Surrealist Last Stands and Hangings: Why Louise Bourgeois' and Robert Gober's Feminist and Queer Uncanny Survive the Treachery of Art History Two concurrent exhibitions in New York at the end of 2014 prove that the Surrealist legacy still informs some of the most vital and psychologically compelling art of the late 20th century--as it still informs, albeit critically and via ironic realignments, a good deal of contemporary art today. The Heart Is Not A Metaphor, the Robert Gober retrospective at MoMA, and Suspensions, the small but enthralling exhibition of suspended sculptures by Louise Bourgeois at Cheim Read Gallery, both derive their power in large part from the near century-old Surrealist project of exposing and mediating the Uncanny . Or to put it in contemporary terms, both prove it is still possible to simulate the Uncanny in a culture tolerant of open sexuality with little need to secret away representations of flesh and genitalia within fetishistic stand-ins.
Finessing virtuoso compositions of the Uncanny in an age of open sexuality and within art world obsessed with The New is no small achievement, given that the Uncanny is a concept derived from the 19th-century German Idealist philosophy of Hegel and Schelling to explain experiences of discomfort. It is a notion refined by Freud at the turn of the 20th-century to suit his theory of neurosis that, in the hands of the Surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s, and particularly its leader, Andre Breton, expanded the Uncanny as the motivating principle and vision that drove the Surrealists to call for an anti-aesthetic revolution seeking the integration of a Convulsive Beauty within everyday life.
Through their art we can see that Bourgeois and Gober clearly consented (however intuitively or conceptually) to Schelling's definition of the Uncanny as the uncovering of phenomena for which we are unprepared. Better known is Freud's development of the Uncanny as our experience of phenomena that strikes us as simultaneously "familiar yet strange", particularly in those experiences of our awakening to desires that are repressed by moral authorities and thereby manifest as fetishistic (that is protective) condensations of the objects of desire, while also being their (equally protective) effacements--that erotic conflation of forbidden desire for random and impersonal genitalia with objects that could pass the inspection of moral authorities of the day--the fetishistic hat whose folds arouse memory of and desire for the furtive vulva; the cigar whose heft fills the void and yearning for the real but absent penis in the mouth.
Of course, Bourgeois and Gober, like other contemporary artists riveted to Surrealism, had to remake the Uncanny just as they had to revive Surrealism. The fundamental problem was that the fetish lost its power to command artistic production once The Pill and its resultant Sexual Revolution overtook the conservative moral climate of the 1960s. With sexuality now openly discussed and viewed, the Uncanny had to refer to something more than the fetish, and in the 1980s, the climate of sexual and gender activism would provide a new context for the Surrealist revolution. But I've gotten ahead of the narrative, as the legacy of Surrealism first has to be contended with as a viable departure for both artists, which the two exhibitions conveniently provide for us.
Through its reliance on the singular motif of the suspension sculptures of Louise Bourgeois, the Cheim Read Gallery compels our recognition of Bourgeoise' compulsion to render so many heavy objects weightless is in debt to one particular artist of the original Surrealist generation. I refer to her contemporary, Remedios Varos (1908 - 1963), among the few historically esteemed women among the Surrealists, although she is known primarily for her painting Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst's Office, painted in 1960. The depiction of a woman depositing a large droplet that seems to fit the Surrealist's fascination with some vague imagination of metaphysical protoplasm is a scathingly humorous foreshadowing of the feminist wave to slam the male preserve of Surrealism while signifying the source for the fierce protection of the male homosocial legislation we've come to call patriarchy. In post-Freudian, feminist terms, Varos' invocation indicts the associative sperm of her father and lovers. Most importantly, Varos, like Frida Kahlo, Lenora Carrington, Maya Deren, Meret Oppenheim and Lee Miller in collaboration with Man Ray, seizes the Surrealist's project of ferreting out the sexual fetishization of natural and man-made objects as a result of the social repression of natural sexual drives and turning it to her own liberating advantage as a woman, daughter and lover. The result is the ultimate feminist retaliation against the law of the father, if not the father and his sperm, is deposed of, for better or for worse.
If Varos begins the project of freeing herself from the iconography that limits her to being a vessel for male sperm and the complex of desires that men are taught to project onto her, Bourgeois takes this project to its full realization. The difference is that Bourgeois by all appearances transfers the project of self-liberation to the art world and the project of making art itself, specifically the problem with being a woman artist who has inherited a Surrealism that, as the canon of art history has framed it, fetishizes the bodies of women. If Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst inverts the traditional Oedipal drama in its depiction of a daughter releasing herself from the social valuations of and expectations for her imposed by her father and lovers, Bourgeois' suspensions expand on the Surrealist informe (the formlessness or preform of form) by freeing form and formlessness from the Surrealist project of fetishizing women. Many of Bourgeois' suspensions even resemble, if not mimic, Varos' droplet, which reinforces at least this viewer to regard Varos as anticipating the significance that body fluids would come to take on both as a motif of formlessness in flux and a material of art that so many feminists introduced into the vocabulary of 20th-century modulation of form and informe.
Gober even more prominently and successively exhibits his debt to René Magritte (1898-1967) for the simulated amputation and isolation of human body parts and their grafting to inanimate objects while partitioning them off from the world with walls that formally define and arrest vision even as they reference the plane of the painting on which they appear. Magritte particularly favored indicting the trompe l'oeil painting, what he regarded the most treacherous of images, by framing it within the real painting of his making so that it functioned punningly "parallel" to the real picture plane. Gober inventively quotes of Magritte pictorial pun even as he inverts the illusionism of trompe l'oeil painting by bringing it into the real space of sculpture. In real space, the trompe l'oeil painting ironically makes the wall "disappear" into the painting in deference to the way that Magritte makes the landscape and window disappear into the painting within a painting. Just as Magritte transubstantiates the sculptural illusion two-dimensionality, Gober transubstantiates the painted illusion three-dimensionally. Whereas Magritte's is an illusionistic mimicry of depth, Gober's is a mimicry of painted flatness.
