Amusement parks capture the imagination in a dreamlike way, and perhaps that’s why Sigmund Freud liked them. In 1909, he visited New York’s Coney Island. But he had already visited Blackpool – twice – in 1875 and 1908. These surprising links between the founder of psychoanalysis and the birthplaces of modern industrialised desire inspired the Edinburgh-born, New York-based artist Zoe Beloff to create Dreamland: The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and the Blackpool Chapter, now showing at Blackpool’s Grundy Art Gallery.
Beloff is fascinated by popular art forms such as film, photography and comics, which she uses to reconnect with Freud’s ideas. When we meet at the Grundy, she explains the background to the Dreamland project. “It started in 2007 when I was talking to the director of the Coney Island Museum,” she recalls, going on to describe an establishment very unlike Blackpool’s rather grand Edwardian art space. “It’s like this big old room upstairs from a bar and a freak-show within the amusement park. We had this idea to do a show to celebrate one hundred years since Sigmund Freud’s visit.”
Preferring not to focus on Freud’s rather uncomfortable afternoon at Coney Island (the weather was muggy and Freud had indigestion, perhaps from eating hotdogs), Beloff thought it would be more interesting to think about his legacy. “To find a form for that, I decided on something called the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society, which would be a group of working people, excited by the new science of psychoanalysis, who decided to analyse themselves. I think they thought about it the way people thought about socialism, as a way to change the world. So psychoanalysis would free your inner life. And Coney Island at this time, the 1920s, really was a hotbed of socialism.”
Thrill ride into the past
Subsequently, Beloff found herself on a thrill ride into the past. “There is a lot of history in this project,” she says. “It’s just not literal history.” In the exhibition, we see photos and biographies of the fictional society’s members, notably its founder, Albert Grass, who had a prolific career, interweaving psychoanalysis with popular art. “His job,” Beloff says, “was to design amusements at Steeplechase Park on Coney Island. But he had this dream to rebuild the Dreamland Park that burned down in 1911, as a great Freudian theme park, in which a series of pavilions would exculpate Freud’s theory of dream formation.”
The model of Grass’s Dreamland is one of the exhibition’s highlights, featuring pavilions named The Unconscious, the Psychic Censor, the Dreamwork Factory (which works with a heap of ideas, shaped like childrens’ building bricks), all leading to Consciousness and revolving around the Libido in the form of a pre-pubescent girl. “And of course,” says Beloff, pointing to the circular miniature railway connecting everything, “it’s all linked by a train of thought.”
Another of Grass’s achievements, newly revealed, is the establishment of the Society’s Blackpool Chapter. “Pleasure Beach and Coney Island are very much sister amusement parks,” Beloff says, “and in fact they share a lot of the same rides. They started roughly around the same time. Both have been called the People’s Playgrounds, and they’re both places where working-class people came for entertainment. And so my idea was that Albert Grass was invited to spend a few months at the Pleasure Beach doing some work there, and he was sitting in the hotel one morning and these ladies on another table started talking about their dreams. He offered Freudian analysis, they were fascinated, and before you knew it, the Blackpool Chapter had sprung up.”
Liberated by popular art
Like their American cousins, the Lancashire-based Freudians, led by one Bert Barrow, had a vision of a society liberated by popular art, explored in Barrow’s study of ‘Saucy Seaside Postcards and their Relation to the Unconscious’. (One wonders what Donald McGill would have made of it.)
Both groups were also keen amateur film-makers, and the exhibition brings us some of their ‘Dream Films’. “I’ve been collecting home movies for years,” says Beloff, “and I’ve always been fascinated by them as psychoanalytic objects, the way Freud thought of dreams or slips of the tongue as revealing more than people realise. And in a way these films were a way of making that idea more visible to people. They’re all found films, I just added the titles.”
Talking about Freudian theory today, Beloff admits: “It exists more in the cultural sphere, as a way to think about film, or art. Its cultural legacy lives on more than its medical legacy.” But the Dreamland experience is not only meant to be fun, but practical too. “In a way, a lot of what I’m doing here is making a proposal. It seems about the past, but it’s really about the idea that people can get together and have activities and explore their inner life. And to say, you can make your own dream films.”
Zoe Beloff’s Dreamland: The Coney Island Psychoanalytic Society and the Blackpool Chapter is at the Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, until 2 November.
On 2 November, the Grundy will host a day-long symposium on Freud In Blackpool. More information at www.grundyartgallery.com
