The recent exhibition at the Center Pompidou in Paris, La Subversion des images (the Subversion of Images) was one of the biggest photo shows I’ve ever seen. There was no official count of pictures on the walls or in the catalogue, but room after room was full of incredible objects – photos, films, magazines, drawings, and collages. The focus was Surrealism in photography and film, and the curators included just about everyone of merit who worked in the 1920s and 30s. All the stars were on display – Man Ray, Lee Miller, René Magritte, André Breton, Max Ernst, Claude Cahun, Luis Buñuel, Paul Elouard, Salvador Dali – in both famous and rarely seen examples. But there were also great pictures by artists who aren’t widely remembered. It was probably the best presentation Germaine Dulac, Eli Lotar, Georges Sadoul, Georges Hugnet (above), Jindrich Styrsky, and Victor Brauner have ever had. The emphasis – understandably – was on artists based in France. But other countries were well represented, from the United States to Russia.
It’s hard to do the Surrealists justice without showing pictures of naked breasts and bottoms, so it wasn’t at all surprising to see a healthy selection of nudes scattered throughout the galleries. But this was not a show that was content with things you already knew. About half way in, there was a ‘special’ room, separated from the rest by the kind of clear thick vinyl curtain usually used for meat lockers and walk in refrigerators, with a big red label outside warning adult content within. And when a Parisian museum warns visitors of ‘adult content,’ you know they mean business.
Pushing past the strips of vinyl and elbowing my way into the tiny room it concealed (it was very popular!), my eyes adjusted to a full-on Surrealist celebration (exploration? meditation?) of sex. Here were pictures that curators usually just whisper about. Man Ray’s ‘Seasons,’ for example, in which the artist and his lover, Kiki of Montparnasse, reveal themselves in four unashamed pornographic poses. If you ever wondered about the size, shape, or character of Man’s Manhood, or Kiki’s ability to receive it, all questions were answered in the display. Here too was a selection of Hans Bellmer photographs too frank for polite company. The ones made without dolls, such as Je suis Dieu, (I Am God), shot from below, close up and personal between a woman’s legs (and lovingly hand-colored!). Raoul Ubac’s picture of a tear-shaped lump of glass resting on a woman’s pubis was pretty tame by comparison. Fear not – he was also represented by his notorious ‘Album,’ a series of seven vignettes of various flavors of coitus, exquisitely gynecological in their detail. For a small room, there was an awful lot to see. As I looked around, visitors were shuffling uneasily from leg to leg, men and women alike, their eyes as big as saucers.
The centerpiece of the section was Man Ray’s ‘cinematic essay’ Two Women. If it had been made in San Fernando – and believe me it could have been – it would have had a much more colorful name. For now I’ll just call it, Two Free-Thinking Nude Women and Their Naughty, Naughty Appliance. I should probably work the word ‘fingers’ in their somewhere too, but you get the idea. I’m not a total letch so I didn’t watch the whole thing (it was pretty long), and besides, there is something weird that happens socially when XXX films are shown in a high-minded museum exhibition. But I saw enough to get the gist of it. There is no plot in the traditional sense. It’s basically just two women going at it – tip to tail, tail to tail, front to bottom, bottom/front, sitting, standing, lying down. Things happen. Vigorously. More than once.
The cynic in me sees this and says, ‘okay, fair play to you Man Ray. You were young and excitable, you convinced two women to “perform” for an “art project” — perfect cover!’ It was Paris, it was the 20s, he was young, they were willing – why not? But the strangest thing happens when you see Man Ray’s film and the other objects in the Pomidou’s Surrealist romper room. It actually starts to make sense.
You might think the pictures would be titillating, erotic, and exciting, but they’re not. Sure, there was bravado involved in breaking social taboos so absolutely, and I don’t doubt they had fun doing it. But there’s a legitimate point too. The stuff really is surreal. There is no sound in Man Ray’s film, the images are in black and white, and the actions are repetitive and more or less mechanical. What could be weirder, more transcendently not-of-this-world, less comprehensible and more unnerving than desensitized images of people engaged in sex acts? It actually works! It’s art.
Re-entering the other galleries after seeing the sex section, everything changes. One of the first things you see is Jean Painlevé’s fantastic 1927 film of an octopus swimming. It’s just shot after shot of an octopus traveling through water, crawling over rocks, squeezing into crevasses, inching suction cup by sticky suction cup over glass. It’s completely animal – the perfect complement to the sex pictures. Suddenly, everything else feels deeply biological too, humans and animals alike, and the show takes on a metaphysical dimension. The irrationality of existence, of being, of the bodies we inhabit, of the way we think, feel, behave – everything is thrown into question. It’s not just a question of tricks of the eye and defeated visual expectations, Surrealism’s calling card. Everything seems profoundly, deeply strange.
After seeing the sex room, the nudes in the show had a different meaning. They no longer felt like decorative forms, the way bodies so often do in painting from the Baroque on. They felt reductionist, stripped bare, awkward, and liminal. The truth about bodies was clearer. Their silliness, their imperfectness, the way they carry and imprison us.
Not every show needs hardcore porn to make it work, but I can honestly say Subversion des images was better for it. It certainly made me think. I wonder if any of the other folks in the room with me had the same reaction, or if they were aroused by all the ‘erotic’ imagery. If so, that would be pretty surreal too.
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