Art historian Pepe Karmel in his essay for the exhibition, Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art http://www.lacma.org/magritte-essay, has treated this inversion further, and on which I cannot hope to improve. "What recalls Magritte in Gober's work is not just the juxtaposition of incongruous items, but also the obsessive attention to the material qualities of things and the revelation of an ominous aura surrounding everyday objects. Converting the literal space of the gallery into a symbolic arena, Gober extends and transforms the tradition of minimal and postminimal installation." With respect to Gober's 1991 installation at the Jeu de Paume and his 1992 installation at the Dia Center for the Arts, both of which covered all four walls of the exhibition space from floor to ceiling with elaborate paintings of forest settings, Karmel writes that Gober's decision "simultaneously to recreate this trompe l'oeil view and to subvert it recalls the canvases in which Magritte depicted a landscape painting set on an easel in front of a landscape, with the view on the canvas merging seamlessly into the "real" view around it. The breakdown of the border between representation and reality induces a kind of mental vertigo."
With such steep investment by both Bourgeois and Gober in the original Surrealist movement, it is off-putting to find nary a word has been written about either the MoMA or the Cheim Read exhibitions in terms of the sustained revitalization of the Surrealist aesthetics of the Uncanny and Convulsive Beauty both shows promote, or more significantly, that the two artists throughout their careers demonstrate great deference to the original Surrealist generation. But this has been the pattern over the decades. Despite the two artist's open admiration for the original movement, the art world heaps accolades on Bourgeois and Gober while exhibiting a resistance to their Surrealist identifications, if not wishfully exorcising those identification outright, while preferring to squeeze the artists uncomfortably within the post-Conceptual and post-Structuralist media- and irony-obsessed artistic paradigms that have taken hold of art since the 1970s. From the 1980s on there has been an air of anxiety surrounding, if not an unspoken proscription of, the association of the original Surrealist movement in relationship to Bourgeois' and Gober's art. In the 1980s, the anxiety was new and subtle, given that in the 1950s and 1960s to have one's art linked to Surrealism was a mark of pedigree, and as late as the 1970s artists such as Eva Hesse and Jonathan Borofsky could be discussed admirably in Surrealist contexts and terms. But from the 1980s on into the present, the poststructuralist and conceptualist biases that dismiss Surrealist concerns as unrealized and outdated has held sway.
Such depreciation is evident in the wall texts educating audiences at MoMA's Gober retrospective, which pointedly shun mention of Surrealism, Freud, the Uncanny and Convulsive Beauty. (The term 'surreal' appears but once in the MoMA wall texts, but as an incidental adjective that functions as one more synonym for 'strange'.) Although the texts play up the morally and emotionally lacerating significations abounding in Gober's work, they downplay any flattening of those significations that comparison with the Surrealists would make attendant. Perhaps this choice has been made so as not to offend those activists who champion Gober for his empathy with those who lost loved ones during to HIV-AIDS--a consideration the Surrealists would have denounced with considerable vitriol. The texts also reflect the curators' strivings to make the work's ethos contemporary. Instead of Freud, the curators on one wall text cite Winnicott, a post-Freudian psychoanalyst who came into prominence in the 1980s with a more thoroughly-scientific grounding favoring a clinically observed and tested basis to the theorization of the personality and its afflictions, while rejecting the largely speculative formation of Freud's conceptual metapsychology. Even in the gallery that features Gober's giant and largely literally-modeled and painted cigar in a central spot on the gallery floor, Freud goes unmentioned in the wall texts.
This is no small transference of valuation. Replacing Freud (and more pointedly, if discreetly, Lacan, who retains much that is essentially and structurally Freudian while having a profound impact on artists of a poststructural bent) with Winnicott, as the psycho-ideological center of contemporary American art imparts the sense that Freud is too obsolete to mention as a result of feminist, queer and transgender dissent against his hetero-patriarchal model of human health and disorder. It was Winnicott, after all, who introduced the anti-essentialist strain of analysis when he argued that it was the environment, not the complexes ingrained in the human subject, that was the topographical framework for the development of the individual personality and his or her integration of the human drives with presiding moral codes. In short, while mention of Winnicott's ideology is more in line with the requirements of feminist and LGBT sexual, moral and political re-socialization of sexual and gender difference even in the context of readdressing Surrealism, the neglect of Freud in a commentary on an artist so indebted to him, even if only through the Surrealists, can only be taken as willful cultural amnesia.
But cultural amnesia is not the correction required for the original Surrealists' suppression of gynarchy and homosexuality. While it is true that there is no mention of gender, sex, or the fetishization pertaining to either anywhere in Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifestos of 1924 and 1929, this omission, when considered together with the well-known homophobia of Breton, Dali, and lesser-known Surrealists, should be added to the long list of critiques proclaiming Surrealism to have failed on several fronts. Mention of the lapse in the MoMA exhibition would embolden Gober's standing for succeeding where certain of the Surrealists failed--most notably in terms of serving as an avant-garde vehicle dedicated to the overthrow of traditional categories of art. For Gober achieves the Surrealist agenda of politicizing art by doing the very thing the Surrealists neglected in their art. And that is representing the inner, personal experience of the Uncanny with a new and liberating visual language that is both emotionally therapeutic and politically primed for inspiring social action.
We can more easily forgive the commercial gallerists for lapsing into ahistorical accounts geared to distance their artists from historical legacies that are the art market's version of audience poison, while also making new artists appear significantly, if momentarily, perpetuating some semblance of the avant-garde to close the sale. After all, the power of art to effect scandal before the cultural audiences of the 1920s and 1930s came to seem quaint if not cliche for relying on a simplistic and pseudoscientific catharsis, especially as American and European audiences grew better educated and more sophisticated over the decades. And what can the artists and promoters of art do when the legitimacy of the avant-garde no longer rests on the Uncanny of Surrealism, given that the the Surrealists were most interested in--that of the fetish--can only be vitally aroused in a climate repression. Eliminate the suppression of the nude and its genitalia, and there is no need for the kind of fetishization that produces at least the erotic Uncanny in the culture at large. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, with pornography and explicit eroticism in art disseminated throughout Western civilization, artists still attached to the formal innovations that grew out of Surrealism found that only had dissent against political repression of women and LGBT individuals in the mainstream to vitalize Surrealist or quasi-Surrealist productions that ironically depend on cultural suppressions for their ideology of revolt.
