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The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Free of human logic': the modern artists inspired by surrealism's 100-year-old parlour game
Some time in the winter of 1925-1926, the French author André Breton and his comrades Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert and Marcel Duchamp invented an old-fashioned parlour game. You write a word on a piece of paper, then fold it over so the next person can't see what you've written, and you end up with a strange sentence. The game is now known as Exquisite Corpse, after the result of their first go: Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau (The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine). Exquisite Corpse gave Breton so much joy because it summed up the essence of the surrealist school of art he was trying to articulate at the time. In his first 1924 manifesto, he told budding surrealists to put themselves in 'as passive, or receptive, a state of mind' as they can and write quickly. Forget about talent, about subject, about perception or punctuation. Simply trust, he writes, 'in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur'. In the year of its centenary, the spirit of Breton's Exquisite Corpse is not just un-dead but frantically rattling the lid of its coffin from the inside. Several modern artists are continuing the surrealist tradition by composing with found materials (words, images, objects), drawn from the accidental debris of the everyday, to make the unexpected. For a recent show at Frith Street Gallery, the British artist Fiona Banner showed works made with discarded mannequin parts she'd found in an abandoned Topshop in north-west England. In a film, titled DISARM (Portrait), she has emblazoned words like 'disarm' on arms, 'obsolete' on soles, and 'delegation' on legs. At first she thought of it as a concrete poem or a Breton-esque poème objet. Then she realised, she says, that 'actually, it's more liquid than concrete'. For Banner, the power of Exquisite Corpse, 'its radical space', lies not in the finished sentence but on that fold. 'I think to not understand is a very important space,' she says. 'To be free of human logic.' Dimitri Rataud, a French actor turned artist, whose work is now on show at HIS Paris gallery, makes what he calls 'haikus marinières': surrealist-inspired concrete poems he finds by blacking out most of the words on a ripped-out page of a random book. The name itself is a word play: the pieces look like Breton tops AKA marinières because of the stripes. And the poems (et soudain … le bonheur – 'and suddenly … happiness') are as light as a feather on the breeze. The printed word, which he handles like a builder might a brick, is useful raw material. And each poem is but a moment. Rataud starts by tearing the cover off the book then opening it on the last page. He can never do the same thing twice. To his gallery's dismay, he refuses to make copies. Rataud is popular on Instagram, and you can of course see why: Breton tops, French romance, Japanese minimalism. And yet, these found poems are luminous, in the way they balance on that paper-thin edge between accident and intention. 'I've found extremely beautiful haikus in sordid books.' For the Paris surrealists of the 1920s – crawling out of the wreckage of the first world war – nonsense was a deadly serious matter. When the Centre Pompidou's exhibition, Surréalisme (a touring mega-show currently at the Hamburger Kunsthalle), opened in September 2024, co-curator Marie Sarré described the centennial movement as one of the most politically engaged of the avant gardes. 'Throughout its history, the political and the poetic ran in parallel,' she said. 'It wasn't an artistic movement or a formalism, but a collective adventure and a philosophy.' Contrary to other avant garde movements which embraced the notion of progress, it questioned everything. The surrealists were among the first anticolonialists, the staunchest anti-fascists, proponents of social revolution and proto-eco warriors. 'They asked the questions artists today are asking,' said Sarré. To wit, Malaysian-born artist Heman Chong, whose work is currently on show at the Singapore Art Museum. This survey exhibition is organised into nine categories: words, whispers, ghosts, journeys, futures, findings, infrastructures, surfaces and endings. One piece, 'This pavilion is strictly for community bonding activities only', reproduces a sign Chong found in a communal space within one of Singapore's Housing and Development Board block of flats. 'The sentence itself is nuts, right?' he says. 'That you would insist on community bonding activities, which means, literally, you cannot be there alone, right? Because you can't bond with anyone alone.' By contrast, he often makes installations with things people could secrete away – stacks of postcards; mountains of sentences from spy novels shredded on to the floor; a library of unread books. 'I would love it if people just take things out of their own accord,' says Chong. 'Coming from Singapore, which is an extremely paternalistic, authoritarian state, a lot of my work is not about telling people what they cannot do.' In November 2024, South Africa-based Nhlanhla Mahlangu, who is a long-term collaborator of William Kentridge, gave a performance lecture titled Chant for Disinheriting Apartheid. It collates several spoken word compositions and improvised works, which delve into the brutal flattening of colonial oppression: language stolen, names mangled, bodies which have learned to recognise different guns by the sounds they make. In one section, he performs, one by one, various unrelated sentences in the languages of isiZulu, Sesotho, Xitsonga, Venda, Xhosa. And then, 'the language of apartheid'. He stands stock still, in total silence, for two whole minutes. He recounts doing a workshop with children from Hillbrow, a part of inner Johannesburg beset by high crime and intense poverty. They were working on a performance of Aimé Césaire's 1939 masterwork, Return to My Native Land – a gut punch of a poem against colonialism, which Breton called 'the greatest lyrical monument of this time'. Mahlangu's students, who were witnessing crime and death and abandonment on the way to class, said: 'We experience surrealisms every day. We don't understand why people go to universities and study it. Our lives are surreal.' 'Surrealism offers ways to look awry at things,' says Patricia Allmer, an art historian at the Edinburgh College of Art. She recently co-curated The Traumatic Surreal at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. 'Because you can't encounter trauma head on, you have to find ways of seeing it, either as a distortion, through a distorting lens or from the side.' For Mahlangu, it is about 'bringing fluidity to what seems stable, and understanding that stability can be a weakness. It's constantly not answering the question, but questioning the answers, asking more questions.' In the 21st century, we may have grown wary of 'isms' in art. In a climate of constant technological and economic interruption, the promise of a transformative cultural revolution can feel suspicious; the most powerful movement in modern art, contended a recent article in the Art Newspaper, may be the art market itself. But it's worth remembering that when Breton first wrote about his ideas in 1924, he didn't think of it as a manifesto, just a preface to a book of poems he wanted to publish. And that's why Exquisite Corpse sums up surrealism's most lasting legacy to modern art today: a tool that taps you into something unexplored, a game for 'pure young people who refuse to knuckle down'.
