Surrealism’s return in a very surreal age

Rabid forms of nationalism are proliferating. Populist strongmen are taking their turn on the world stage. Meanwhile, big-tech companies are designing a future full of augmented reality devices and fantastical realms. Are we living through a reprise of the 1920s, when machines and despots were transforming everyday reality, and major artists embraced the Surrealist art movement as both escape and a means of explaining an increasingly incoherent world?

Certainly, if you consider what’s currently happening in visual arts, it appears that we are in a major Surrealist revival. The most prominent bellwether is the Venice Biennale, which opens to the public on April 23. The title of this year’s exhibition, “The Milk of Dreams,” is taken from that of a book by Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington that portrayed dreamscapes filled with disturbing images of headless children, vultures frozen in gelatin and human-eating machines. It is a terrifying vision but, as the biennale’s curator, Cecilia Alemani, tells us in her curatorial statement, it is also “a world set free, brimming with possibilities.”

Populist strongmen may be more ascendant than they’ve been since the days of the original Surrealists. But the art world has a redoubtable rebuttal, offering both escape and inspiration. Alemani has chosen a roster of mostly female and gender nonconforming artists, and included what is probably the most sizable non-Western and ethnically diverse contingent ever to participate in the biennale, or in any major international art exhibition for that matter. It is “a choice,” Alemani writes, “that reflects an international art scene full of creative ferment and a deliberate rethinking of man’s centrality in the history of art and contemporary culture.”

Shuvinai Ashoona, the celebrated Inuit artist, epitomizes Alemani’s curatorial agenda. Ashoona produces sculpture and paintings that address female empowerment and environmental destruction through images that include phantasmagoric hybrid forms of wildlife and women birthing planets — a radical departure from traditional Inuit art. Ashoona was born in 1961 and, although she is a familiar name in the Canadian art scene, it is only in recent years that she has begun to receive international recognition, having had her first solo show in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2020. Certainly, her appearance in the upcoming Venice Biennale should help cement her global reputation.

“The Milk of Dreams” is only the latest in a series of major art shows inspired by Surrealism, which from its inception was never a style but rather a revolutionary movement that sought to shatter the status quo through jarring juxtapositions: images of disembodied male and female organs; beings comprised of machine parts and human ones; netherworlds that exist between dream states and everyday reality; mixes of Western and non-Western motifs.

Surrealism has always been a truly international movement and, as such, it speaks to contemporary concerns with diversifying existing Western cultural cannons. A notable example is the sprawling “Surrealism Beyond Borders” show, currently on view at the Tate Modern in London. The exhibit, which spans the globe and more than a half-century of work dating from the movement’s beginnings in the 1920s, displays how many Western and non-Western artists employed Surrealist techniques to dismantle dominant Eurocentric hierarchies and esthetics.

Even as major institutions are revisiting and reinterpreting the history of the movement, prominent New York City art galleries are featuring the work of contemporary Surrealism-oriented artists such as Matthew Ronay, who recently had a major show at the Casey Kaplan gallery. Ronay’s colourful, psychedelic sculptures have been described as existing “between a primordial and futuristic state.” Currently on view in New York City’s Madison Square Park is the work of the African American Surrealist sculptor Hugh Hayden, who anthropomorphizes traditional American furniture in installations that call attention to social inequities and racism.

When one considers the cultural politics and agendas of many contemporary Surrealists, it is striking how much they echo those of the original vanguard. Indeed, Surrealism was ardently “woke,” long before the term even existed.

The seminal Surrealist 1931 Anti-Colonialist Exhibition, for example, was intended as a counterpoint to a contemporaneous government-sponsored exhibition celebrating French imperialism and is viewed by some art historians as the first prominent show to display how France subjugated Black and brown peoples through brutal violence and forced labour.

Surrealist art and poetry from the early 20th century can be ambiguous, but their manifestos could be as forceful as any coming from the Me Too or the Black Lives Matter movements. In a 1932 manifesto, a group of prominent Parisian Surrealists declared that France had “dismembered Europe, made mincemeat of Africa, polluted Oceania and ravaged whole tracts of Asia,” adding that they were “in favour of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and colonial form, into a civil war.”

Progenitors of Surrealism, such as the poet André Breton, also celebrated and found inspiration in non-Western art, at a time when artworks from Amazonia, Oceania and Africa were displayed for Western audiences more as anthropological curiosities than as esthetic objects capable of inspiring awe.

Breton had an extensive collection of masks from the Arctic Yu’pik people, to which he and his Surrealist collaborators ascribed mystical and magical powers that aligned with their fascination with the unconscious and the occult. Breton’s friend, the Italian-American painter Enrico Donati, kept one of Breton’s Yu’pik masks in his studio and he slept underneath another that he believed was a talisman for his psyche.

In subsequent years, the early European Surrealist devotees of Indigenous art have been taken to task by critics for ham-handed cultural appropriation, and some of their acquisitions were later revealed to be plundered property. One of Breton’s Indigenous headdresses was returned by his daughter in 2003, along with a $40,000 donation, to the First Nations community in Alert Bay, B.C., from which it had been seized in a 1921 raid.

Breton and his friends were borrowing from Haida, Yu’pik and other Indigenous communities, sometimes without knowing the provenance of the works, to revive an art scene they felt had become moribund. Nearly 100 years later, it is striking to see how Ashoona and other artists of colour are in turn deploying Surrealist-like dreamscapes populated by fantastic forms and creatures to both break Eurocentric cultural stereotypes and reinvigorate their own art traditions.

It is no coincidence that today’s art world is finding new significance in a movement spawned by artists who fled a war-torn Europe and were responding to an increasingly brutal, intolerant and irrational world. Indeed, considering the oppressive cultural forces on the march today, and the weight of another major pandemic, it seems apt that contemporary artists are using Surrealist techniques to keep the human spirit free and hopeful.