art and allusion

Taboo: Notes from Session 4 of Exploring Surrealism: Chance-Dream-Desire-Taboo

Notes from the final session of Chance-Dream-Desire-Taboo

What is a taboo? Something that is prohibited by a particular society, culture or subculture. Not everything that is prohibited merits the term 'taboo'. Taboo carries with it a particular kind of  abhorrence and those who break taboos are usually ostracised.  In discussion some people suggested there was a distinction to be made between very widely held taboos (e.g. against incest) which might have evolutionary explanations. and those which were much more local, idiosyncratic and obviously socially determined.

Religions often have taboos - some dietary. There are also many taboos connected with particular kinds of sexuality and sexual acts, such as paedophilia, incest (more on this here), necrophilia, bestiality and so on.

Freud connects taboo with the unconscious. The reason for their being a taboo against, for example, a father having sex with his daughter, is that at some unconscious level both might desire this.

The Surrealists, as part of their project of unleashing desire, engaged freely with taboos. Many of the Surealists approved the work of the Marquis de Sade which was famous for its almost mathematical working through and inversion of the various sexual taboos. Perhaps the most extreme examples of this tradition occur in George Bataille's The Story of the Eye which is a scatological novella in which, for example, a couple run over a body, almost decapitating its head, revel in the beauty of the torn flesh, and then engage in a masturbatory scene that involves urination. The climax of the book is the murder of a priest while he is being raped by a woman, who then gets her accomplice to cut out his eye and insert it into her vagina. Here Bataille is self-consciously disgusting the reader with his provocative descriptions. The artists Hans Bellmer drew illustrations for this book. .

Bellmer is, however, more famous for his photographs of composite dolls (dolls made up by joining parts from other dolls), many of which are, broken or twisted in what looks to have been an act of sexual violence (there is a very interesting article about Bellmer by Sue Taylor here). Bellmer's doll photographs are included in the final room of the Surreal Things Exhibition. These are more subtle engagements with taboos than his illustrations for The Story of the Eye. But they nevertheless maintain the power to shock in their combination of violence and perhaps even implied paedophilia. They are also fascinating and uncanny (exploiting the Surrealist's familiar trope of using mannequins for their near-living qualities). Their effect on viewers is probably largely at an unconscious level.

The discussion of the Surrealists' use of taboo led on to questions about the limits on artistic expression, specifically the circumstances in which it might be approrpriate to censor a work of art. Plato famously censored representational art both on the grounds that it was deceptive (because it did not picture True Reality adequately) and, more pertinently here, because some art had a pernicious effect on the audience or performer (as, for example, when an actor reads a first person account of evil). The Surrealists' open depiction of taboo acts and topics was, they believed, a prophylactic against these things producing evil effects; but it could be argued that they might just as easily be a trigger to some evil...

John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859) is the classic defence of the liberal idea that free expression brings with it many benefits, but that some limits must still be put on it, namely it should be limited when there is a risk that the expression will lead to someone else being harmed. The relevant chapter is here. In his example, you can complain in a newspaper article about corn dealers pushing up the prices, but if you stand with a placard reading 'Corn Dealers Are Starvers of the Poor' on the steps of a corndealer's house before an angry mob, this is an incitement to violence and can appropriately be prevented. Mill was largely concerned with the written and spoken word, and notoriously was somewhat imprecise about what 'harm' meant (though he did take pains to argue that its causing offence was not sufficient justification for anything being censored). In contrast with Mill, some religious believers argue that anything that offends against their religion should be suppressed. When Mayor of New York City, Giuliani in 1999 took legal action against the display of Chris Ofili's picture of Mary in Brooklyn on the grounds that his use of cut out pornographic photographs and elephant dung in the pictures was disrespectful to Catholocism, this was an example of religious offence being used as justification for artistic censorship of publicly funded galleries. Other famously provocative art works such as Serrano's 'Piss Christ', Salman Rushdie's  novel The Satanic Verses, and the play 'Behtzi' have provoked a similar backlash.