But such rationalizations cannot justify the historical amnesia of a world-class museum dedicated to recording and delineating current canons of significant artistic production and taste no matter how much the museum exhibition and collection depends on the endowments of collector trustees who arguably benefit from rearrangement in the historical record. The lapse is especially curious given that such recent and renown museum exhibitions as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's 2007 spectacular, Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images , and the Centre Pompidou's extensive survey of sculpture in Le Surrealisme et L'Objet of 2013-14 both pivoted on the thesis that much contemporary art remains crucially indebted to Surrealism.
The LACMA and Pompidou shows do shed light on one possible rationale explaining why some curators, gallerists and collectors involved with the work of Bourgeois and Gober might wish to circumvent the climate of scandal that the original Surrealist productions sought out and produced. For however ingenious Bourgeois and Gober have been in revitalizing the Surrealist Uncanny in their art by aligning it with the culture of contemporary dissent, their art has never been particularly given to provoking scandal as much as it has been humorously, poignantly and politically instructive. This is in part due to the artists' restraint in representing genitalia or fetishistic stand-ins for genitalia, as neither artist is known for depicting explicit sexual acts. Moreover, however uncanny their use of the nude and genitalia is, the appearance of genitalia and fetishes in their work is simultaneously amusing for conveying formal puns (in deference to Freud, Magritte, Varos) and aesthetically conformed to compositional harmony. At the most, Bourgeois and Gober are preoccupied with the absurd association and arrangement of genitalia and fetishes which compensate for the more simple arrangements that were sufficient to produce the Uncanny for earlier generations.
In their recourse to sexual discretion, Bourgeois and Gober cannot be considered children of Georges Bataille, Breton's ideological and theoretical rival as much for his extreme disaffection with Surrealism, which he saw surrendering to the attentions of the bourgeoisie, as for his mock elaborations of a society that would be best suited to return to an orgiastic, even Sadean, sexuality of pagan ritualistic abandon. In terms of shock value, both Bourgeois and Gober have been surpassed by a succession of contemporaries, such as the Vienna Actionists, Carolee Schneemann, Karen Finley, Andres Serrano, Lynda Benglis and Robert Mapplethorpe, all of whom truly scandalized recent middle class audiences while awing more seasoned culturophiles with their art (and in Benglis's case with an Artforum ad of her posing nude while brandishing a dildo). This increased inability to scandalize the Western liberal and secular middle class audience inevitably accounts for a wishful disassociation with Surrealism on the part of some gallerists, curators, critics and artists who (ironically) nostalgically yearn for a renewed avant-garde with teeth that bite the hand that feeds it.
The plight of Surrealism's failure to scandalize today was central to the exhibition, Undercover Surrealism, mounted in 2006 at the Hayword Gallery in London by Surrealism scholars Dawn Ades and Simon Baker. The show was provocative enough to prompt The Guardian's Mark Hudson to summarize its contemporary context. "If the relevance of Surrealism itself is generally agreed to be at an all-time low, the influence of the deviant branch represented by [Georges] Bataille and [his journal] Documents, seems inexorably on the rise. A whole generation of younger would-be transgressor artists -- including the Chapman Brothers, Thomas Hirschhorn and Paul McCarthy -- cite Bataille as an influence." Indeed, with Breton and other Surrealists in disrepute, and with the spread of sexual liberalism, Bataille finally and posthumously attained the appreciation he'd been denied by earlier generations during his lifetime for promoting what was dismissed as sheer pornography. With Bataille's unbridled embrace of a new erotism in mind, scores of artists from the 1980s onward sought to locate a new politics of surrealism (now written with a lower case 's' to distance it from the original movement while signifying surrealism's new ubiquity in culture) and surrealist-derived artistic activism within a definition of convulsive beauty that, stripped of its function to sublimate art, breaks down the values of convention--such as gender and cultural identity--while seeking to deepen our comprehension of power and sexual relations in the world.
And yet Bourgeois and Gober have made art that has proven to sustain interest despite their imposition of aesthetic restraint. Of course so did Magritte, Dali, Ernst, De Chirico, and perhaps the greatest of Surrealists, Frida Kahlo. None indulge orgiastic displays, but all issued powerfully evocative and provocative compositions. Only Kahlo brought politics into her panting to the extent that Bourgeois and Gober bring it into their sculpture. But Bourgeois and Gober also bring to their sculpture the elegant, whimsical, metaphysical and morphologically astute punning on a level with Magritte, Dali, Ernst and De Chirico. Still, it is Bourgeois' and Gober's aestheticism that keeps curators and commentators coming back, while making them wary of burying the artists prematurely in the Surrealist family crypt.
Conversely, for artists and audiences unconcerned with the fickle art market, it is memory of how Bourgeois and Gober throughout the 1980s and 1990s made their art of dissent personal in a way that was foreign to Breton and Bataille that is most compelling. Bourgeois let it be known that in her life the suppression of the feminist principle began with her father and continued on through her marriage and motherhood. Gober progressed from a celebration and pride of coming out as a gay man only to find his hedonism overshadowed and crushed by the specter of HIV-AIDS and its neglect by the government and medical establishments. It was the most natural of transferences to project such severely limiting yet personal alienations and emotional lacerations onto an artist's parent Surrealism, especially given that artists such as Bourgeois and Gober could feel let down if not betrayed by those Surrealists who became known for an obsessively exploitive objectification of women's bodies and or a salient and virulent homophobia. It is for such a complicated legacy of contradictions that the activist artists of the 1980s and 1990s took up the project of effecting a critical psycho-sexual revitalization of the Surrealist Uncanny. And lest we forget, the artists who were waging the most virulent dissent against the institutional and popular agents of political suppression between the 1960s and the 1990s weren't the underclass that Bataille favored. It was the children of the middle classes who, during the 1970s brought the Vietnam War to a close, and during the Reagan-Bush administrations of the 1980s and 1990s brought the issues of sexuality, gender, reproduction, ethnicity and race to the streets, to the media, to the academies, and to the art world. In terms of revolutions, the dissent of the middle classes proved ultimately to be both more contagious and more effectual than anything dreamed of by the Surrealists' proletarian revolt.
