Surrealism: The Peotry of Dreams

Anonymous, Photobooth portrait of André Breton with glasses c.1928–29, Gelatin silver print, 21.7 x 16.8cm, 
Purchased 2003, Collection: Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris 

Gallery of Modern Art

Southbank, Qld

11 June – 2 October 2011

Surrealism: drugged, drunk and grappling with a world in flux. Bracketed in time by Dada in the former and Abstract Expressionism in the later; Surrealism, in the main, occupied at least thirty years of political upheaval, intellectual abstraction and social change. Primarily a philosophical movement, it reflected the inherent situational schism felt by bourgeois intellectuals and provided a circumstantially legitimate trajectory through the obscurity left by the first World War. Rooted in the juvenile and reactionary anarchism of the Dadaists and utopian Marxist aspirations, the Surrealists essentially valued the individual. Add a dash of Freudian psychology and function moves from self to supra.

For Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), Surrealism is in vogue; boasting the exclusive Australian venue for a show comprising the proclaimed 'core' of the 'famed' Surrealism collection of the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris. Needless to say, for GOMA and Brisbane this is a pretty big thing and the museum has been blowing all the trumpets it can find. And sure, I suppose it is. The whole of Surrealism with its precursors and progeny: fifty-four artists spanning seventy years. With painting and sculpture and photography; drawing and collage and film. A truly multidisciplinary event. And all laid out in careful chronology. A tour de force of … well … Surrealism I guess.

And a layman like myself; for whom the twinkle of tinsel still catches the eye and big city lights are a little blinding, would see this as quite the event. Seventy years of art are laid out so matter-of-factly, in segmented rooms of palatable pieces. With large font didactics and interactive displays: no doubt more than I'd know what to do with.

So off I go. Full to the brim. With Man Rays and Dalis and Bretons. To go all around, and show what I have found, and profess that I know all about it. 'Till suddenly I find, with amaze in my mind, that at best it was no more than a tasting.

And though I might say, a more focused foray, would be better than big meal of fragments: a meal is a meal, and I'll say it with zeal, a meal is much better than nothing.

Iason Yannakos