What a festival galore! Enough to do in or up or even down and from all over, it would be hard for me to think of what has been left out. And actually, it is the case that nothing has been left out. Timothy Baum, who has gathered everything you can possibly imagine about Surrealism and its relation to collage, has now offered such a treat, such a banquet, in the halls of and in the mind—a very capacious mind it indeed is—of Emmanuel Di Donna. This marvel none of us mortals might have dreamed up in our right and even capaciously often wrong minds.
Why wrong? Because Surrealism is as likely and as happily to err on the side of wrong as on the side of right. To be Surrealist, of course, as we know, is to be on all sides of just about everything, and this exhibition—what an exhibition!—strains just about our entire ability for description. Oh yes, I went, and I went last night, and will surely be going again, but the plentifulness of the everything exhibited just about knocked me over, and at my age to be knocked over is not something entirely delightful. Except, this time, it was just metaphorically.
Let me point out, for no particular reason except that I'm speaking from the heart as a disabled and all the more enthusiastic consumer of these goods, that I could barely get around to all the rooms in this visually and verbally sumptuous exhibition and therefore will comment only on artworks that stood out. I have to point out that they all stood out, as, ironically, I’m now sitting to write this. They all stood out as if in capital letters as the primary examples one could ever find anywhere of such glorious—sumptuous is the word—this sumptuous gathering of goods. Goods not in the sense of commercial goods, but visual and lasting, way beyond commercial goods. Now let me say a few things that stood out for me, but because there’s no way in this review or in any other review, that I could even begin to expound on it all. For such an adventure there’s an impossibility of explaining what we are seeing except by saying both that it is too much and yet it’s just enough.
No, I could not see it all, and in a way I’m very glad because that means I will have many reasons to go back. And right now, before uttering (well, in print) one more word let me say that if there is a show you want to go back to, or you want to want to go back to, this is the one. I have written about many Surrealist shows, being an enthusiastic Surrealist myself, but let me just pick out a few things here, without a promise to not come back—no, with the repeated promise to come back—but right now and right here I want to say this.
Okay, I know it starts (and ends) with Gala Dalí, the wife of Salvador Dalí, and I have to say that this is not probably the place, but I’ll say it anyway, that I often saw Salvador in the South of France near my very own cabanon near Carpentras in the Vaucluse, and Salvador Dalí and that house were continuous in my mind. So Salvador, the great miraculous Salvador, gave his whole being and his whole spirit—and good God, was there a lot of spirit to this thing. Let me say “thing,” because I don’t know in what way one can describe Surrealism, except as this “thing.” And all the good senses of “thing” because it is the one element that can convene the whole universe, that is what I want to convene right now to talk about this exhibition we need to celebrate here, without going on further.
First, I need to talk about not just Jacqueline Lamba, André Breton’s wife whom I loved for years and years, but her daughter Aube Elléouêt whom I also loved, and whom I wish to celebrate in this celebration of her parents.
I could stop anywhere in this exhibition and go on for hours but let me choose a few places because that’s the only way to get my point across, and I have so many points to get across that I won’t of course get to them all but just a few.
Primarily, I need to say how magnificent it is this whole exhibition, to have everything together; now you’re going to say we don’t have everything together, but no we have an awful lot a damned awful lot together and let me celebrate what is here. I can’t think of anything missing. I have to start—how can I not start?—with Joan Miró? Because for me, and not just for me, for all of us he has been able, with the smallest traces to put in an enormous shape the everything the everything about Surrealism and about art.
I’m referencing, since I think that details sometimes matter rather a lot, a promenade label on a glass, untitled but so magnificently sparse as to be crowded with thoughts and feelings. And let me say right now that that is the way Surrealism is for me: it is crowded with emptiness, it is an emptiness full of everything.
Let me stop right there and start a new paragraph. Here and now, how not to mention Marcel Duchamp? I think that in any way of talking about anything in art marked as modern, we have to invoke Marcel Duchamp, the founder of so much. Maybe this is not the place to tell this anecdote, but I will anyway. When, bored, I was leaving a 1966 exhibition of Surrealism, I was in the elevator with Marcel Duchamp. He had left the gathering saying No. No. That was all he said when the moderator Haskell Block had asked if he wanted to say something, and that was his complete answer. Pretty complete, I thought, and I so admired it, that we got to talking about it in the elevator. Great experience with the super-great guy.
In closing I just need to point out the things I most loved here. I think if there’s one thing we want to celebrate in Surrealism it is joy. Throughout all the wanderings and mis-wanderings I’ve done in Surrealism that is the thing I want to stick to. Joy.
[What, you don’t see the sadness of everything?]
[Oh, you bet the hell I do, but Surrealism somehow gives you the opportunity to go on to something else, and that is what I want to celebrate, right in this moment.]
Of course, I know very well, and am reveling in this catalogue, the wonderfully fraught images, say, of the side of the sea, or the shipwreck in the night of the early thirties. Sad and ultra-magnificently disastrous. Ah, there are many more, but I don’t want to eat up the entire space that anyone has to talk about this fantastic exhibition to which we will all return.
Quite as we will all return to in Surrealism, which is always about beginnings and never about endings. As indeed, I didn’t think that I wouldn’t have spent my now very long life working in the fields of and caring about the products of Surrealism. Here they are all brilliantly chosen, brilliantly photographed, brilliantly displayed. Some miraculous simplicity of handling, in the enormous magnificence of viewing, has taken and is taking place, and the joy of that is what I must finally celebrate now with all my heart and mind. Thank you, all of you here present.