There is also that aspect of the Surrealist legacy that informed the aesthetics brought to the art of dissent. However else the original Surrealist Revolution failed for being so successfully subsumed into and sublimated by the mainstream media, it directly and positively was the foundation on which all subsequent aesthetic theories and formal strategies of mid- to late-twentieth century art were elaborated. Abstract Expressionism, Combine Art, Pop Art, Happenings, Minimalism, Performance Art and Conceptualism all quoted, appropriated and departed from Surrealism. On the downside, such a profuse diffusion of Surrealist principles, lessons and exercises ultimately became so diluted within the art market that Surrealism was seen to be exhausted. As it turns out, Bourgeois's feminism and Gober's queer and AIDS activism were the catalysts timed to the resurrection and revitalization of the Surrealist Uncanny as a potent and salient agent of signification required to effect enlightenment through an art of aesthetic activism.
And yet it isn't merely for their dissent against late 20th-century political establishments that keeps Gober and Bourgeois from being reduced to the status of second- or third-generation surrealists who academically perpetuate the Uncanny or Convulsive Beauty. For both artists, the Uncanny and Convulsive Beauty are still to be arrived at through the working out of an individual's liberation from whatever is the current agency of cultural repression, just as it had been for the original Surrealists. The difference is, the potency of their work was now equally to be found in their renewed yet conceptualized aesthetics. And really, aesthetics had always held an important place in the Surrealist heart, however much the original movement under Breton proclaimed otherwise. The return to visual aesthetics reorients Bourgeoise and Gober location of the Uncanny not only in those obstacles and delaying tactics used by cultural authorities to circumvent the liberation and parity of women and LGBT individuals, they also considered the culture of ubiquitous consumption that held the populations of the Western capitalist democracies back from attaining a more sustaining democracy. Surrealist aesthetics also account for why Bourgeois and Gober have such an immediate effect on so large an audience--as do such artists as Cindy Sherman, Marina Abromavic, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.
If Bourgeois and Gober can be regarded both a Surrealist and a postSurrealist, it is because they are virtuosos in their modulation of the infinite capacity of the informe that exists in nature or culture, often as some identifiable form with or without human utility, and within which the artist sees some previously unrealized meaning or resemblance. (Think of the way that Man Ray and Lee Miller saw in the fetishized body of woman the informe that can be made to resemble the penis. Or in a less sexually-charged example, the way that a tribal African sculptor saw in a tree branch the informe of the human body or face to be released with the sculptor's chisel.) In much of Bourgeois' and Gober's work we can see the Surrealist employment of the informe overtaking the fetish in art. This is because their inform is freed of the fetishization of the male or female subject by the open display of the respective genitalia.
Bourgeois and Gober make conscious what Freud described as the unconscious effacement and displacement of the genital object, both the phallus and the vulva, by resisting the social convention of camouflaging the libidinal desire within a non-genital object made to resemble genitalia or some other body part. In place of the fetish, Bourgeois and Gober graft the recognizable genitalia to objects. The resultant conflation isn't a fetish because the fetish simultaneously stands in for the genital desired even as it hid the genital from view--or more accurately demolished the genital form while retaining only a formal if discreet resemblance to the genital while taking up its erotic charge. Both artists are keen to the wisdom that the fetish only has power in an culture of repression. In a society that openly displays sexuality either physically, or through the proxy of art and pornography, the fetish is without its required function of transferring the charge of the genitalia onto an object and essentially is thereby voided. Whereas the fetish is carried on in secret and shame, Bourgeois' and Gober's art enables us to openly gaze at genitalia grafted to objects whose purpose is to be sublimated by society as art.
In work such as Janus in a Leather Jacket, 1968, Bourgeois subjects the phallus to the same objectification and fetishization as the Surrealists did to the bulbous inform of the female breasts and buttocks. After all, if women's breasts can be grafted onto a beast such as the sphinx, griffin or harpy, as they were since antiquity and the Surrealists like the Symbolists before them quoted, why can't an imaginary object also receive male genital signification? Bourgeois took up the challenge with an explicitly and full-fledged mythopoetic bronze cast decades ahead of its time, while reaching back in time for a male mythical prototype to mimic. In Untitled Candle, 1991, with its simulated pubic hair or any of the 1991 beeswax leg and buttock sculptures with candle appendages, Gober condenses desire for the male body with mock fetishistic candles that parody the Surrealist's simulated condensation of arbitrary and dissociative objectification of the female body. These and other of the artists' works simultaneously submit to the Surrealist scrutiny of middle class conventions and turn the lens of scrutiny back at the Surrealists for their omissions of bias that betrayed the alleged automatism that was to replace conscious choice as the arbiter of Surrealist taste.
In this regard, both Bourgeois and Gober expose the prejudice behind the myth of the male Surrealist of the early and mid-20th-century by going back to the basic constitution of Surrealism, beginning with its principles of the informe and the fetish. By extrapolating the male and female genitalia and wielding them openly, instead of discreetly as did the oft-time stunningly prudish Surrealists, Bourgeois and Gober recharge the objectification of women's and men's bodies by incorporating the phallus imagery largely excluded from mid-20th century Surrealist production out of homophobic concerns. In this respect, Bourgeois and Gober takes Surrealism to its logical conclusion in ultimately collapsing traditionally-imposed gender and sexual representations compatible with feminism, queer and transgendered valuations that ultimately free the inform and fetish from the exclusive hetero-male valuations. In other words, the two artists achieve for all men and women what the Surrealist largely only accomplished for heterosexual men. They render the whole human subject and its fetishistic objectifications in one holistically destabilizing visual and conceptual ambiguity that makes all alternative readings of non-invasive sex and gender equal in the eyes of the artist.