One major difficulty in this area is that art as we know it now frequently works in opposition to the status quo (social and artistic - see, fo rexample,the list of visual artists linked at the end of this piece on taboo) - challenging it, mocking it, parodying it, presenting alternative visions: we should expect it to be challenging and some art would not achieve its aims if it weren't permitted to shock...Furthermore some people see the freedom to challenge prevailing views and attitudes as a basic pre-requisite for a successful democracy: without the possiblity of presenting alternatives, and ridiculing dearly-held views (even if ultimately the prevailing views prove correct), there won't be the free market in ideas which is necessary for a flourishing democratic society.

Notes from Session One: Chance

Notes from Session Two: Dream

Notes from Session Three: Desire

Exploring Surrealism: Notes from Session 3 - Desire

Exploring Surrealism: Chance-Dream-Desire-Taboo

We touched on many of the Freudian aspects of Desire in relation to Dreams in Session 2. For Session 3 we discussed the nature of human desire as a way of bringing out easily overlooked aspects of the Surreal Things exhibition. If anyone wants to follow up the relationship between Freud and the Surrealists in relation to desire, the cataloge from the Tate exhibition Desire Unbound is a good place to start.

We began with a discussion of whether animals can be said to 'desire' anything. Opinions differed, but many of us felt that the concept of desire implied a sophisticated level of conscious (as well as unconscious) functioning and that language use led to a difference between a desire and a drive.

In the realm of sexual desire, the physiological and the cognitive aspects are both important. Sexual desire isn't simply an innate drive to procreate but involves cultural and autobiographical apsects. The philosopher Thomas Nagel gave an interesting account of what could be seen as a paradigm case of sexual desire in his article 'Sexual Perversion' (reprinted in his collection of essays Mortal Questions. For Nagel sexual desire involves an escalating reciprocity requiring a high level of self and other awareness. The individual becomes aroused not just by the sight of someone he or she desires, but by the knowledge that looking at that person is instrumental in that person becoming aroused him/herself (and vice versa). Nagel suggests that this account of sexual desire helps to explain what sexual perversion is (though he does not use the term 'perversion' as one of moral censure - on my reading, his point is that  the reasons why some perversions are immoral is not simply that they are perversions): someone, who for example, is a necrophiliac, is engaging in perverted sexual desire because there is (unless that person is a medium, perhaps) no possibility of reciprocity of arousal of the kind he outlines.

Within the final room of the Surreal Things exhibition, we looked at some of the ways in which Surrealist artists explored Sexual Desire. It was difficult to find any examples of the kind of escalating reciprocity that Nagel described. We considered the question of whether for many  the Surrealists 'Sexual Desire' meant male heterosexual desire for a young woman whose look did not meet his gaze. Desire was often represented as desire for part of the body, or by a symbol of a part of the body, and for mannequins who, while they exhibited the quality of the uncanny, also left no possibility for reciprocity. We discussed the question of whether this attitude to desire was a liberating depiction (or in cases symbolisation) of what lies within the unconscious, or perhaps evidence of  a pessimistic view of human sexuality.

For Germaine Greer's view that the Surrealists may have used women simply to fulfill their erotic fantasies, see this article 'Surrealism: Double Vision'. There are a number of robust replies to it if you scroll down under the article here.

Notes from Session Two of Chance-Dream-Desire-Taboo

CHANCE-DREAM-DESIRE-TABOO

Notes from Session Two: DREAM

[Notes from Session One: CHANCE are here]

Can you tell if you are dreaming now? At first glance it seems obvious that you can. But when pressed, most people recognize that it is extremely difficult to eliminate all doubt about this (though you very probably are awake), partly because of the phenomenon of false awakenings - dreams in which you dream that you have woken up.

This was a question René Descartes posed himself in his first Meditation, and at that point in his argument came to the surprising conclusion that he couldn't be absolutely sure that he wasn't dreaming...This was part of the sceptical phase of his Meditations where he is pushing doubt to its limits: by the sixth Meditation he points to two features of dreams that allow us to distinguish them from reality: 1) Dreams don't usually connect up in the way that our waking experience does, and 2) Dream content often includes absurd actions that defy the laws of nature.

For an overview of Descartes' Meditations, listen here.

The point of this is in part that dreams are not necessarily always dreamlike. However when critics talk of the Surrealists use of dream imagery etc. what they usually mean is that Surrealist artists drew freely on the kinds of imagery that paradigm dreams include, and in particular on the unexpected juxtapositions that may occur in dreams but rarely do so in reality and the absurd things tha happen in dreams.

