Interior Design Blog
The Surreal House
July 20, 2010
Kimberly Chen and Jordan Paragpuri, Blueprint
The image of the home has been traditionally represented within the cultural sphere as the safe haven, a realm of security, stability and comfort. However, The Surreal House, at the Barbican this summer, capsizes all of these notions. All that is familiar becomes unsettlingly wrung, distorted, melted and torn apart.
Sculptures, photographs, paintings and films depict everyday objects subverting the roles and characteristics that they usually possess. Furniture juts out at awkward angles; faces become blurred as domineering furnishings, a fireplace, and even wallpaper, take precedence over human identity. The self becomes lost in the chaotic confusion of malfunctioning, erratic and ill-behaved domestic objects.
The Surreal House opens with windows: an unconventional entrance, and one that immediately shows the gulf between the surrealist idea of the house and the functional, modernist conception. It is almost entirely hidden from the outside, the only hint of its presence being the sign that points into a dark doorway; consequently, as one ventures further within its labyrinthine depths, a growing sense of wonderment at its scale emerges. The Surreal House is far larger than expected, even extending up to a second floor that can pass almost entirely unnoticed until one reaches the end of the first.
The curators have made an intelligent choice over the use of sound, as a multitude of different voices and sounds from various films situated in a range of locations are allowed to collide and overlap each other creating an atmospheric, confusing and haunting effect.
Rebecca Horn's Concert for Anarchy, 1990 (above) hangs from the ceiling, and collapses into an extreme and unfeasible state of disrepair with a musical crash every two minutes before slowly folding itself back up again. At first, it is almost impossible to recognise as a piano; however, the light of realisation brings a smile to the face. The exhibition certainly succeeds in disconcerting and surprising the viewer with its presentation of the familiar in unfamiliar garb.
Within the tall, black walls, unsettling items of 'furniture' such as Rachel Whiteread's Untitled (Black Bath), 1996 (below) or Giacometti's 1948 chandelier, Lustre, set the mood as dark and disturbing, evoking death and entrapment. Though the light is generally subdued, recalling the fearful descriptions of night from Macbeth, some exhibits, such as Lustre, are brightly illuminated to give them vast, spidery shadows and a distinct aura of menace.
The various displays produce a mixture of different moods. For instance, Jan Švankmajer's 1971 film, Jabberwocky, is amusing and darkly humorous, in what the exhibition describes as a 'wicked comedy'. One such aspect from the film includes children's wooden blocks rapidly manoeuvring themselves into miniature cities, and then becoming immediately demolished, rebuilt and dismantled yet again. Whilst, other displays are purely sinister, Maurizio Cattelan's Charlie Don't Surf, 1997 (above) is a mannequin of a child at his school desk where malevolent pencils pierce the palms of the child's hands. The exhibition both draws you in and repels you away in equal measure in this unnervingly bizarre, yet absorbingly wonderful, world of surrealism.
Barbican Art Gallery 10 June-12 September
Comments
I really like the modern, minimalistic design in these pictures. Great!
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