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Finessing virtuoso compositions of the Uncanny in an age of open sexuality and within art world obsessed with The New is no small achievement, given that the Uncanny is a concept derived from the 19th-century German Idealist philosophy of Hegel and Schelling to explain experiences of discomfort. It is a notion refined by Freud at the turn of the 20th-century to suit his theory of neurosis that, in the hands of the Surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s, and particularly its leader, Andre Breton, expanded the Uncanny as the motivating principle and vision that drove the Surrealists to call for an anti-aesthetic revolution seeking the integration of a Convulsive Beauty within everyday life.
Through their art we can see that Bourgeois and Gober clearly consented (however intuitively or conceptually) to Schelling's definition of the Uncanny as the uncovering of phenomena for which we are unprepared. Better known is Freud's development of the Uncanny as our experience of phenomena that strikes us as simultaneously "familiar yet strange", particularly in those experiences of our awakening to desires that are repressed by moral authorities and thereby manifest as fetishistic (that is protective) condensations of the objects of desire, while also being their (equally protective) effacements--that erotic conflation of forbidden desire for random and impersonal genitalia with objects that could pass the inspection of moral authorities of the day--the fetishistic hat whose folds arouse memory of and desire for the furtive vulva; the cigar whose heft fills the void and yearning for the real but absent penis in the mouth.
Of course, Bourgeois and Gober, like other contemporary artists riveted to Surrealism, had to remake the Uncanny just as they had to revive Surrealism. The fundamental problem was that the fetish lost its power to command artistic production once The Pill and its resultant Sexual Revolution overtook the conservative moral climate of the 1960s. With sexuality now openly discussed and viewed, the Uncanny had to refer to something more than the fetish, and in the 1980s, the climate of sexual and gender activism would provide a new context for the Surrealist revolution. But I've gotten ahead of the narrative, as the legacy of Surrealism first has to be contended with as a viable departure for both artists, which the two exhibitions conveniently provide for us.
Through its reliance on the singular motif of the suspension sculptures of Louise Bourgeois, the Cheim Read Gallery compels our recognition of Bourgeoise' compulsion to render so many heavy objects weightless is in debt to one particular artist of the original Surrealist generation. I refer to her contemporary, Remedios Varos (1908 - 1963), among the few historically esteemed women among the Surrealists, although she is known primarily for her painting Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst's Office, painted in 1960. The depiction of a woman depositing a large droplet that seems to fit the Surrealist's fascination with some vague imagination of metaphysical protoplasm is a scathingly humorous foreshadowing of the feminist wave to slam the male preserve of Surrealism while signifying the source for the fierce protection of the male homosocial legislation we've come to call patriarchy. In post-Freudian, feminist terms, Varos' invocation indicts the associative sperm of her father and lovers. Most importantly, Varos, like Frida Kahlo, Lenora Carrington, Maya Deren, Meret Oppenheim and Lee Miller in collaboration with Man Ray, seizes the Surrealist's project of ferreting out the sexual fetishization of natural and man-made objects as a result of the social repression of natural sexual drives and turning it to her own liberating advantage as a woman, daughter and lover. The result is the ultimate feminist retaliation against the law of the father, if not the father and his sperm, is deposed of, for better or for worse.
If Varos begins the project of freeing herself from the iconography that limits her to being a vessel for male sperm and the complex of desires that men are taught to project onto her, Bourgeois takes this project to its full realization. The difference is that Bourgeois by all appearances transfers the project of self-liberation to the art world and the project of making art itself, specifically the problem with being a woman artist who has inherited a Surrealism that, as the canon of art history has framed it, fetishizes the bodies of women. If Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst inverts the traditional Oedipal drama in its depiction of a daughter releasing herself from the social valuations of and expectations for her imposed by her father and lovers, Bourgeois' suspensions expand on the Surrealist informe (the formlessness or preform of form) by freeing form and formlessness from the Surrealist project of fetishizing women. Many of Bourgeois' suspensions even resemble, if not mimic, Varos' droplet, which reinforces at least this viewer to regard Varos as anticipating the significance that body fluids would come to take on both as a motif of formlessness in flux and a material of art that so many feminists introduced into the vocabulary of 20th-century modulation of form and informe.
Gober even more prominently and successively exhibits his debt to René Magritte (1898-1967) for the simulated amputation and isolation of human body parts and their grafting to inanimate objects while partitioning them off from the world with walls that formally define and arrest vision even as they reference the plane of the painting on which they appear. Magritte particularly favored indicting the trompe l'oeil painting, what he regarded the most treacherous of images, by framing it within the real painting of his making so that it functioned punningly "parallel" to the real picture plane. Gober inventively quotes of Magritte pictorial pun even as he inverts the illusionism of trompe l'oeil painting by bringing it into the real space of sculpture. In real space, the trompe l'oeil painting ironically makes the wall "disappear" into the painting in deference to the way that Magritte makes the landscape and window disappear into the painting within a painting. Just as Magritte transubstantiates the sculptural illusion two-dimensionality, Gober transubstantiates the painted illusion three-dimensionally. Whereas Magritte's is an illusionistic mimicry of depth, Gober's is a mimicry of painted flatness.
