Weng Chuanxin
The special exhibition "Surrealism Beyond Borders" ended at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the United States and is currently on display at the Tate Gallery in the United Kingdom. This exhibition shows how the surrealist movement spread around the world over the next 50 years and took root in the local culture.
With the ambition of global art, the curators seem to focus on Asia, Africa, Latin America, and other regions outside the West, but the selected painters are more or less from the West, which makes people feel that the Western-centrism behind them is inevitable. Although the exhibition is titled "Surrealism Beyond Borders", it seems that future curations are more worthy of breaking through not national boundaries but the boundaries of Western centrism and the boundaries of knowledge.
Exhibition site
Paris in the 1920s ignited the fire of surrealism, how did it ignite? The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition (October 11, 2021 – January 30, 2022, Tate February 24, 2022 – August 29, 2022) shows how the movement has spread around the world and taken root in local culture over the next 50 years.
Exhibition Scene October 11, 2021 Weng Chuanxin / Photo
Curators see Surrealism not only as a concern for the unconscious and dreams, but as a revolt against "social injustice, colonialism", etc., a quest for "political, social and individual freedom". As a result, it became an exhibition in which social significance trumped beauty: admittedly, refreshing works can be found in this exhibition (such as the Surrealism of Mexico City, which will be presented below), but it may be disappointing to see works as remarkable and original as the surrealist artists of the 20s, Picasso, Dalí and Margaret. In the exhibition, a glass is used to cover a pile of scattered and unwrapped parcel bags, ordinary and chaotic like the express bags piled on the ground and opened today, and they are covered by glass, inadvertently making people feel that it is an irony of contemporary art. And this detail is like a metaphor for this exhibition: there are many and chaotic, and beauty does not seem to be the concern of the curators; Art critic Karen Wilkin also believes that the exhibition is visually unattractive and does not create the desire to see it multiple times.
A glass covers a pile of loose, unwrapped bags in the exhibition Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Southernism Beyond Borders Virtual Opening | Screenshot of the Met Exhibitions video
But in any case, in this "smorgasbord" style exhibition, you can occasionally pan for gold in the sand sea. In the exhibition hall of "Mexico City", several paintings combine fantasy, magic and alchemy. Alice Rahon's Ballad to Frida Carroll is hung in the most prominent position in the exhibition hall, even from another exhibition hall. Her paintings look like a bottomless mirror from a distance, emitting a ghostly and floating blue color that makes people inadvertently fall into it.
Alice Rahon, Ballad to Frida Kahlo (details) La balada para Frida Kahlo (The Ballad for Frida Kahlo), 1955–56
The painting looks like the silhouette of a crocodile with an open mouth from a distance, and up close, a small town emerges. Breaking the linear structure, they are like islands floating on the mysterious waters of memory, surrounded by auroras that fluctuate between deep blue and dark green.
It is hard to imagine for a moment that such a profound, mysterious painting as Rahon's is so superbly depicted, and these qualities are intertwined with an unconcealed ecstasy: the crowd marching on the right is lined up in a winding line, the left group holds a tree branch-like bonfire and skull, and the middle group celebrates around a huge object like a Ferris wheel; The Ferris wheel is lit up, and the building in the background is also brightly lit; The picture emits the mystery and noise of the ritual in the dark night.
Alice Rahon, Ballads for Frida Carroll (partial)
The paradox of the painting is that the building in the distance is clearer than the person in the close-up; Perhaps the people in memory are "amorphous past" as Benjamin noticed in Baudelaire's poems, or perhaps Rahon tried to simplify the image of the person after visiting the Altamira Cave. Their vague forms enveloped animal-like bodies: on the marching line on the right, their bodies were stretched out like giraffes, while on the left they held up campfires like cranes in robes.
Enter the distant view behind the rows of houses and protrude the tall black shadows of owls, cats, giraffes, birds and horses, which resemble totems guarding the city's secrets.
Animal elements can be seen everywhere in this painting, evoking a sense of human primitiveness and animal intimacy. Not only the marching procession, but also the tall black shadows of owls, cats, giraffes, birds and horses protruding from behind the rows of houses in the distance, which seem to guard the city's hidden totems. The two giraffes running on the right side of the foreground are again with childlike lightness and joy. And at the bottom of the picture, a duck's footprint is reduced to a text, "Frida aux yeux d'hirondelle" in the eyes of a swallow. The painting, with an animal perspective, reveals an air of primitiveness and purity, finding sounds that intersect with each other between Surrealism and shamanism.
