This week I decided to try out some colour. Inspiration: the Vancouver Art Gallery had a substantial exhibition on Surrealism which I viewed no less than four times. I have to admit during my undergraduate in Art History I never focused on the Surrealist movement, focusing more on architecture; however I should have. I am the first to confess I have the habit of focusing on the realistic or logical arts. That being said, Surrealist art has persistently, slyly wormed itself into my awareness. I blame Dalí. A few years back, the Vancouver Art Gallery had the Monet to Dalí exhibition and the colours and brushwork of Dalí’s "The Dream" caught my attention. Of course I had seen images of it in class and knew enough to get by on a test, nevertheless seeing it in reality was something else. Later on in Berlin I went to the Salvador Dalí museum, which was mainly composed of his earlier works and sketches.
Last May, for my birthday my sister gave me a membership pass for the Vancouver Art Gallery and I went with my good friend Katie and we had quite a time trying to decipher the meaning of the Surrealist Exhibition “This is the Colour of my Dreams” and went for cupcakes after an hour and a half.
The following attempt, I decided to get an expert’s say on the whole matter. On Tuesday, the Art Gallery is open until 9PM and occasionally they have themed tours, often led by university professors. The tour I took focused on the influence of science and medicine on Surrealism. The main concept was many of the founding Surrealists had backgrounds in science and it deeply influenced them. I won’t get into it too much here, however the one point which really stuck with me was the explanation Surrealists rejected the real and the logical. During WWI many of these artists were exposed to the negative effects of the machine of war which too easily rationalizes the horrific activities demanded of soldiers through logic. Therefore the reaction was to reject the logical and focus on finding ones subconscious and arguably natural and pure thoughts.
Back on track, I returned to the exhibit two more times to revisit a few of my favorites such as: “This is the Colour of my Dreams” (1925) by Joan Miró, “Listen to the Living” (1941) by Kay Sage, “The Four Temperaments” (1946) by Kurt Seligmann, and the Cadavre Exquis and “Plein Ciel” (1947) by Yves Tanguy.
This all being said, yesterday I was particularly inspired by a pineapple at the produce market and with all best intentions to go home and reproduce a perfect image of this tropical fruit then in victory consume all sweet juicy victory. I got to about this point and I fell into some harsh artists’ melancholy. I was not feeling the allure of the pineapple anymore, the colours and shape were frustrating and I was nowhere near done.
I decided to resort to abstraction and let my subconscious determine the fate of the remaining expanse of white in front of me. Here is the final product:
Love it? Hate it? Life changing? Wondering where architecture comes in?
Ok! To tie things up, architecture if viewed as art in real four dimensional space has a long history of being symbolic and decorative from ancient Egyptian pyramids to Baroque palaces. Around the time of WWI and afterwards people no longer wanted to be reminded of the past which had caused so much destruction. Rather, plans were to be made straightforward with designs focused on logic, sanitation, and function. In other words, as my professor Dr. Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe put, they dropped the “macaroni” frivolousness (think back to the Yankee Doodle rhyme of your childhood). Le Corbusier stated “the home is a machine for living” and Mies van der Rohe declared “decoration is a crime”, which led to the starkness in modernism, evolving into the Brutalism style. Now this is me oversimplifying a very complex issue which had many factors and is not necessarily negative. My point: surrealist art and architecture split off at this point two opposite directions, consumed largely by the same people (oh for the sake of juxtaposition!). In recent decades, we have slowly welcomed decoration back into the architectural canon along with green space, new technology and other trends. I believe a balance of function and aesthetics is important in today’s design theory. Ugly buildings are unnecessary, uninspiring, and depreciate the worth of their neighborhood. Perhaps a little bit of frivolous subconscious wouldn’t be so bad in today’s designs as it may have a positive psychological effect on inhabitants and form creative answers to our many complex housing issues. Revolution through architecture?
