Surrealist Ghostliness

3 The Ethnographic Automatism of Brassaï and Dalí’s Involuntary Sculptures

69 3 The Ethnographic Automatism of Brassaï and Dalí’s Involuntary Sculptures The surreal exists within us, in the things which have become so banal that we no longer notice them, and in the normality of the normal. Brassaï, speech at unesco banquet, 1963, quoted in Annick Lionel-Marie, “Letting the Eye Be Light” In Brassaï (born Gyula Halasz in Brasso, Transylvania) and Salvador Dalí’s collaboration for the surrealist art journal Minotaure in 1933 on a series of photographs titled Sculptures involontaires (henceforth Involuntary Sculptures), ghostliness emerges from the anamorphic ambiguity of the images (see fig. 13). These found objects are “involuntary” in the sense that they were made automatically: absentmindedly shaped and rolled bus tickets, a toothpaste blob, shaving cream, and a roll captured to look like an ancient stone statue. The distorted magnification that photography brings to these objects reveals their ghostliness because, while recognizably inert, their distended shapes contribute to the illusion of animation they project. Brassaï thought of this look as baroque, a style that leads one astray like a dream. “Il déroute comme le songe,” he wrote in 1962, in an essay in which he describes baroque statues so organically lifelike that they come to life: “Les statues baroques s’animent.” For him the baroque style “explodes” into works that are “primitive,” by which he means the Sicilian baroque but also objects like these (“La 70 Brassaï and Dalí’s Involuntary Sculptures Villa” 351). Dalí, in his essay on Modern Style architecture for which Involuntary Sculptures serves as a visual preface, extends Brassaï’s view of the baroque to include Barcelona’s modern architecture by Antonio Gaudí and the public ironwork by Hector Guimard decorating Parisian metro stations. The series of six photographs that constitute Involuntary Sculptures , initially labeled “large-scale” or “automatic objects,” shot by Brassaï and privately annotated by Dalí,1 constitute an archive in the counter-archival sense that John Roberts attributes to surrealist photography because of their intimacy and because they represent things that are disposable—the opposite of objects normally commemorated in a public archive. They embody what Steven Harris has called a “refusal of professional status” since anyone could make them (“Coup” 96).2 The previous issue of Minotaure had featured explicitly ethnographic photographs of Dogon masks and dances 13. Brassaï (Gyula Halász, 1899–1984), Sculptures involontaires, in Minotaure 3–4 (1933): 68.© Estate Brassaï—rmn. Digital image © Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by scala / Art Resource, New York. Brassaï and Dalí’s Involuntary Sculptures 71 in an essay by Leiris, as part of that issue’s report on the DakarDjibouti mission of 1931–33 sponsored by the Trocadéro Museum of Ethnography, in which Leiris participated. Involuntary Sculptures also constitute an ethnographic study of unconsciously produced contemporary art made by ordinary Parisians. Like Ray’s tacks and pins in Retour à la raison, these things pop with unlikely sentience, confusingly animate. Like Cahun’s self-portrait Human Frontier, they ask viewers what we know and how we know as human beings . Unlike Ray’s and Cahun’s objects, however, Brassaï’s sentient things serve a cultural, even anthropological function: they teach us about ourselves as humans based on the things we make, use, and throw away. Brassaï explains that for him, photography was the art of giving “things the chance to express themselves” (in Sayag 15). The psychological dimension he sees in inert things is ethnographically emblematic of surrealist ghostliness. From Spiritualism to Ethnography Ethnography superseded psychoanalysis as a scientific method for the surrealists in the 1930s, offering a new way to study the unknown and explore the psychic geography of people, habits, and objects through a marriage of science and art in the shape of photography. Like the Minotaur for whom they named their journal for this decade (1933–37),3 they began to think of human beings as not only living psychoanalytically with the duality of conscious and unconscious minds, symbolized by the Minotaur’s dual nature as animal and human, but also as living in a labyrinth that the receptive surrealist could not only survive but decode. Increasingly the “forest of symbols” by which they were surrounded extended beyond Paris and involved objects.4 Ethnography was the science that could help them understand better the environment in which they lived and their interactions with it. Brassaï was motivated by the belief that “we know more about the habits of the pygmy...