La Subversion des Images

Rulers, military strategists, political theorists, and religions make a habit of trying to change the world. In the first half of the twentieth century, an uncommon number of artists and art movements laid plans to do the same — not just to change art but to change human consciousness, perception, and the very nature of daily life. The Italian Futurists thought art had this power, so did Kazimir Malevich, and the Russian Futurists thought it could direct the will of the masses toward the world’s transformation. Richard Huelsenbeck, one of the fathers of Dada, wrote: “Dada means nothing. We want to change the world with nothing.” Le Corbusier believed architecture alone could alter life. The Surrealists were also true believers, and in fact they did make a major change, at least in the visual environment, but not quite the way they meant to.

La Subversion des images, a splendid exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, presented more than three hundred photographic images, plus some one hundred documents and a dozen fi lms, bountiful evidence of how important photography was to the Surrealists. The team of curators (Quentin Bajac, Clément Chéroux, Guillaume Le Gall, Michel Poivert, and Philippe-Alain Michaud) prodigally supplied little-known images: “disturbing objects” by Paul Nougé, a Belgian poet; pictures by Ghérasim Luca, a Romanian who in 1944–45 invented a process of cutting photographs into squares and reassembling them (his piecemeal, mostly naked women existed long before Robert Heineken’s Cliché Vary series of the 1970s); the French novelist Léo Malet’s 1936 “mirror objects,” in which he moved a mirror out from the middle in both directions across an innocent enough photo illustration — the exhibition’s wall text quotes Malet “discovering” secret “mouths and vaginas that open and close, muttering, shouting, screaming.”

Surrealist photography went public quite early. By the late 1920s and 1930s, Man Ray worked for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue (see his 1936 photograph of a model reclining before his painting of enormous lips floating in the sky), Dora Maar made advertising photographs, and Claude Cahun illustrated a children’s book. (Children, who do not clearly distinguish fantasy from reality in their first years, would seem to be an ideal audience for the less erotic versions of Surrealism; think of Alice in Wonderland.) Because photography transferred readily to print media and wide distribution, it was Surrealism’s most likely avenue to the public’s eye. But once commerce heartily embraced it, the Surrealists were dismayed. They played fast and loose with popular culture, especially in collage (following the Dadaists’ lead), but they didn’t want popular culture to play with them.

Surrealism’s public presence is still robust: advertising, animation, record covers (and art photography, encouraged by Photoshop) loudly broadcast its credos. The pronouncement by André Breton, the movement’s principal founder, that “it is through the power of images that, in time, real revolutions may well be brought about” has, in one sense, come true. Breton wanted to change life itself, which required changing ways of seeing, and ways of seeing did indeed change. Surrealism’s interest in the ideas of Sigmund Freud may even have abetted the dissemination of Freud’s revolutionary theories by inserting dreams, daydreams, and subconsciously driven free association into the public realm.