Of course anyone with a brain in their head and a basic understanding of Surrealism already knows that it was never just a “radical avant-garde” in the first place, and the idea that it willingly dissolved itself into commercial culture after 1945 is as ludicrous as it is insulting. Not that we should be surprised: this exhibition is yet another self-satisfied attempt by curators and shop assistants to assimilate a movement they have failed to defeat. Counter-revolutionaries are requested to form an orderly queue at the tills when they go to buy their souvenir Dalí fridge magnets.
So perhaps we should really be waxing wroth about this exhibition. But as Groucho said, tell Roth to wax the Dean for a while. To try to engage the V&A in an argument over the true nature of Surrealism would be pointless: the Museum has surely made it clear enough already that it doesn’t give a shit anyway. We could print angry leaflets and write indignant letters to the press, but that at best would merely be to engage with them on their own PR-oriented terms, adding another voice to an already meaningless media babble. As SLAG has said before, Surrealism is not a discourse, but an activity. The best we can hope for is that the presence of genuinely Surrealist objects amid the commodities will provoke some visitors into an genuine encounter with the unknown, will make them feel the pull of their own utopian yearnings, and will lead them somehow out of the exhibition and into the tulgey wood of the Surrealist movement.
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Since publication of this blog posting we've already seen "surrealist interior decor" features in the weekend press. Last night two of SLAG's members received an email from a commissioning editor on the (Murdoch-owned) Sunday Times Style Magazine who "would be very grateful if you could enlighten me as to your output. And might you have any pictures of yourselves?" It seems that a media-friendly kind of surrealism-lite is indeed about to become fashionable for a while. But we confess we had not expected to be so directly targeted by the mainstream media ourselves. Needless to say, we declined the request. We wonder who else is on their email distribution list this week. What Surrealist would take the shilling?
Very unfortunate. Earlier this morning I was thinking about capitalism and its effects on the landscape--how there tends to be a monotony and uniformity, overall, which spreads relentlessly (to me, the idea of a "national forest" is pathetic in several ways, prominently that it subjugates the natural to something sanctioned by the state), and I can see how 'surrealism-lite' could be taken up as a form of entertainment, in order to distract from the monotony of it all.
BUT, anything as such whose aims are only visual will be nothing but a distraction--however "profound" the distraction is at times. It serves more as an apology than a revolution, and, as such, legless, it will last until the novelty wears off.
This might be the paranoiac in me, but maybe someone holding some things might be pushing for a Dali resurgance?
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