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Free of human logic': the modern artists inspired by surrealism's 100-year-old parlour game
Some time in the winter of 1925-1926, the French author André Breton and his comrades Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert and Marcel Duchamp invented an old-fashioned parlour game. You write a word on a piece of paper, then fold it over so the next person can't see what you've written, and you end up with a strange sentence. The game is now known as Exquisite Corpse, after the result of their first go: Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau (The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine). Exquisite Corpse gave Breton so much joy because it summed up the essence of the surrealist school of art he was trying to articulate at the time. In his first 1924 manifesto, he told budding surrealists to put themselves in 'as passive, or receptive, a state of mind' as they can and write quickly. Forget about talent, about subject, about perception or punctuation. Simply trust, he writes, 'in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur'. In the year of its centenary, the spirit of Breton's Exquisite Corpse is not just un-dead but frantically rattling the lid of its coffin from the inside. Several modern artists are continuing the surrealist tradition by composing with found materials (words, images, objects), drawn from the accidental debris of the everyday, to make the unexpected. For a recent show at Frith Street Gallery, the British artist Fiona Banner showed works made with discarded mannequin parts she'd found in an abandoned Topshop in north-west England. In a film, titled DISARM (Portrait), she has emblazoned words like 'disarm' on arms, 'obsolete' on soles, and 'delegation' on legs. At first she thought of it as a concrete poem or a Breton-esque poème objet. Then she realised, she says, that 'actually, it's more liquid than concrete'. For Banner, the power of Exquisite Corpse, 'its radical space', lies not in the finished sentence but on that fold. 'I think to not understand is a very important space,' she says. 'To be free of human logic.' Dimitri Rataud, a French actor turned artist, whose work is now on show at HIS Paris gallery, makes what he calls 'haikus marinières': surrealist-inspired concrete poems he finds by blacking out most of the words on a ripped-out page of a random book. The name itself is a word play: the pieces look like Breton tops AKA marinières because of the stripes. And the poems (et soudain … le bonheur – 'and suddenly … happiness') are as light as a feather on the breeze. The printed word, which he handles like a builder might a brick, is useful raw material. And each poem is but a moment. Rataud starts by tearing the cover off the book then opening it on the last page. He can never do the same thing twice. To his gallery's dismay, he refuses to make copies. Rataud is popular on Instagram, and you can of course see why: Breton tops, French romance, Japanese minimalism. And yet, these found poems are luminous, in the way they balance on that paper-thin edge between accident and intention. 'I've found extremely beautiful haikus in sordid books.' For the Paris surrealists of the 1920s – crawling out of the wreckage of the first world war – nonsense was a deadly serious matter. When the Centre Pompidou's exhibition, Surréalisme (a touring mega-show currently at the Hamburger Kunsthalle), opened in September 2024, co-curator Marie Sarré described the centennial movement as one of the most politically engaged of the avant gardes. 'Throughout its history, the political and the poetic ran in parallel,' she said. 'It wasn't an artistic movement or a formalism, but a collective adventure and a philosophy.' Contrary to other avant garde movements which embraced the notion of progress, it questioned everything. The surrealists were among the first anticolonialists, the staunchest anti-fascists, proponents of social revolution and proto-eco warriors. 'They asked the questions artists today are asking,' said Sarré. To wit, Malaysian-born artist Heman Chong, whose work is currently on show at the Singapore Art Museum. This survey exhibition is organised into nine categories: words, whispers, ghosts, journeys, futures, findings, infrastructures, surfaces and endings. One piece, 'This pavilion is strictly for community bonding activities only', reproduces a sign Chong found in a communal space within one of Singapore's Housing and Development Board block of flats. 'The sentence itself is nuts, right?' he says. 'That you would insist on community bonding activities, which means, literally, you cannot be there alone, right? Because you can't bond with anyone alone.' By contrast, he often makes installations with things people could secrete away – stacks of postcards; mountains of sentences from spy novels shredded on to the floor; a library of unread books. 'I would love it if people just take things out of their own accord,' says Chong. 