Freud on Dreams

'The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs.' (from The Interpretation of Dreams)

André Breton wrote of 'the omnipotence of the dream' for the Surrealists. There were different views about Surrealism's relation to dreams. Breton himself described a dream of finding a book with a gnome-like statue for a spine and black wollen pages...he thought of remaking the object seen in the dream 'I want to have a few articles of the same kind made, as their effect would be puzzling and disturbing'. In contrast, Max Ernst described the mission of Surrealism not to re-create dream objects or images (since that would be a kind of naive naturalism), but rather  to 'move about in the borderland between the internal and external worlds'.

Much of the fuel for this elevation of dreams and dreamlike elements of reality came from the Surrealists' reading and sympathy for the works of Freud, several of which were translated into French for the first time in the 1920s.  Most importantly The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) was translated into French in 1926. This book, thought by many to be Freud's masterpiece, overturned the view that dreams were meaningless outpourings of images from the events of the day and a trawl of memory. For Freud every dream expressed an unconscious wish. But that wish was disguised by a kind of censor and only allowed to emerge in changed and cryptic form.

Freud made a distinction between the manifest content of a dream (what it seems to be about at the literal level: what happens) and its latent content. Manifest content is what the dream seems to be about (e.g. getting lost in a forest); latent content is the dream idea, the real motivating factor (e.g. wanting to have sex with your parent). For example, in The Interpretation of Dreams Freud describes a young agoraphobic woman's dream of a walk in the street wearing a straw hat: she feels that the officers she passes cannot harm her. This is the manifest content of the dream. Freud points to the latent content which is her fear of  sexual temptation. The hat becomes a phallic symbol that somehow protects her. Freud tells her that 'if she had a husband with such splendid genitals she need fear nothing from the officers...'

For Freud, the latent content of the dream can never enter consciousness undisguised. The unconscious wish that drives the dream gets converted by a process of condensation, displacement and symbolisation [Recommended: for a more detailed discussion of these ideas see the summary on the Freud Museum website].

In this session we concentrated on symbolisation. For our purposes it didn't matter whether Freud was right about dreams or not - the point was his influence on early Surrealism. Freud emphasised that there are many recurrent images that have particular meanings in dreams while at the same time recognising that individuals have particular associations for particular people...Some frequently occuring dream symbols are

kings and queens = parents
prince or princess = the person having the dream
any longuitudinally extended object (sticks, tree trunks, umbrellas - because of the way they are put up - long sharp weapons, nail files etc).  = male member
cans, boxes, caskets, cupboards and ovens, caves, ships and other containers - women's abdomens
rooms = women (doors, windows and other points of entrance and exit are particularly symbolic)
steps, ladders, stairs and climbing them = the sexual act
woman's hat or man's tie = male genitalia
fish, snakes, hand, foot = male genitalia
mouth, ear, eye = female genitalia
Read the relevant section of The Interpretation of Dreams here.

We looked at works in the Surreal Things exhibition by Salvador  Dali (who described his paintings as 'hand painted dream photographs' and was heavily influenced by Freud's writing on dreams) and René Magritte (who denied that Freud was an influence)...the frequent inclusion of the classic Freudian dream symbols (whether or not by conscious design) is one factor that contributes to the dreamlike quality of many of these paintings.

Notes from Session One of Chance-Dream-Desire-Taboo

SESSION ONE: CHANCE

In this first session of the course Chance-Dream-Desire-Taboo we addressed two key questions:
What is Surrealism? and Why did the Surrealists so value chance?

Recapitulating the early history of Surrealism, we began with words before moving on to images. We opened by playing ‘exquisite corpse’: a game beloved of the Surrealists and an apparently chance way of generating a sentence. It was dubbed ‘exquisite corpse’ after the memorable sentence an early round of the game produced’

‘The exquisite corpse willdrink the new wine’

Here are some of the sentences we created on Friday:

The fabulous bird examines the sad house
The ancient car kisses the purple breast
The unimaginable storm eats the handsome cow
The red piano races the random mansion
The bright shoe grows the shining moon

Any of these could be the first line of a Surrealist poem, or a stimulus for a Surrealist painting.

