgh art scene, curator Patrick Elliott talks to Neil Cooper about the powerful and highly influential movement
When you’re 16 and teenage dream states are everything, being strange is all the rage. For the adolescent, distorted realities where worlds collide and melt out of shape into hallucinogenic symbols of the inner id can’t help but flood through the after-hours subconscious mind’s eye into some upside-down wibbly-wobbly perspective.
Thank goodness, then, for Dada, surrealism and everything psycho-actively skew-whiff that’s grown out of what’s now regarded as the most significant art movement to gloop out of the 20th century. Where the workaday order of Sunday painter landscapes and fruit bowl still lives are simply too still for the more fevered imagination, an alternative universe of Dalí surprises, Magritte hat-tricks and Miró-esque assassinations has already been whipped up to float around in. Some visitors like it so much they never grow out of it.
National Galleries of Scotland curator Patrick Elliott was just such a 16-year-old dazzled by what he found in surrealism, and is about to repay the favour with Another World, a mind-melding collection of surrealist art from maestros familiar and arcane so eye-poppingly comprehensive that it threatens to burst through the Dean Gallery’s walls and into some other realm. ‘The objective is to arrive at an all-singing, all- dancing blockbuster of a show,’ says Elliott. ‘We’ve got something by everyone of importance, and we’ll be showing their work through a whole variety of forms, be it collage, frottage and photography as well as painting and sculpture. That will take up the entire building in a way that adds to the experience.’
Coloured walls full of densely hung rarities are
88 THE LIST 24 Jun–8 Jul 2010
promised, alongside cabinets of curiosities including numerous periodicals and manifestos that vented the spleen of the movement that exploded into the 1920s with an energy that was in turns eccentric, radical, provocative, contrary and ultimately hugely influential. If there’s any danger of the exhibition neutering the anti-establishment wildness of some of the work, surrealists always did flirt with the mainstream that patronised them, embedding its iconography into the collective (un)consciousness via ad-land’s hi-tech wizardry in having animals escaping from vodka bottles and so forth. Culturally, too, the juxtaposed none-sequiters found a natural home in the Oxbridge- educated anarchy of Monty Python. Alongside the icons of the short-lived movement, are the lesser-known British artists, of whom Elliott is particularly enamoured. Many of these come from the expansive collection of artist Roland Penrose.
‘The British surrealists arrived a little later than their continental colleagues,’ Elliott points out, ‘which seems to be the way the British do things. But it’s important to see them next to the better-known names. A lot of exhibitions of surrealism tend to be themed: surrealism and sex, surrealism and homosexuality or whatever. With Another World I just wanted the best. If you go to an exhibition of surrealism you can see a multitude of styles and techniques. Surrealism is an adjective rather than a style.’
Another World – Dalí, Magritte, Miró and the Surrealists, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, Sat 10 Jul–Sun 9 Jan.