'Coming from Singapore, which is an extremely paternalistic, authoritarian state, a lot of my work is not about telling people what they cannot do.' In November 2024, South Africa-based Nhlanhla Mahlangu, who is a long-term collaborator of William Kentridge, gave a performance lecture titled Chant for Disinheriting Apartheid. It collates several spoken word compositions and improvised works, which delve into the brutal flattening of colonial oppression: language stolen, names mangled, bodies which have learned to recognise different guns by the sounds they make. In one section, he performs, one by one, various unrelated sentences in the languages of isiZulu, Sesotho, Xitsonga, Venda, Xhosa. And then, 'the language of apartheid'. He stands stock still, in total silence, for two whole minutes. He recounts doing a workshop with children from Hillbrow, a part of inner Johannesburg beset by high crime and intense poverty. They were working on a performance of Aimé Césaire's 1939 masterwork, Return to My Native Land – a gut punch of a poem against colonialism, which Breton called 'the greatest lyrical monument of this time'. Mahlangu's students, who were witnessing crime and death and abandonment on the way to class, said: 'We experience surrealisms every day. We don't understand why people go to universities and study it. Our lives are surreal.' 'Surrealism offers ways to look awry at things,' says Patricia Allmer, an art historian at the Edinburgh College of Art. She recently co-curated The Traumatic Surreal at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. 'Because you can't encounter trauma head on, you have to find ways of seeing it, either as a distortion, through a distorting lens or from the side.' For Mahlangu, it is about 'bringing fluidity to what seems stable, and understanding that stability can be a weakness. It's constantly not answering the question, but questioning the answers, asking more questions.' In the 21st century, we may have grown wary of 'isms' in art. In a climate of constant technological and economic interruption, the promise of a transformative cultural revolution can feel suspicious; the most powerful movement in modern art, contended a recent article in the Art Newspaper, may be the art market itself. But it's worth remembering that when Breton first wrote about his ideas in 1924, he didn't think of it as a manifesto, just a preface to a book of poems he wanted to publish. And that's why Exquisite Corpse sums up surrealism's most lasting legacy to modern art today: a tool that taps you into something unexplored, a game for 'pure young people who refuse to knuckle down'.
New York Times
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Surrealist Classic Shows Us the Uncanny in Everyday Paris
There is an old saying in French: 'Tell me whom you haunt and I will tell you who you are.' As in English, 'haunt' in French (hanter) can have two meanings: to frequent, and to linger as a ghost. The adage, argues the father of Surrealism, André Breton, in his 1928 book 'Nadja,' thus 'says much more than it intends.' We reflect not only the people we associate with most frequently, but also those who turn us into revenants, who draw out the past selves we've long thought buried. For Breton (1896-1966), one of those figures was actually a place. Paris has always been a haunted city. It is not, like New York, a city of progress, but one that compels infinite returns to the past. People have called it a museum of itself. And it is full of flâneurs and loiterers, who, to paraphrase Breton, are doomed to retrace their steps while believing they are moving forward. Breton's most renowned literary work, NADJA (New York Review Books, 131 pp., paperback, $16.95), recently reissued in a deft new translation by Mark Polizzotti, was written as a means of processing and paying homage to two forms of encounter that have long destabilized those who have experienced them: encounters, that is, with a great love and with a great city. Nadja was Breton's love; Paris, his city. In the novel, and in his life, he haunts them both, and they torment him in kind. Nadja is a greenhorn from the north of France, and the focal point of her seduction, as in so many romances, is her eyes, which reflect 'that mix of obscure distress and luminous pride.' Though André, the narrator, is married, this is no serious impediment. He and Nadja meet at cafes, metro stations and shabby hotel rooms. They meet at the corner of Rue Lafayette and Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, a stone's throw from where I am writing this sentence. They stroll past the Sphinx Hôtel, which no longer exists, and take the steps to Breton's room in the Hôtel des Grands Hommes, which does. All the while, as their infatuation develops, deepens and then decays, we register uncanny moments that populate not only the narrative, but also our experience reading the book, which is littered with photographs (taken by Man Ray, the official portraitist of Surrealism, and his assistant Jacques-André Boiffard) of places and faces we feel we have seen before — in films, in dreams or in waking life. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The big idea: should we abolish art?
