The surreal house

This exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery brought together many well known Surrealist works and some surprises. It contains a large number of artworks, films, photographs, architectural drawings, plans, sculptures and installations. Jane Alison, the curator, says in the catalogue that in planning the exhibition she thought of the gallery as a kind of house and wanted to take the visitor on an experiential journey through it. The viewer enters through a door next to Marcel Duchamp’s Fresh window in which the panes are made of polished leather so they reflect the gaze. The window is a key metaphor in the exhibition as the threshold between outside and inside, reality and dream, the rational and the irrational.

Some of the pieces that impressed me most were Rebecca Horn’s Concert for anarchy, an upside down piano that regularly spews out its keys in a cacophony of sound cleverly referencing confinement and escape. Donald Rodney’s tiny house made from his skin In the house of my father effectively revealed the fragility of home. Maurizio Cattelan’s Charlie don’t surf of a small figure of a boy pinned to the table by pencils through his hands was a chilling contemporary example of the wax figures found in early museums. While Edward Kienholz The wait initially seemed to be an installation of an old woman in her cosy parlour until you realised that she was just a construct of memories, bones and dust.

It was interesting to see some of Magritte’s paintings, especially Time transfixed which was much smaller than I had realised. There was a good selection of Francesca Woodman’s ethereal photographs. Edward Hopper’s House by the railroad was the model for the house in Psycho and the Addams Family so it was interesting to see the original here.

I found the films being shown very interesting probably because I had not seen them before. Jan Svankmajer’s Down to the cellar follows the labyrinthine journey of a young girl to collect potatoes from the cellar, while his Jabberwocky turns a dolls’ tea party into a cannibal feast. I had not considered Buster Keaton’s work as surrealistic but in Steamboat Bill Jr he uses the window as an active participant in the drama and in The scarecrow an uncanny motherless home is revealed. Maya Deren’s Meshes of the afternoon follows her dreamlike path through a house in which dream and reality gradually and fatefully come together.