The surrealist object and subject in materialism: notes on the understanding of the object in surrealism

This essay grew out of my curatorial work and my essay 'The Uncommon Object: Surrealist Concepts and Categories for the Material World', for the exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design in March 2007. The show's success (travelling to Spain and the US) prompted curators at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt a.M. to approach me for consultancy on an encyclopaedic exhibition on surrealist objects, held in 2011. Out of this curatorial consultancy developed the commission for the present essay, which explores how the first generation of surrealist writers and thinkers incorporated materialist discourses into their art practice and the conception of their movement. More broadly, it addresses the significance of materialist thinking for the perception and categorisation of objects within surrealist discourse. Materialism is today widely regarded as unfashionable and nostalgic in Anglo-American academia. For the understanding of modernist discourses, however, it is necessary to analyse and debate the contribution of (historical) materialist thought, as this approach had gained much currency in artistic circles at the beginning of the twentieth century (for concrete political as well as aesthetic reasons). In particular, to understand the surrealist object not simply as a subjective, psychologically coined artefact but as reflection on contemporary manufacture and quotidian objects, a materialist methodology is required. This essay develops a new strand within contemporary scholarship by projecting back a materialist discourse onto the genesis of objects within Surrealism. It does so in the context of the research into and display of actual, concrete objects (from sculptures to ready-mades), which were presented to an international museum audience. Across two international exhibitions, across five major institutions, the curatorial work and texts on the surrealist object have reached a large constituency of general public, fellow curators, and academic peers