Some of us will go to an art gallery this weekend. Maybe it will help us reflect or inspire us. Isn't that part of a life well lived? And if you don't go to a gallery, maybe you'll find yourself lingering on a picture at home, reading a novel, going to the theatre or listening to music. But what if you didn't? What if there were no galleries, theatres, publishers or concert halls? What if we got rid of art? The impulse seems philistine at best, authoritarian at worst, yet a remarkable number of modern artists were seduced by it. André Breton, the leader of the surrealists, repeatedly called for the end of literature. Theo van Doesburg, the founder of the De Stijl movement, proclaimed that 'art has poisoned our life', while his friend and compatriot, Piet Mondrian, believed that if we did abolish art, no one would miss it. In December 1914, as the first world war entered its first winter, the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky declared that art was already dead. 'It found itself in the backwater of life,' he wrote. 'It was soft and could not defend itself.' These points of view were rooted in a historical moment, particularly in the shock and disillusionment occasioned by the war, yet it's easy to see resonances in our own time. Many back then had a distrust of culture that was elite in the wrong way: expensive, inaccessible, obscure. If you've been to an art fair recently, you'll notice that this kind of art is in rude health. Characters such as Mondrian and Van Doesburg wished not to abolish creation or self-expression – but to break art out of its frame, to transfigure our whole environment so there would be no distinction between art and ordinary objects. The rise of modern design has perhaps brought us closer to that goal, yet Mondrian hoped that his own style, with its distinctive primary colors and geometric planes, would form the basis for a single, universal, anonymous language of design, and instead it has degenerated into Mondrian-kitsch, to be found on everything from socks to aprons. It seems as if we like designers more than design. The most intriguing of those old impulses to abandon art derived from suspicion of an art that was empathetic and humanistic. During the war, Breton had worked as a psychiatrist tending to traumatised soldiers, and these experiences made him wary of any art that might attempt to redeem all the horror they had witnessed. If the world was wretched, shouldn't we be transforming it, not distracting ourselves from it? Yet for most of us, that's precisely the role art plays in our lives. If you've had a bad week at work, you relax with art. It blunts your ire, and by Monday you're ready for the boss again. But what would happen if we didn't soothe ourselves with imagined utopias, but instead did as John Lydon once suggested, and used anger as an energy? It should be obvious that these early calls to end art didn't achieve their goals. Mondrian talked the talk about art's end, but his love of painting made him equivocate, and eventually he blamed society for being ill-prepared for his brave new artless world. Also, the proposed alternatives weren't always so viable. Among several ideas, Breton suggested walking in the city as a new form of poetic activity. He felt that a disjunctive kind of verse, a collage of sights and signs and feelings, would emerge from the chance encounters and lateral thoughts occasioned by a walk. Maybe it would if you were strolling through the historic parts of Paris in the 1920s, but when I tried wandering at random around my own neighbourhood in an outer borough of New York City, I found my 'poems' were banal and forlorn. I struggled to disengage from thoughts of goals and destinations, and crossing the busy street posed its own risks. I concluded that we partition our lives for a reason: we rationalise to get stuff done, we fantasise to relax. In other words, art and life don't mix. Recent developments suggest that artists agree. After a flurry of attempts to democratise art in the 1960s, things have quieted somewhat, and like a young radical entering middle age, art has grown conservative. While once we wanted avant-garde performance, or sculpture made of documents or heaps of dirt, today patrons want portraits once again. There's much to be said for the notion that art should consist of beautiful objects. In a world that is increasingly digital, dematerialised and accelerated, the pleasures of pausing and looking at something exquisite help us slow down and rest in the moment. Yet to accept that this is all art should aspire to is to accept that a whole realm of human creation devoted to beauty, thought and feeling will be confined to the boundaries of a picture frame or a plinth, and sold to the highest bidder. That is the sorry spectacle on show at most art fairs today, in which prestige attaches not to the experience of beauty, nor to public discourse about it, but merely to the acquisition of expensive trophies. So while calling for the end of art can sound like a mantra for hare-brained radicals or philosophers and obscurantists, believing in its possibility can help us see the world anew, and puts us in distinguished company. We tell ourselves that an everyday experience, no matter how odd and arresting, can never be the highest art – but André Breton thought it could. We tell ourselves that the colours we paint on walls at home can never be art, no matter how much pleasure they give us – but Piet Mondrian thought they could. Instead, we accept defeat, and tell ourselves that art is something that only someone else has the privilege to own. Keep the creativity; these are the attitudes we ought to abolish. Morgan Falconer is the author of How to Be Avant-Garde (WW Norton). Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art: by Orlando Whitfield (Profile, £20) Mondrian: His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute by Nicholas Fox Weber (Knopf, £30)
