So Exotic, So Homemade: Surrealism, Englishness and Documentary Photography (review)

In his second chapter on the English landscape painter Paul Nash, Ian Walker discusses the artist’s production of the Dorset Shell Guide (1936), an interwar Baedeker for the motoring, high-brow sightseer. With its picture of a dinosaur set over the caption “SCELIDOSAURUS HARRISONI: FORMER NATIVE,” Nash’s contribution to the Shell Guides series reflects his unique brand of natural surrealism. The Dorset Shell Guide joined a growing list of guidebooks, though Nash’s “was the only case where the author did the writing, produced most of the illustrations (both paintings and photographs) and designed the book” (33). In his unorthodox interpretation of the assignment, Nash explored the native strangeness of small town British culture and the disquieting beauty of the prehistoric structures scattered in the outlying regions. He also made his fascination with local, organic elements relevant to a movement more associated with the cosmopolitan sites of Paris.

Such curiosities are profuse in So Exotic, So Homemade, a book that makes a valuable contribution to surrealist studies and serves as an appreciation of the rich collections of primary material that lured its author to archives far and wide. A self-styled sequel to City Gorged With Dreams (2002), So Exotic takes its title and central motif from Patrick Keiller’s London (1994), a film that evinces the city’s great ability to reconcile the contradictions between what is British and modern, exotic and homemade. Walker brilliantly traces this thematic concoction in the work of several artists, demonstrating that England indeed participated formidably and originally in the surrealist movement.

Walker’s is not the familiar surrealism of Breton, Duchamp, or Aragon, automatic writing, manifestos, and revolution. The objet trouvé retains its critical role, but in place of spiky irons, bicycle saddles, and bric-à-brac from the Parisian marche aux puces, there are rock formations, gnarled trees of the heath, snickets, statues, and walls with graffiti and advertisements. Throughout his analysis, Walker focuses on questions of English national identity—a tricky subject to be sure—and its diverse expression in the face of tensions between north and south, industrial and rural regions, London and everywhere else. Walker covers quite a bit of territory, temporally and geographically (indeed, a map in the style of Thomas Hardy would have been useful), doing so with an enormous fondness for place. Chapter One sets up the parameters of the discussion by examining Paul Nash’s photographs of forms natural and man-made at Avebury, Monster Field, and Swanage. For Nash and other artists under consideration, photography instigates work in other media, allowing for experimentation and creative configurations with text and image. Angle, light, and framing stir feelings of estrangement, intimacy, delight, and repulsion. Chapter Two continues his study of Nash, tracing how issues of tradition and modernity emerge from the artist’s work in a 1936 issue of Architectural Review, where “a respectable seaside resort” (38) provokes a sense of alienation and banality that Walker likens to the surrealism of Breton’s Nadja.

Chapter Three, “The Comic Sublime—Eileen Agar at Ploumanac’h,” focuses on the painter and object-maker’s experimental photographic output. To Agar, rock formations were animated spirits in the landscape. In her words, “[t]hey lay like enormous prehistoric monsters sleeping on the turf above the sea” (58). Instead of sentimentalism, however, Agar approaches such “pathetic fallacy” with a combination of cheek and admiration, what Walker dubs “the comic sublime.” Humor also factors into the work of Roland Penrose and Lee Miller, the subjects of Walker’s fourth chapter. While many discussions of Penrose and Miller exist, none focuses upon their journey thorough the Balkans and Penrose’s The Road is Wider Than Long (1939), the publication that captured it in photographs and an extended non-linear, non-sequential poetic travel guide. Though Walker’s evenhandedness as a critic is apparent throughout the volume, it is here that his willingness to assess the work of these artists emerges...