Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction by David Hopkins

Author:David Hopkins
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2004-05-11T04:00:00+00:00

22. Meret Oppenheim, My Nurse, metal platter, shoes, string, and paper, 1936

If, returning to a contrast between Dada and Surrealism, we further compare Oppenheim’s My Nurse with a Duchamp readymade such as Fountain (Figure 3), it is apparent that Oppenheim’s Surrealist object openly insists on its psychological content while the Dada readymade mutely awaits our interpretation. Fountain has in fact been interpreted as a bi-gendered form, with its curves and the hole at the base giving a ‘feminine’ inflection to an otherwise ‘masculine’ receptacle. If the readymade might, ironically, be thought usable, were it not temporarily being designated as ‘art’, the Surrealist object proffers its own uselessness as something of potential value. Georges Bataille, who was a major critic of Surrealism’s romanticizing tendencies in the 1920s and 1930s, once derided the impotence of aesthetics, declaring ‘I challenge any art lover to love a canvas as much as a fetishist loves a shoe.’ In this context My Nurse could be seen as serving precisely the needs of fetishism rather than those of art.

This comparison establishes a clear division between Dadaist and Surrealist aesthetics. The readymade serves to collapse the distinction between art and non-art. It implicitly acknowledges that art is something to be contested on its own terms. By contrast, the Surrealist object complies with art’s conventions, however altered these may have become, in order to fulfil a new experiential function.

Nothing more powerfully illustrates the catalytic role envisaged for the Surrealist object than an incident famously recounted by André Breton in Mad Love (1937). Breton talks of how Alberto Giacometti had been facing an apparent psychological block in finishing the head of a sculpture, later to be called The Invisible Object. He and Breton had gone for one of their familiar Surrealist trawls of the Paris flea markets and had found themselves drawn inexplicably towards a peculiar metal half-mask which they were later to identify as a fencing mask. Giacometti later realized that the form of the object provided a solution as to how to complete the head of his sculpture. Here Breton is not so much talking of the Surrealist object as something that is closer to the Duchampian readymade, namely the ‘objet trouvé’ – the ‘found object’ which corresponds mysteriously to the dictates of ‘objective chance’. His point is that Giacometti’s unconscious desires had effectively predisposed him to finding the object. Breton would see romantic love functioning in an analogous manner. But the task of the Surrealist object was, in a sense, to render such a search unnecessary and to speak directly to our desires. Theoretically at least it serves to move us beyond aesthetics entirely.

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