For the Surrealists this game (and many others too) served a serious aim. Simon Kahn recollected Surrealists playing exquisite corpse in the early 1920s:

‘…the suggestive power of those arbitrary meetings of words was so astounding, so dazzling and verified surrealism’s theses and outlook so strikingly, that the game became a system, a method of research, a means of exaltation as well as stimulation, and even, perhaps, a kind of drug’

From the verbal game, they quickly moved on to visual versions. There is more on exquisite corpse including a gallery of the results of the visual version here.

What is Surrealism?
If someone asks ‘What is Surrealism?’ we could point to a game of exquisite corpse and say ‘that is Surrealism’. This would be a kind of ostensive definition: you answer a ‘what is x?’ question by pointing to some examples of x, leaving it up to the viewer to work out what, if anything, the examples of x have in common.

Another approach would be to list some of the features commonly found but in Surrealist works, such as a dreamlike quality, an intention to shock, biomorphic forms, bizarre juxtaposition, sexual symbolism and so on. Perhaps there is a family resemblance between the appearance, or perhaps the manner of making all the things we call Surrealist: a pattern of overlapping resemblances, but no single defining quality that makes them all Surrealist. This fits with a loose use of the term Surrealist which makes artists like Bill Brandt [there is a bit about Brandt and Surrealism in my downloadable essay 'Brandt's Pictorialism'] and Louise Bourgeois [subject of a major retrospective at Tate Modern this Autumn] Surrealists even though they were never officially part of the movement: their works share overlapping common features with paradigmatic works of Surrealism. André Breton’s ‘Surrealist Manifesto’ of 1924 included the following definition that isolates some key features of Surrealism:

‘SURREALISM n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.’

A third approach is to concentrate on the historical movement Surrealism, with André Breton’s decision of whether or not an artist was a Surrealist as the main determining factor. On this view there is always a right or wrong answer to the question ‘Was such-and-such an artist a Surrealist?’ De Chirico wasn’t a Surrealist; nor was Bill Brandt; nor Louise Bourgeois. But Max Ernst was and so was Eileen Agar. This approach focuses on the decision that was historically taken rather than the grounds on which it was taken.

The question ‘Is this work of art Surreal?’ can, then have a right answer (when this is a question about the historical movement, the third sense above). But there is also a looser sense of ‘Surreal’ which makes this question an invitation to assess the patterns of overlapping resemblances (visual and other) between this and paradigm Surreal works, and then a judgement to be made (without there being a straightforward right or wrong answer).

Automatism
One important feature of the early history of Surrealism was its focus on automatism, by which was meant automatic, unreflective creation. This was first manifest in the Surrealists’ interest in automatic writing: uncensored free-flowing writing. The visual equivalent was a drawn version of exquisite corpse.

Max Ernst found a way to come closer to automatism in visual art, known as frottage (from the French frotter – to rub - it also has a sexual meaning). Inspired by childhood memories of fake mahoghany in his bedroom and by the story of Leonardo da Vinci advocating throwing a paint-filled sponge against a bare wall as  a way of generating the patterns of an imaginary landscape, Ernst placed a sheet of paper on the coarse floorboard, and rubbed it with graphite, producing an image of the grain. In a quasi- hallucinatory state he began to see shapes and beings within the textures on the page, and drew these. He also developed grattage, an approach which allowed a similar effect in paint. The chance patterns on the page triggered chance associations. There is a  short free video clip of Max Ernst demonstrating frottage and talking about it here [scroll down to 'click here to watch a free film clip']. There is also an interesting article about Ernst's continuing significance here.

Ernst wrote in Beyond Painting (1936):

‘The procedure of frottage, relying on nothing but the irritability of the mind by appropriate technical means, excluding any conscious mental direction (of reason, taste, morals), reducing to the extreme the active part of the person who had been, until then, ‘the author’ of works; this procedure revealed itself subsequently to be the real equivalent of what was already known under the term automatic writing’

