- Venue
- Barbican Arts Centre
- Location
- London
The Brutalism of the Barbican Estate’s architecture is like an awkward cousin of Modernism. Honest unabashed concrete fills your whole field of vision as you look out around the Barbican Centre to the flats and avenues and the three sky-rise towers: Shakespeare, Lauderdale and Cromwell. Yet there prevails a sense of space and purpose, the avenues leading to the Barbican Centre nestled within, hosting both the Barbican Art Gallery and the Curve Gallery, as well as cinema, concert hall, libraries, bookshop and cafes.
“The Surreal House”, curated by Jane Alison and designed by Carmody Groarke, showcases films, animations, photographs, sculptures, paintings, publications and illustrations within a series of domestically-themed rooms visible from the upper gallery as a complex interconnecting warren. It is a dense and ambitious exhibition, drawing comparisons between early 20th century surrealism and contemporary artists examining the domestic in art.
The entrance on the gallery’s lower floor is immediately impactful with Buster Keaton’s famous 1928 film “Steamboat Bill Jr” and Duchamp is swiftly name-checked before we enter a room of Richard Longo’s larger than life charcoal and graphite drawings depicting a residence, namely of Sigmund Freud’s Vienna flat. We already feel surveilled, guided, compartmentalised, almost told how to think. The sensation recalls the recent exhibition at Tate Modern “Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera”, translating an assumed universal experience of our daily life into the gallery’s confining walls, both familiar and unnerving.
These dimly spotlit, concisely curated antechambers lead us through to the heart – the living quarters – of the “house”. We are being fed clues that create a picture of disordered domestic pre-occupation. Rebecca Horn’s perilously suspended poltergeist piano, “Concert for Anarchy” 1990, provides a disconcerting soundtrack to the main female protagonists of the “house”: Louise Bourgeois and Francesca Woodman. The home is deconstructed into concepts of enclosure/disclosure, and revealed as a fickle friend in Francesca Woodman’s photographed interiors of 1972-8, presenting curious tableaus, moments of apparition and trickery resonant of paranormal activity and also of implied domestic violence. Louise Bourgeois’ staircase to nowhere “No Exit” 1989, similarly conveys unspoken violence in its impossible avenue of escape.
Two animation films by Jan Švankmajer: “Jabberwocky” 1971 and “Down to the Cellar” 1982, combine childsplay and inference to the dark horrors of mass slaughter, starvation and imprisonment. In “Jabberwocky” (inspired by Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem of the same title), a dolls tea party becomes an arena for emotionless cannibalism as they serve a soup of dolls arms and legs. In “Down to the Cellar” an intrepid young girl confronts jerkily animated shoes which battle ravenously over her dropped pretzel; as the house’s cleaner bakes cakes of coal, the girl struggles and fails to collect a basket of potatoes, symbolic as basic food of the poorest victims of famine caused by war and political disarray; all the meanwhile stalked by a cat probably in reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s unsettling tale of guilt and horror concealed: “The Black Cat”.
At this point in the exhibition the many and varied facets of “The Surreal House” become apparent: dark comedy, psychology/dream-state, paranormal activity and transgression/violence – both on a domestic and universal scale. The “Surreal House” is presented as a tenuous space, unwillingly revealing its identity and defined both as a portrait of and a trap for its inhabitants. While Modernism aimed to rationalise the present, the Surrealist Manifestos of 1924 and 1929 appealed for a more honest look at our human condition, and was reactive to the recent collective memory of World War I, and so in this respect is a particularly European movement.
In the upper gallery, Man Ray’s photographs of defunct mathematical objects, the “Objet Mathématique” series 1934-6, translate abstract, objective theory into an impression of tangible concrete existence. Scale is hard to read in their strong directional lighting reminiscent of sunlight. These photographs echo Georges Malkine’s “Demeure” paintings presented early in the exhibition, whose harshly lit walls and forms and off-centre perspectives create a dream-like quality of sinister interior space. This theatrical staging of “bad geometry” in both Malkine’s and Man Ray’s work highlights chips and imperfect edges, betraying the limitations of their construction. These examinations of material form through photography and painting are like a microcosm for the Barbican’s honest, aesthetically “unfinished” architectural style, in contrast to Modernism’s uncompromising idealism which seemed to leave no room for human intervention and denied any sense of decay or ageing.
In the same room as Man Ray’s photographs there is a cabinet of curiosities which includes a maquette of Emilio Terry y Sanchez’s “Maison à Double Spirale” 1933, complete with a tree growing through the top. This improbable depiction of an “unsafe” house joined at the centre by a double spiral recalls Jung’s Bollingen Tower, whereby he added houses upon houses over several years toward the end of his life resulting in a “tower” that became like an outward presentation of his interior psychological and conceptual development. John Hjeduk’s “House of the Painter” and “House of the Musician”, both from 1984, present the house as the person – like a dual interpretation of “occupation” – what a person does creates the structure which they inhabit. The house is occupied by the musician who in turn is occupied with music. The house is occupied with music.
The Barbican Art Gallery has a history of presenting shows which combine academic motive with well-chosen and sourced international art, a good example of which being 2005’s “Colour After Klein”. Many of the works displayed in “The Surreal House” would usually be out of reach for most artists in London, scattered across Europe and America in various public and private collections. I say “artists” because it feels like an artists’ show, and surrealism is conveyed here as an artists’ movement. The Barbican Centre is in fact a valuable resource for London’s artists in particular. At £8 entry, “The Surreal House” competes strongly against similarly priced exhibitions at Tate Modern, Hayward Gallery, The Royal Academy and The National Gallery, but seemingly without the crowd-pleasing compromises that can sometimes befall more widely publicised “blockbusters”. In this respect, I found “The Surreal House” to be a satisfying and stimulating exhibition, which although detailed and dense to the extent that it would practically be impossible to watch all the films and examine every item in one visit or for that matter list them all here, the experience of the curation enabled this visitor to read the whole and the detail together and feel compelled to embark on further inquiries into several of the works that stood out for me.
