TANNING AT THE TATE

REFLECTIONS ON SURREALISM 


It is difficult to believe but we will soon be approaching the hundredth birthday of Surrealism, child of DADA and Freud, the most famous art movement of the 20th Century. From advertising to comic books and movie posters surrealist images are ubiquitous and ingrained into the culture. What precocious teenager did not have an Athena Salvador Dali poster on their wall? For a taste for surrealism was a short cut to showing that you were ‘deep’ and ‘arty.’
Iconic Dali Image
It’s very success was its greatest failure, when images adorn every Tube station platform or magazine advert they cease to be original, let alone shocking. So, it was with mixed feelings that I approached the Dorothea Tanning exhibition at the Tate.
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Given the rampant sexism that even now characterises the art world, it is perhaps understandable, if unforgivable, that I had only ever heard of Tanning as the wife of Max Ernst so that her work was/is entirely new to me. The exhibition proved to be a revelation, managing to be both original and genuinely disturbing. At its best Surrealism has the capacity to challenge reality unsettling and disturbing our settled views of the world.  And Tanning’s work is Surrealism at its best.
Of course, few questions feel as crass than “what is it about?’ Yet unless an image is not just a surprising, shocking or merely interesting collage of strange and unexpected images, then there are passions, ideas, desires, fears and anxieties behind the images. The Surrealist project is one of tension and unease anything else is merely novelty. There is an uneasy edge to Tanning’s work.
‘Tanning was born in the small town of Galesburg Illinois where she said “nothing happened but the wallpaper.”’ This was/is about as far away from the bohemian art world of New York, Paris and Berlin as it is possible to get. Yet it is perhaps this very upbringing that accounts for both her originality and her ability to imbue everyday domesticity with menace and tension. If nothing happened but the wallpaper, then in Tanning’s imagination it was wallpaper out of which burst babies and which the demons that hid behind the sofa emerged to claim the room as their own.
Dorothea Tanning Black Day
We now enter the fraught territory of what the paintings are ‘about. ‘Here alas the artist now departs the room, for she has no say now in what goes on between you and her art, for it is now you who create meaning, you decide what the painting or the sculpture is ‘about.’

DOROTHEA TANNING IS AT THE TATE MODERN 27 FEB – 9TH JUNE 2019



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