Art historian Pepe Karmel in his essay for the exhibition, Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art http://www.lacma.org/magritte-essay, has treated this inversion further, and on which I cannot hope to improve. "What recalls Magritte in Gober's work is not just the juxtaposition of incongruous items, but also the obsessive attention to the material qualities of things and the revelation of an ominous aura surrounding everyday objects. Converting the literal space of the gallery into a symbolic arena, Gober extends and transforms the tradition of minimal and postminimal installation." With respect to Gober's 1991 installation at the Jeu de Paume and his 1992 installation at the Dia Center for the Arts, both of which covered all four walls of the exhibition space from floor to ceiling with elaborate paintings of forest settings, Karmel writes that Gober's decision "simultaneously to recreate this trompe l'oeil view and to subvert it recalls the canvases in which Magritte depicted a landscape painting set on an easel in front of a landscape, with the view on the canvas merging seamlessly into the "real" view around it. The breakdown of the border between representation and reality induces a kind of mental vertigo."
With such steep investment by both Bourgeois and Gober in the original Surrealist movement, it is off-putting to find nary a word has been written about either the MoMA or the Cheim Read exhibitions in terms of the sustained revitalization of the Surrealist aesthetics of the Uncanny and Convulsive Beauty both shows promote, or more significantly, that the two artists throughout their careers demonstrate great deference to the original Surrealist generation. But this has been the pattern over the decades. Despite the two artist's open admiration for the original movement, the art world heaps accolades on Bourgeois and Gober while exhibiting a resistance to their Surrealist identifications, if not wishfully exorcising those identification outright, while preferring to squeeze the artists uncomfortably within the post-Conceptual and post-Structuralist media- and irony-obsessed artistic paradigms that have taken hold of art since the 1970s. From the 1980s on there has been an air of anxiety surrounding, if not an unspoken proscription of, the association of the original Surrealist movement in relationship to Bourgeois' and Gober's art. In the 1980s, the anxiety was new and subtle, given that in the 1950s and 1960s to have one's art linked to Surrealism was a mark of pedigree, and as late as the 1970s artists such as Eva Hesse and Jonathan Borofsky could be discussed admirably in Surrealist contexts and terms. But from the 1980s on into the present, the poststructuralist and conceptualist biases that dismiss Surrealist concerns as unrealized and outdated has held sway.
Such depreciation is evident in the wall texts educating audiences at MoMA's Gober retrospective, which pointedly shun mention of Surrealism, Freud, the Uncanny and Convulsive Beauty. (The term 'surreal' appears but once in the MoMA wall texts, but as an incidental adjective that functions as one more synonym for 'strange'.) Although the texts play up the morally and emotionally lacerating significations abounding in Gober's work, they downplay any flattening of those significations that comparison with the Surrealists would make attendant. Perhaps this choice has been made so as not to offend those activists who champion Gober for his empathy with those who lost loved ones during to HIV-AIDS--a consideration the Surrealists would have denounced with considerable vitriol. The texts also reflect the curators' strivings to make the work's ethos contemporary. Instead of Freud, the curators on one wall text cite Winnicott, a post-Freudian psychoanalyst who came into prominence in the 1980s with a more thoroughly-scientific grounding favoring a clinically observed and tested basis to the theorization of the personality and its afflictions, while rejecting the largely speculative formation of Freud's conceptual metapsychology. Even in the gallery that features Gober's giant and largely literally-modeled and painted cigar in a central spot on the gallery floor, Freud goes unmentioned in the wall texts.
This is no small transference of valuation. Replacing Freud (and more pointedly, if discreetly, Lacan, who retains much that is essentially and structurally Freudian while having a profound impact on artists of a poststructural bent) with Winnicott, as the psycho-ideological center of contemporary American art imparts the sense that Freud is too obsolete to mention as a result of feminist, queer and transgender dissent against his hetero-patriarchal model of human health and disorder. It was Winnicott, after all, who introduced the anti-essentialist strain of analysis when he argued that it was the environment, not the complexes ingrained in the human subject, that was the topographical framework for the development of the individual personality and his or her integration of the human drives with presiding moral codes. In short, while mention of Winnicott's ideology is more in line with the requirements of feminist and LGBT sexual, moral and political re-socialization of sexual and gender difference even in the context of readdressing Surrealism, the neglect of Freud in a commentary on an artist so indebted to him, even if only through the Surrealists, can only be taken as willful cultural amnesia.
But cultural amnesia is not the correction required for the original Surrealists' suppression of gynarchy and homosexuality. While it is true that there is no mention of gender, sex, or the fetishization pertaining to either anywhere in Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifestos of 1924 and 1929, this omission, when considered together with the well-known homophobia of Breton, Dali, and lesser-known Surrealists, should be added to the long list of critiques proclaiming Surrealism to have failed on several fronts. Mention of the lapse in the MoMA exhibition would embolden Gober's standing for succeeding where certain of the Surrealists failed--most notably in terms of serving as an avant-garde vehicle dedicated to the overthrow of traditional categories of art. For Gober achieves the Surrealist agenda of politicizing art by doing the very thing the Surrealists neglected in their art. And that is representing the inner, personal experience of the Uncanny with a new and liberating visual language that is both emotionally therapeutic and politically primed for inspiring social action.
We can more easily forgive the commercial gallerists for lapsing into ahistorical accounts geared to distance their artists from historical legacies that are the art market's version of audience poison, while also making new artists appear significantly, if momentarily, perpetuating some semblance of the avant-garde to close the sale. After all, the power of art to effect scandal before the cultural audiences of the 1920s and 1930s came to seem quaint if not cliche for relying on a simplistic and pseudoscientific catharsis, especially as American and European audiences grew better educated and more sophisticated over the decades. And what can the artists and promoters of art do when the legitimacy of the avant-garde no longer rests on the Uncanny of Surrealism, given that the the Surrealists were most interested in--that of the fetish--can only be vitally aroused in a climate repression. Eliminate the suppression of the nude and its genitalia, and there is no need for the kind of fetishization that produces at least the erotic Uncanny in the culture at large. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, with pornography and explicit eroticism in art disseminated throughout Western civilization, artists still attached to the formal innovations that grew out of Surrealism found that only had dissent against political repression of women and LGBT individuals in the mainstream to vitalize Surrealist or quasi-Surrealist productions that ironically depend on cultural suppressions for their ideology of revolt.
