Don’t we feel french and hip? The 1938 International Surrealism Exhibiton in Paris was another seminal moment in installation art history. First of all, in light of my last post about “Womanhouse,” I would like to point out that I cannot find record of a single female artist who was shown at the 1938 surrealism exhibition, even though there were plenty of women surrealist artists active during this period. Don’t get me started.
The exhibition was organized by french authors Andre Breton and Paul Eluard. Marcel Duchamp curated. The technical crew included Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Wolfgang Paalen.
Up until then art had been shown primarily in white-walled rooms. Breton and Eluard wanted to up the ante and make the rooms reflect the paintings. They created an exhibit with three main rooms: the entryway, which had an installtion by Salvador Dali, “Rainy Taxi.” The ivy-laced car had a mannequin inside and was sprayed with water throughout the exhibition:
The next room was a large hallway, “The most beautiful streets in Paris,” filled with more mannequins and street signs:
The last room, designed by Duchamp, had hundreds of coal bags, filled with newspaper, hung from the ceiling. On the opening night of the exhibit, the lighting failed and they handed out flashlights to the patrons to view the art on the walls.
The opening was attended by a large contingent of high-society art hangers-on from all over the continent and the United States. Another element that the 1938 Surrealist Exhibition pioneered was the use of performance at an exhibition. Dali was responsible for actor Helene Vanel’s naked mud puddle performance.
This exhibit marked a turning point in the presentation of contemporary art. Nowadays any artist worth their weight in salt gives much thought to how and when their artwork is presented. Furthermore, installation art grew out of the thought behind this exhibition. The artist may create works for sale for a patron to take home, but an artist also can create a site-based sensory experience that cannot be recreated exactly the same way in a different location. Though an installation may travel from location to location, the artist must be present at each venue to install it.
Furthermore, adding an element of performance to the exhibition was way ahead of its time. After attending many, many art openings, I can say that adding an element of performance and surprise is always welcome to the rather one-note feel of a typical exhibition.
The 1938 Surrealist Exhibition paved the way for the performance and installation art the was so prevalent in the 1960s. We still are feeling its pulse in the interactive installations we are creating at WNMU using recently developed technology such as the arduino and IDEs such as Processing and PD. Art is no longer a framed object on a wall, or a sculpture on a pedestal, but a holistic experience.
Peter Bill is an Artist, Activist and Educator. He has, since learning photoshop v. 1.5, been interested in connecting under-represented communities with digital tools so their voices may be broadcast. He has been involved with large scale video projections, guerrilla art actions, and community building since the 90s.
Peter Bill's award winning paint and video landscapes have shown in such diverse venues as The Kitchen(NYC), the Henry Art Gallery(Seattle), FILE Festival(São Paulo, Brazil), and other international venues. He continues in his Oil paintings and video work to weave the painterly with the digital, pixels and paint, indigo and 191970 blue. He envisioned and realized the first time-lapse film festival in North America, the Gila Timelapse Film Festival and has curated and directed shows on three continents. "Art must be realized on the streets, as an agent of change and progress."
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Much of my art has been about creating a vessel, a space for meditation. Through my painting and video installations I hope to create a moment of quietude, a contemplation of this world we have built.
In my mural and documentary film work I have balanced a certain transcendentalism in my heart with my didactic scots-yankee bones. In the public sphere arts role is to inspire and provoke. Therefore in my mural projects I have attempted to involve the local community in the conception and realization of my projects. In my animations and short films I have attempted critiques of the bathetic apocalyptic culture we live in, the false utopia of the California landscape, the contested landscape of New Mexico, and tried to get to the situation on the ground in war torn Bosnia, among other subjects. The world is a complicated, granular place. We cannot oversimplify with our stories, but we can in their telling change opinions, and thus change the world for the better.
