- Title
- (re) findings: discovery and memory in the architecture and legacy of surrealism
- Creator
- Chapman, Michael
- Relation
- Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts Vol. 13, p. 51-59
- Relation
- http://interstices.aut.ac.nz/ijara/index.php/ijara/article/view/182
- Publisher
- Enigma
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- "It is in discovery alone, that one recognises the marvellous headlong rush of desire. It alone can enlarge the universe, causing it to relinquish some of its opacity, letting us discover its extraordinary capacities for reserve, proportionate to the innumerable needs of the spirit. Daily life abounds in exactly this sort of small discovery … You only have to know how to get along in the labyrinth. (Breton 1987: 15-16)" Historicity, specifically the construction of images and their subsequent remembering, has a special relevance for the endeavours of Dada and surrealism, two movements which sought to reconstruct the everyday through a disassembly of images and their values. The architecture of the city was an important part of this process. It was celebrated by the surrealists for its residual qualities that not only evoked historical time but spatial and lived experience more generally. While studies of architecture and surrealism have focussed, to a large extent, on the “objects” that they selected to substitute for buildings, there is an equally rich counter-current within surrealism that used memory and the found object as a strategy to dismantle the homogenising forces of modernist architecture. Within this is a re-discovery of the historical trace and its power as a polemical tool in the construction of images and their dissemination. This paper investigates the role of the objet trouvé within the activities of the avant-garde, with an emphasis on the theoretical discourse that was attached to surrealism in the 1970s. The objet trouvé—literally “found object”—became a fascination for both Dada and surrealism in the 1920s. Both movements used the discovery of objects (and the associated psychological displacement) to challenge bourgeois conventions of the art object and contemporary expectations of lived experience. In the 1970s there was, for the first time, a dedicated discourse on avant-garde practice which set out to diagnose the specific practices of the historical avant-garde and the philosophical motivations underpinning them. If modernism was characterised by the autonomy of the artistic object in this discourse, avant-garde practices in this period were defined by the conflation of art and life in artistic production and the rejection of aesthetic categories more generally. In this sense, the avant-garde can be seen as a distinct trajectory from modernism: a fact that has been made explicit in the theoretical positions of both Hilde Heynen (1999) and Andreas Huyssen (1986), amongst others.
- Subject
- architecture; surrealism; Dada; found object
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1308990
- Identifier
- uon:21741
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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