But such rationalizations cannot justify the historical amnesia of a world-class museum dedicated to recording and delineating current canons of significant artistic production and taste no matter how much the museum exhibition and collection depends on the endowments of collector trustees who arguably benefit from rearrangement in the historical record. The lapse is especially curious given that such recent and renown museum exhibitions as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's 2007 spectacular, Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images , and the Centre Pompidou's extensive survey of sculpture in Le Surrealisme et L'Objet of 2013-14 both pivoted on the thesis that much contemporary art remains crucially indebted to Surrealism.
The LACMA and Pompidou shows do shed light on one possible rationale explaining why some curators, gallerists and collectors involved with the work of Bourgeois and Gober might wish to circumvent the climate of scandal that the original Surrealist productions sought out and produced. For however ingenious Bourgeois and Gober have been in revitalizing the Surrealist Uncanny in their art by aligning it with the culture of contemporary dissent, their art has never been particularly given to provoking scandal as much as it has been humorously, poignantly and politically instructive. This is in part due to the artists' restraint in representing genitalia or fetishistic stand-ins for genitalia, as neither artist is known for depicting explicit sexual acts. Moreover, however uncanny their use of the nude and genitalia is, the appearance of genitalia and fetishes in their work is simultaneously amusing for conveying formal puns (in deference to Freud, Magritte, Varos) and aesthetically conformed to compositional harmony. At the most, Bourgeois and Gober are preoccupied with the absurd association and arrangement of genitalia and fetishes which compensate for the more simple arrangements that were sufficient to produce the Uncanny for earlier generations.
In their recourse to sexual discretion, Bourgeois and Gober cannot be considered children of Georges Bataille, Breton's ideological and theoretical rival as much for his extreme disaffection with Surrealism, which he saw surrendering to the attentions of the bourgeoisie, as for his mock elaborations of a society that would be best suited to return to an orgiastic, even Sadean, sexuality of pagan ritualistic abandon. In terms of shock value, both Bourgeois and Gober have been surpassed by a succession of contemporaries, such as the Vienna Actionists, Carolee Schneemann, Karen Finley, Andres Serrano, Lynda Benglis and Robert Mapplethorpe, all of whom truly scandalized recent middle class audiences while awing more seasoned culturophiles with their art (and in Benglis's case with an Artforum ad of her posing nude while brandishing a dildo). This increased inability to scandalize the Western liberal and secular middle class audience inevitably accounts for a wishful disassociation with Surrealism on the part of some gallerists, curators, critics and artists who (ironically) nostalgically yearn for a renewed avant-garde with teeth that bite the hand that feeds it.
The plight of Surrealism's failure to scandalize today was central to the exhibition, Undercover Surrealism, mounted in 2006 at the Hayword Gallery in London by Surrealism scholars Dawn Ades and Simon Baker. The show was provocative enough to prompt The Guardian's Mark Hudson to summarize its contemporary context. "If the relevance of Surrealism itself is generally agreed to be at an all-time low, the influence of the deviant branch represented by [Georges] Bataille and [his journal] Documents, seems inexorably on the rise. A whole generation of younger would-be transgressor artists -- including the Chapman Brothers, Thomas Hirschhorn and Paul McCarthy -- cite Bataille as an influence." Indeed, with Breton and other Surrealists in disrepute, and with the spread of sexual liberalism, Bataille finally and posthumously attained the appreciation he'd been denied by earlier generations during his lifetime for promoting what was dismissed as sheer pornography. With Bataille's unbridled embrace of a new erotism in mind, scores of artists from the 1980s onward sought to locate a new politics of surrealism (now written with a lower case 's' to distance it from the original movement while signifying surrealism's new ubiquity in culture) and surrealist-derived artistic activism within a definition of convulsive beauty that, stripped of its function to sublimate art, breaks down the values of convention--such as gender and cultural identity--while seeking to deepen our comprehension of power and sexual relations in the world.
And yet Bourgeois and Gober have made art that has proven to sustain interest despite their imposition of aesthetic restraint. Of course so did Magritte, Dali, Ernst, De Chirico, and perhaps the greatest of Surrealists, Frida Kahlo. None indulge orgiastic displays, but all issued powerfully evocative and provocative compositions. Only Kahlo brought politics into her panting to the extent that Bourgeois and Gober bring it into their sculpture. But Bourgeois and Gober also bring to their sculpture the elegant, whimsical, metaphysical and morphologically astute punning on a level with Magritte, Dali, Ernst and De Chirico. Still, it is Bourgeois' and Gober's aestheticism that keeps curators and commentators coming back, while making them wary of burying the artists prematurely in the Surrealist family crypt.
Conversely, for artists and audiences unconcerned with the fickle art market, it is memory of how Bourgeois and Gober throughout the 1980s and 1990s made their art of dissent personal in a way that was foreign to Breton and Bataille that is most compelling. Bourgeois let it be known that in her life the suppression of the feminist principle began with her father and continued on through her marriage and motherhood. Gober progressed from a celebration and pride of coming out as a gay man only to find his hedonism overshadowed and crushed by the specter of HIV-AIDS and its neglect by the government and medical establishments. It was the most natural of transferences to project such severely limiting yet personal alienations and emotional lacerations onto an artist's parent Surrealism, especially given that artists such as Bourgeois and Gober could feel let down if not betrayed by those Surrealists who became known for an obsessively exploitive objectification of women's bodies and or a salient and virulent homophobia. It is for such a complicated legacy of contradictions that the activist artists of the 1980s and 1990s took up the project of effecting a critical psycho-sexual revitalization of the Surrealist Uncanny. And lest we forget, the artists who were waging the most virulent dissent against the institutional and popular agents of political suppression between the 1960s and the 1990s weren't the underclass that Bataille favored. It was the children of the middle classes who, during the 1970s brought the Vietnam War to a close, and during the Reagan-Bush administrations of the 1980s and 1990s brought the issues of sexuality, gender, reproduction, ethnicity and race to the streets, to the media, to the academies, and to the art world. In terms of revolutions, the dissent of the middle classes proved ultimately to be both more contagious and more effectual than anything dreamed of by the Surrealists' proletarian revolt.
