Exhibition review: Surrealism at the Tate St Ives
Whilst visiting the ‘Tate St Ives’ it was interesting to see
that amid the examples of naïve art with their more rudimentary expressions of
perspective, and Hepworth’s sculptural forms, were some Dali-esque surrealist
pieces. Centred in an environment where the art work is positioned to complement
its coastal surroundings, often with a quietude that reflects more classical
painting techniques, the idiosyncrasy of the gallery spacing allowed the
surrealist art to juxtapose its naturalistic neighbours.
Sir Roland Penrose’s ‘Le
Grand Jour’ was intriguing. Penrose himself had connections to Cornwall yet
unlike the modernist, earthy formations by Hepworth drawn from the geographical
textures of the landscape, he found exhilaration and urgency. In the painting
Penrose delineates how structural mapping in art can invoke a synthesis of
unrelated subjects; perhaps it is this geometry in the work that urges a viewer
to psychologically forge these interrelations between ‘fish’ and ‘ringmaster jacket’.
This harmonisation of the discrepant links to Penrose’s own sexual misconducts.
He viewed ‘Surrealism’ as not only an artistic movement but a “way of life”
which allowed him to have his “contrary instincts” working as one as he had
relations with Lee Miller and others. The indiscriminate nature of the painting
can therefore be viewed as typifying the irrationality of human existence and
our subconscious, psychological impulses; almost in the region of automatism.
Ithell Colquhoun’s ‘Ages
of Man’ also had a feel of automatism. The depiction of botanical tendrils
posing as organ-like shapes is an example of anthropomorphism. As she seems to
dissect human anatomy with the red and blue rivulets signifying male and female
life spans it becomes easier to make a connection with Jacques’ “Seven ages of
man” speech in Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’. The glass-like structures
painted between the tendrils suggest the stages of human growth, both physical
and cognitive.
Although I’ve interpreted both Penrose’s and Colquhoun’s
work in the context of both biographical and cultural influences, what is
important about surrealist art is that each individual viewer can see the art
differently; there is often no solid meaning. As Penrose stated himself: “the
images are unrelated to each other but by coming together like images in dreams
they produce new associations which can be interpreted in whatever way the
spectator may feel inclined.” And it is this viewer inclination and
subjectivity which gives formation to the symbolic texture of a piece; the
viewer is in control as ‘The Interpreter’.
This relationship between individual imagination and
Surrealism shares an affinity with literary theoretical practices, in
particular, reader-response theory. What is poignant about reader-response
theory is that it too makes clear that a literary piece of work is reliant upon
a reader’s own subjectivity to give it a symbolic construct. Wolfgang Iser in
his essay ‘The Reading Process: A
Phenomenological Approach’ brings light to “two poles” in a literary text:
the ‘artistic’ and the ‘aesthetic’. The ‘aesthetic’ points to the fact that a
text can only be fully realised by a reader’s own response to it, giving a text
its existence. The focus is on reader consciousness. Roland Barthes gave
prominence to this notion with his idea of “the birth of the reader”. He makes
the distinction of a text being ‘writerly’ when “the reader [is] no longer a
consumer but a producer of the text” “before the infinite play of the world is
traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system which
reduces the plurality of entrances.”
So when you are next looking at some art or reading a novel,
try to bear in mind that there shouldn’t be a “plasticized” meaning, but one
waiting to be forged by your own interpretative powers.
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