Why bother?
The underlying justfication for the technique of frottage was that it offered a reasonably direct route to the unconscious. Perhaps it is wrong to describe these techniques as involving ‘chance’, since as David Hume pointed out in the Eighteenth Century, what we call ‘chance’ is really ignorance of causes… A number of Freud’s works were translated into French in the early 1920s.  The Surrealists revered Freud (though the feeling wasn’t mutual - Breton received a cold welcome on a visit to his hero in Vienna): like Freud, they believed that the most substantial aspect of the human psyche is inaccessible, particularly to reason. This was a result of Freud’s Third Revolution. The first revolution was the discovery that the Earth wasn’t the centre of the universe, the so-called Copernican Revolution (after one of its discoverers, Copernicus); the second was the Darwinian revolution that recognized that we had descended from apes. The third great revolution was that caused by the recognition that I may not be in charge of my destiny: in a deep sense I am a stranger to myself because so much of what is me is not accessible to conscious thought. There is a summary of this position here... (More on Freud in relation to dreams next time…)

What was apparent in looking at the Ernst frottage works in the exhibition, Oscar Dominguez’s Decalcomania (the smeared painting) and the Brassai ‘Sculptures Involontaires’ and Eileen Agar’s ‘Bum-Thumb-Rock’ was that although each has a found or unchosen element each also has some aspect that is shaped by the artist in the traditional manner (e.g. through choice of angle, treatment, etc.).

Next week: DREAM...

Chance-Dream-Desire Taboo - course overview

EXPLORING SURREALISM: CHANCE-DREAM-DESIRE-TABOO

Led by Nigel Warburton (booking required)
Friday evenings 6.30-8.30 p.m, Victoria and Albert Museum.

Course Aims
•    To introduce and explore some key themes from Surrealism
•    To discuss these themes in relation to philosophy
•    To examine these themes in relation to particular works in the Surreal Things show

1. (1.6.07) CHANCE: The methods of surrealism include free association and other forms of automatism. In this session we will explore philosophical ideas about artistic intention and chance, and interpreting the accidental.

2 (8.6.07) DREAM: Dreams and dream-like imagery inspire many surrealist works. The second session of the course is devoted to an exploration of the relation between dreams and reality.

3.(15.6.07) DESIRE: Sexual desire, its complications, sublimations and manifestations fuels surrealism. In this third session we will explore some of philosophical explanations of the nature of desire relating these ideas to works in the exhibition.

4.    (22.6.07) TABOO: Like many artists, the surrealists challenged the status quo, They did this most dramatically by confronting taboos. In this session we will explore the meaning of taboo, and philosophical questions about offence, and the limits of artistic freedom.

I will be putting summaries, further thoughts, links to related material and suggestions for further reading linked from my weblog ‘Virtual Philosopher’ <www.virtualphilosopher.org> a few days after each session.

Places Still Available on Exploring Surrealism

Exploring Surrealism: Chance-Dream-Desire-Taboo

This is a 4-session course at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, held on Friday evenings (1st - 22nd June), led by me (Nigel Warburton) and timed to coincide with the Surreal Things exhibition.  Online booking for this course is now open. Places are still available.

Surrealism Course at the V&A Booking Now Open

Exploring Surrealism: Chance-Dream-Desire-Taboo  This is a 4-session course at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, held on Friday evenings (1st - 22nd June), led by Nigel Warburton and timed to coincide with the Surreal Things exhibition.  Online booking for this course is now open.

Interview with curator Susan Bright on Face of Fashion

Susan Bright, freelance curator of photography exhibitions and author of the highly successful book Art Photography Now discusses her new exhibition Face of  Fashion (15th Feb. - 28th May 2007) below...[update: Read Susan's interview about 'How We Are Photographing Britain', Tate Britain]

Links to information about the five photographers included.
Read the Press Release.
Hear Susan talking about the exhibition on 3rd March at the NPG, booking information here
Susan will also be discussing fashion photography with some of the key players on Friday 13th April in a Tate Modern study day 'When Fashion and Art Collide'.

Audio tour: download mp3s about the exhibition.
Screensaver: download Face of Fashion screensaver.
Information about the Exhibition Catalogue here or click on icon below.

Nigel: Face of Fashion at the National Portrait Gallery has more publicity before it has opened than some major exhibitions get altogether. Why do you think there is such fervid press interest here?

Susan: I think there are many reasons for it. There are five photographers, so there are five potential stories and takes on the subject; the photographers have good links with the magazines so  in turn publications are more likely to feature them;  the exhibition features celebrities which of course sell column inches and finally the NPG has an excellent press department with very good relations with the media. You are also probably noticing it more too as you know me. Hogarth has had a lot too!