There is also that aspect of the Surrealist legacy that informed the aesthetics brought to the art of dissent. However else the original Surrealist Revolution failed for being so successfully subsumed into and sublimated by the mainstream media, it directly and positively was the foundation on which all subsequent aesthetic theories and formal strategies of mid- to late-twentieth century art were elaborated. Abstract Expressionism, Combine Art, Pop Art, Happenings, Minimalism, Performance Art and Conceptualism all quoted, appropriated and departed from Surrealism. On the downside, such a profuse diffusion of Surrealist principles, lessons and exercises ultimately became so diluted within the art market that Surrealism was seen to be exhausted. As it turns out, Bourgeois's feminism and Gober's queer and AIDS activism were the catalysts timed to the resurrection and revitalization of the Surrealist Uncanny as a potent and salient agent of signification required to effect enlightenment through an art of aesthetic activism.
And yet it isn't merely for their dissent against late 20th-century political establishments that keeps Gober and Bourgeois from being reduced to the status of second- or third-generation surrealists who academically perpetuate the Uncanny or Convulsive Beauty. For both artists, the Uncanny and Convulsive Beauty are still to be arrived at through the working out of an individual's liberation from whatever is the current agency of cultural repression, just as it had been for the original Surrealists. The difference is, the potency of their work was now equally to be found in their renewed yet conceptualized aesthetics. And really, aesthetics had always held an important place in the Surrealist heart, however much the original movement under Breton proclaimed otherwise. The return to visual aesthetics reorients Bourgeoise and Gober location of the Uncanny not only in those obstacles and delaying tactics used by cultural authorities to circumvent the liberation and parity of women and LGBT individuals, they also considered the culture of ubiquitous consumption that held the populations of the Western capitalist democracies back from attaining a more sustaining democracy. Surrealist aesthetics also account for why Bourgeois and Gober have such an immediate effect on so large an audience--as do such artists as Cindy Sherman, Marina Abromavic, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.
If Bourgeois and Gober can be regarded both a Surrealist and a postSurrealist, it is because they are virtuosos in their modulation of the infinite capacity of the informe that exists in nature or culture, often as some identifiable form with or without human utility, and within which the artist sees some previously unrealized meaning or resemblance. (Think of the way that Man Ray and Lee Miller saw in the fetishized body of woman the informe that can be made to resemble the penis. Or in a less sexually-charged example, the way that a tribal African sculptor saw in a tree branch the informe of the human body or face to be released with the sculptor's chisel.) In much of Bourgeois' and Gober's work we can see the Surrealist employment of the informe overtaking the fetish in art. This is because their inform is freed of the fetishization of the male or female subject by the open display of the respective genitalia.
Bourgeois and Gober make conscious what Freud described as the unconscious effacement and displacement of the genital object, both the phallus and the vulva, by resisting the social convention of camouflaging the libidinal desire within a non-genital object made to resemble genitalia or some other body part. In place of the fetish, Bourgeois and Gober graft the recognizable genitalia to objects. The resultant conflation isn't a fetish because the fetish simultaneously stands in for the genital desired even as it hid the genital from view--or more accurately demolished the genital form while retaining only a formal if discreet resemblance to the genital while taking up its erotic charge. Both artists are keen to the wisdom that the fetish only has power in an culture of repression. In a society that openly displays sexuality either physically, or through the proxy of art and pornography, the fetish is without its required function of transferring the charge of the genitalia onto an object and essentially is thereby voided. Whereas the fetish is carried on in secret and shame, Bourgeois' and Gober's art enables us to openly gaze at genitalia grafted to objects whose purpose is to be sublimated by society as art.
In work such as Janus in a Leather Jacket, 1968, Bourgeois subjects the phallus to the same objectification and fetishization as the Surrealists did to the bulbous inform of the female breasts and buttocks. After all, if women's breasts can be grafted onto a beast such as the sphinx, griffin or harpy, as they were since antiquity and the Surrealists like the Symbolists before them quoted, why can't an imaginary object also receive male genital signification? Bourgeois took up the challenge with an explicitly and full-fledged mythopoetic bronze cast decades ahead of its time, while reaching back in time for a male mythical prototype to mimic. In Untitled Candle, 1991, with its simulated pubic hair or any of the 1991 beeswax leg and buttock sculptures with candle appendages, Gober condenses desire for the male body with mock fetishistic candles that parody the Surrealist's simulated condensation of arbitrary and dissociative objectification of the female body. These and other of the artists' works simultaneously submit to the Surrealist scrutiny of middle class conventions and turn the lens of scrutiny back at the Surrealists for their omissions of bias that betrayed the alleged automatism that was to replace conscious choice as the arbiter of Surrealist taste.
In this regard, both Bourgeois and Gober expose the prejudice behind the myth of the male Surrealist of the early and mid-20th-century by going back to the basic constitution of Surrealism, beginning with its principles of the informe and the fetish. By extrapolating the male and female genitalia and wielding them openly, instead of discreetly as did the oft-time stunningly prudish Surrealists, Bourgeois and Gober recharge the objectification of women's and men's bodies by incorporating the phallus imagery largely excluded from mid-20th century Surrealist production out of homophobic concerns. In this respect, Bourgeois and Gober takes Surrealism to its logical conclusion in ultimately collapsing traditionally-imposed gender and sexual representations compatible with feminism, queer and transgendered valuations that ultimately free the inform and fetish from the exclusive hetero-male valuations. In other words, the two artists achieve for all men and women what the Surrealist largely only accomplished for heterosexual men. They render the whole human subject and its fetishistic objectifications in one holistically destabilizing visual and conceptual ambiguity that makes all alternative readings of non-invasive sex and gender equal in the eyes of the artist.
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