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Object Lessons: Surrealist Art, Surrealist Politics
- Modernism/modernity
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 12, Number 1, January 2005
- pp. 175-181
- 10.1353/mod.2005.0040
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPModernism/modernity 12.1 (2005) 175-181
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Object Lessons:
Surrealist Art, Surrealist Politics
In a 1929 photograph by the Belgian surrealist Paul Nougé entitled La naissance de l'objet [The Birth of the Object], members of the Belgian surrealist group stare in concert at a fixed point on the wall of a petit-bourgeois sitting-room (Fig. 1). Since it is not immediately clear what it is they are gathered together to observe, the photograph's title raises questions about what kind of object is being born—or conceived—in the image.
On the one hand, Nougé's photograph excludes its viewers from the spectacle witnessed by the surrealist group, suggesting that this "object" is something whose concealment, or whose mystery, might be central to its hold upon them. On the other hand, the image's focus on the huddled bodies of the surrealist witnesses makes their absorption a central feature of the photograph; their act of looking dramatizes the [End Page 175] birth of "the object" as the result, or at least the occasion, of a collective avant-garde practice. Does the group of onlookers owe its existence to the object that fascinates them, or does the object—whatever it may be—owe its existence to the onlookers, including the camera and ourselves, whose gaze produces it?
Click for larger view | Figure 1 Paul Nougé, La naissance de l'objet [The Birth of the Object], from The Subversion of Images. © 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels. |
By both concealing the object of the group's attention and framing this attention as its central object, Nougé's photograph poses questions useful to the study of the surrealist movement in general: what, precisely, is surrealism's object? That is, why was the surrealist movement so fascinated by objects? And did this interest have an object? In the material sense, Nougé's photograph demands that we consider the material status of the hidden target of the group's attention. It also asks that we examine the space this group inhabits, the physical quality of their bodies, and, through our own identification with their gaze, the photograph itself as a material thing. At the same time, "La naissance de l'objet" asks a more purposive question: to what end did the members of the surrealist movement pursue such collective practices? Nougé's photograph asks that we consider whether surrealism's play of fascination is merely a light-hearted game of hide-and-seek, or whether such collective practices bear more substantial philosophical or political consequences.
Nougé's photograph, described in passing in David Bate's Photography and Surrealism , articulates concerns central to a number of recent works of scholarship dealing with the political ramifications of surrealist art. Each of the four critical works discussed here strives to assess the political use-value of the objects gathered and produced by members of the surrealist movement [End Page 176] during the interwar years. These studies, the work of art historians and museum curators, move beyond the aesthetic consideration of surrealist poems and paintings, in order to address broader concerns about the epistemological and political function of surrealist and avant-garde creative practices; they will thus be of interest to literary scholars and theorists of French thought between the wars as well.
The surrealist practice of making and thinking about objects—whether flea-market finds, trinkets, artifacts, totems, or assemblages—bears an intellectual genealogy that draws from the critical apparatus of Marcel Duchamp's readymades, from the psychoanalytic...
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