Nigel: What is the main theme of the show?

Susan: There is no over-arching theme. Its not a survey but a glimpse at the work of 5 photographers, highlighting their  virtuosity as portraitists and the diversity of the genre within a commercial setting. I like what Philippe Garner wrote about it in PLUK.. “…Face of Fashion does not claim to be encyclopedic or even comprehensive. It feels, rather, like and intuitive and sensitive probing of the field and presents work of just a few photographers…but each in sufficient depth to underscore their individuality. The list is international; it is diverse, and it succeeds in demonstrating the very considerable shifts that have marked the world of fashion imagery since the early 1990s. Without the straightjacket of a self-conscious curatorial structure, the work is encouraged to speak for itself, and it successfully  puts forward some challenging ideas.”

Nigel: What is fashion portraiture?

Susan:  Portraiture that is done by photographers that work mainly in fashion and portraits that appear within fashion and lifestyle magazines. This can be advertising or editorial.

Nigel: Is it different from other kinds of celebrity portraiture?

Susan: Yes. There are many types of celebrity portraiture – publicity shots and grabbed paparazzi shots for the ‘red tops’ example. Here we are looking at the very best editorial and advertising shots of the famous.

Nigel: I do think there is something different about fashion portraiture, but am not quite sure what it is. Perhaps because many of the subjects are particulary good-looking there is less focus on character (if the subjects are famous they are famous for the way they look, so everything is on the surface). It might have something to do with portraiture created for the more ephemeral medium of the fashion magazine spread too...Do you have any thoughts about this?

Susan: I think a lot of portraiture in ‘art photography’ is about the photographic act. Subjects tend to be awkward and over self-conscious about the camera. This is what makes so much of it strong. I am most obviously thinking of Rineke Djkstra here…In fashion portraiture they have been commissioned. The models or actors are very used to being photographed and are acting. It's their job to be photographed so the photographic act is totally taken for granted on some levels. They know what to do.

Models are like silent movie stars. Tilda Swinton wrote very eloquently in the handlist about being photographed by Paolo and how to move so not to appear frozen. She totally gets how to move, how to react. Production values are much higher too in commercial portraiture and don’t forget sitters will have been styled and made up. Also post production is much more rigorous and we only see the ones that make it to the final edit.

Nigel: In your book Art Photography Now (p.13) , writing about photographic portraiture, you asked, rhetorically, 'Is it all about  surface appearance or can it communicate something more?' Are you prepared to answer this question in relation to Face of Fashion?

Susan: I think its all about the surface. Portraiture is about role playing, performance, posing. Corinne’s work comes closest to showing more about the presence of her models but they are still aware of the camera.

Nigel: How did you select the five photographers?

Susan:  I was limited by space. The NPG is a modest museum. I wanted 5 different sets of work so that I could show a good amount of photographs rather than just three or four by more photographers. I wanted to show how each photographer approach portraiture in very different ways. However, it was important  in the selection to illustrate that what links them together is that they all form very close collaborations with the sitter. All the photographers deal with intimacy on some level although they do this in very different ways. Their relationship with their sitters comes from empathy and respect. There is not any cruelty in their work. I am not condemning cruelty in portraiture (some of the very best photographers use this to wonderful effect – Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn to name a few) it's just not what these photographers are about or what the show wanted to say about portraiture. This doesn’t mean to say that the photographers in the show are just interested in flattering their sitters, far from it, it's more that they are prepared to work very closely with their subjects to produce results that push both themselves and the sitter due to high levels of trust created whilst shooting.

Nigel: Are we in a golden age of fashion photography?

Susan: Sadly no. Very conservative times indeed. The control of the advertisers cannot be underestimated. This doesn’t mean good work isn’t being produced though – but a Golden Age it certainly isn’t. The work in the show starts at the early 1990s which can be understood as a very significant time in the history and runs to the modern day.

Nigel: What are the highlights of the exhibition for you?

Susan: Working with Mario Sorrenti and Paolo Roversi. The integrity of both photographers was overwhelming.

Nigel: As a curator, are you able to influence the manner in which the photographs are displayed?

Susan: Yes, and no……with some photographers I worked very collaboratively. With others it was much more of them saying how their work was to be presented. We of course discussed everything through before display but each relationship was different.