The swallow flies high in the clouds, and the town it sees is a wilderness, liberated from the linear streets, like a string of notes. The painting Ballad for Frida Kahlo was written shortly after Frida's death. Rahon met Frida Caro at an exhibition in Paris and took refuge from France to Mexico City during World War II, where he was received by Frida. Ballad usually refers to songs or poems that tell short stories, and Rahon's painting transforms space into a narrative with music, singing the space in which Frida lived during her lifetime (the Metropolitan Museum of Art's commentary suggests that the cobalt blue base of the painting refers to Frida's blue house, but I can't disagree, because Rahon's previous 1941 le Cirque was also based on blue). Although the painting is public, it is at the same time extremely personal; It revolves around memory, innocence and the memory of primitive totems, the memory of the region where Frida lived, using an island to present the time of memory from a spatial dimension. It also presents two dimensions of memory, one is its ambiguity, but it also peels back the cocoon and reveals itself from the unconscious.
Leonora Carrington, Chiki, ton pays (Chiki, Your Country), 1944
Leonora Carrington's paintings also present a piece of land. Kiki, Your Country depicts Carrington's husband, Chiki, the home country of a Mexican photographer. The land is covered with brilliant colors, with thorny white buildings standing in the mountains tumbling like the sea in the distance, and the people in the wide cloak in the middle are elegant and mysterious, layered on top of each other, hiding incredible wonders (such as the triangular cloth like pizza, the depleted landscape on the red cloak); In the close-up sunken underground world, roulette is also distributed with inexplicable logos. "Strange, Your Country" is not so much a figurative landscape as a land full of symbols.
Carrington's paintings are so densely packed with dreamlike combinations that hieronymus Bosch's masterpiece The Garden of Earthly Delights is dizzying, and every zoom, every detail, is a jaw-dropping imagination. This is not only related to the magical tradition accumulated in Mexico for thousands of years, but also to Carrington's fiery exploration of the spiritual world; She actively absorbed the mystical elements of the world's religions (including medieval Christianity, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Tibetan Buddhism), and she and her lover, ernst, a fellow painter, were interested in folktales, mythology, magic, and the occult, and she herself chose the image of the horse as her second self (alter ego). Although the horse is not visible in this painting, the underground world in this painting may be related to the underground world of the Mayan tradition that Carrington was fascinated by. Surrealism found a fit in the exotic mexican region, where the beliefs and folklore it nurtured gave inspiration to artists who pursued dreams and the subconscious.
Remedios Varo, Bordando el manto terrestre (Embroidering the Earth's Mantle), 1961
The Cloak That Weaves the Earth was painted by Carrington's close friend, Remedios Varo. Also about the earth, the previous one is fragmented, scattered stacks of symbols, and this one connects different elements within a mythical frame: a tall tower from which golden satin flows down on the spherical surface to form the ground, and the ocean is interspersed. A disproportionate ship can also be seen on the horizon, and the world seems to have been microfitted. The viewer sees the mechanism of internal operation through the walls of the tower; Four women dressed in blue were weaving satin with threads from the center of the white can, a magician opened the book with one hand as if chanting a mantra, stirred the mysterious solution of white gas in the jar with the other, and sat behind him a man in an orange robe and playing an instrument. The tower, satin, the orange tone of the house with warmth and enthusiasm, contrasts sharply with the low saturation of the background, the dull blue-gray, and the expressionless cold face of the female worker.
This group of women who dress almost identically, have hairstyles, and even looks have appeared in Other Paintings by Remedios Varo (such as Hacia la torre (To the Tower)). They are also so neatly aligned in that painting, with their unified, unsymansured faces that seem to match Voro's upbringing in the convent. These features give Varo's painting an elegant sense of distance, contrasting with Carrington's brilliant and lively imagination. Varo also seems to be more concerned with grand and profound issues, such as the creation myth in this painting, the incorporation of alchemy and magic, and the structure of the earth as a woman.
Exhibition site
The three female painters responded in their own ways to the local, the mysterious and the dreamlike imagination, and rediscovered Mexico from the perspective of women and Westerners. They localized Surrealism, a process that enriched the meaning and practice of Surrealism itself.
It is also worth noting that although the curators have the ambition of global art and seem to focus on Asia, Africa, Latin America, which are outside the West, the selected painters are more or less from the West, which makes people feel that the Western-centrism behind them is inevitable. Just as Varo, Carrington, and Rahon belong to the circle of surrealist artists who migrated from the West to Mexico City, how to distinguish between Surrealism in Mexico City and Surrealism's cultural colonization of Mexico is also a question worth pondering. Although the exhibition is titled "Surrealism Beyond Borders", it seems that future curations are more worth breaking through not national borders, but the boundaries of Western-centrism and the boundaries of cognition.
(The author is a lecturer in the Department of Art History, Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, Shanghai University, and a Ph.D. in art history at the University of Pennsylvania)
Editor-in-Charge: Ruoxi Chen
Proofreader: Ding Xiao