Nigel: Many of the sitters for these portraits are startlingly beautiful, yet remarkably thin. Are you worried about supporting the size zero approach to beauty here and influencing vulnerable teenagers?

Susan:  I am interested that you think some of the sitters are remarkably thin. Don’t forget that models have always been thin (in fashion) think of the body shapes of famous models of the 1960s and 1970s such Gerry Hall, Marie Helvin, Twiggy…. Are the body shapes we have in the exhibition any different? Not really. I think they look strong and independent.  They certainly are not anywhere size zero. All the models in the show are from reputable (top) model agencies and most of the commissions are from magazines such as W, POP, Vogue which never show size zero models and have a working rule of only using models over 16. The whole ‘skinny’ model thing is fascinating and comes, I think, much more from Hollywood rather than fashion magazines. The red tops' obsession with weight is much more ‘to blame’ if we are going to band blame around.

Nigel: Kate Moss emerges as the star of this show. Somehow she manages to upstage the photographers even.  What is it about her that makes her such a mesmerising subject?

Susan: Her ordinariness on one level and her total understanding of the photographic act on the other. I know that sounds like a weird thing to say, but an anecdote might better illustrate this. A friend of mine was a fashion photographer in the early 1990s. Kate was often sent to him as a ‘go see’. He never bothered to take her picture and couldn’t understand why she kept being sent. He just didn’t get it. They became friends. He was at the time seeing an American model and remembers walking down Kings Road with her and noted that all the men were eying her up and then looking and him and wondering how he managed to go out with somebody so beautiful. A week later after one of the shows he was walking down the same road with Kate and noted that none of the men looked at her. Not one. Get her in front of the camera and she transforms. You can’t take your eyes off her. I noticed this at the opening - when she was in front of the cameras she transformed, totally lit up. It was incredible. So we can relate to her as ‘one of us’ but also as somebody so glamorous and unattainable.  This is a perfect combination for obsession and fascination – for both men and women.

Nigel: What are your plans for future projects?

Susan: Coming up in May 2007 I am co-curating How We Are: Photographing Britain with Val Williams for Tate Britain. This is to take place in the Linbury Galleries and is to be Tate’s first ever large scale exhibition of British photography. In May I also start a book on photographic self portraiture which I am currently researching. In October I am curating an exhibition at Fotogalleriet in Oslo. I am also thinking about getting a full time job rather than working freelance.

Nigel: Thank you very much.

Exploring Surrealism: Chance-Dream-Desire-Taboo

Early warning about a course I will be leading later this year at the Victoria and Albert Museum to coincide with the 'Surreal Things' exhibition:

EXPLORING SURREALISM: CHANCE-DREAM-DESIRE-TABOO

4 consecutive Friday evenings 1st June – 22nd June at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Exhibition Road, London.

Led by Nigel Warburton
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at The Open University

Course Aims

• To introduce and explore some key themes from Surrealism
• To discuss these themes in relation to philosophy
• To examine these themes in relation to particular works in the Surrealism show

This course does not pre-suppose any prior knowledge of philosophy or Surrealism. There will be suggestions for further reading, but no obligatory reading associated with the course.

Method
This course will be taught through a variety of interactive sessions. Students will be encouraged to discuss and explore the various themes through structured small group activities supplemented by short lectures and plenary discussions. Teaching will take place both in a classroom and within the exhibition itself. Students will be encouraged to engage both with philosophical ideas and with the objects on display.

The Themes (a provisional list)
The themes below may need to be adapted in the light of the content of the exhibition.

1. CHANCE: The methods of surrealism include free association and other forms of automatism. In this session we will explore philosophical ideas about artistic intention and chance, fatalism, and interpreting the accidental.

2. DREAM: Dreams and dream-like imagery inspire many surrealist works. The second session of the course is devoted to an exploration of the relation between dreams and reality.

3. DESIRE: Sexual desire, its complications, sublimations and manifestations fuels surrealism. In this third session we will explore some of philosophical explanations of the nature of desire relating these ideas to works in the exhibition.

4. TABOO: Like many artists, the surrealists challenged the status quo, They did this most dramatically by confronting taboos. In this session we will explore the meaning of taboo, and philosophical questions about offence, and the limits of artistic freedom.

Booking will be possible online at www.vam.ac.uk/tickets