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Beyond Surreal I’m used to postal misadventures these days, what with a GNVQ in weights and measures being needed to calculate the size and price of stamps, so I wasn’t surprised when at the end of March a letter marked ‘RETURN TO SENDER’ landed on the mat. I was surprised, though, when I turned it over and saw that the return address was not in my writing. Ripping it open, I found it contained a letter to one Bucky Wonka of 233 Cromwell Tower, The Barbican, London EC2Y 8DD, printed on paper headed with my address. The letter began as follows: Dear Bucky Wonka, You old self-experimenter, are those blackened trees still exploding under your hat? Have you woken up from your dream to find that time has stopped, or did you time your dream to find out what was stopping you from waking? I haven’t slept for a long timeÖ It continued in similar vein for three paragraphs before signing off ‘Laura Gasgoigne’ at the bottom. This is how the Passport Office spells my name (I have to remember to misspell it when booking air tickets) but, again, the handwriting wasn’t mine. At 8 in the morning, fresh from sleep, this gave me the creeps. I do get occasional letters from mad people forwarded to me by magazines, which I normally giggle at gaily before tossing in the bin. This one, however, wasn’t so funny as the sender knew where I lived. Then, to my relief, I noticed the ICA’s stamp at the top of the envelope and, printed along the bottom of the letter, the words ‘Cellar Door, ICA, 24 April-15 June, 2008’. The whole thing was an elaborate stunt by the ICA press office to titillate reviewers’ curiosity about their next exhibition. It worked - I went. The reality was disappointing. The exhibition is the UK debut of Loris Gréaud, a 29-year-old French fan of Alice in Wonderland currently making waves, on dit, on the international art scene. His installation at the ICA consists of 3 identical black rooms interconnected by automatic doors and covered in identical patterned carpet inspired by the co-ordinates of stars and Buckminster Fuller (quite stylish, this). Identical ‘spore speakers’ hang from the centre of each ceiling, piping avant-garde opera, pulsating with light and bearing a faintly sinister resemblance to pyramids of chocolate profiteroles left out in the radioactive rain. Each room has an identical message written in mirror letters across one corner - ‘When people tell me that I know how this story is going to end I usually tell them: wait till the end and you will see for yourselfÖ’ – and each was staffed at the press view by a black-clothed attendant holding a tray of black champagne. As the champagne was blackened with dye, not Guinness, I decided against it, though I did accept the complimentary bag of Celador boiled sweets (also available from a vending machine in the bar) whose USP is that they are completely flavourless, the idea being that the sucker projects whatever flavour he or she likes onto them. (I gave mine to my son for his birthday. As he is fortunately too old to cry, he swallowed his disappointment and selflessly decided to share the bag with unaccompanied children in parks to teach them a lesson in accepting sweets from strangers.) It’s hard, even for someone with no sense of direction, to become disorientated in three rooms, so bubble as the champagne might (and with black champagne in a black room, it’s not easy to tell), the show left me flat. Despite all the trouble and expense, the installation wasn’t half as spooky as the letter. In fact, to anyone mentioning Loris Gréaud’s name in the same breath as Lewis Carroll’s, I’m tempted to shout: ‘Off with their heads!" But I can’t blame Loris; it isn’t really his fault. In the present state of reality, it has become impossible for artists to be surreal. As anyone who visited Tate Modern’s recent show will have noticed, the worst the diseased imaginations of Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia could dream up at the opening of the last century looks quaint and quotidian at the start of this one. The reason is not simply, as Laura Cumming recently argued in her entry on ‘Surrealism’ in the free giveaway Observer Book of Art, that ěsince the word has come to mean just about anything weird, you could say we’re all surrealists now". The weirdness has gone beyond linguistics. For the past few years, actual fact has been getting curiouser and curiouser, to the point where fiction now has to cede defeat. There are still occasions when life imitates art – as at Guantanamo where, we recently learned, lawyers responsible for approving torture techniques took their cue from counter-terrorist agent Jack Bauer in the American TV series 24. But mostly, these days, life leaves art far behind. Just before the Guantanamo story broke in April, the Guardian published an image released by the European Space Agency showing Earth with rings like Saturn’s representing the 12,000 pieces of space debris which, on current estimates, are orbiting around it. They include the golf ball driven into the intergalactic long grass by Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin for a sports company promotion in 2006. A few days before that, the paper had published an even more surreal artist’s impression of the Universitas Leadership Sanctuary planned by American heiress Donna Vassar, of the Vassar education dynasty, for the Nevada desert. The vision of British artist-architect Douglas Patterson – whose natty design for a Mogul mansion on Mustique had caught Vassar’s eye – the building looks like a meteoric glitterball from outer space that has crash-landed in a jumbo plate of spaghetti. Nevertheless, Vassar’s hope is that its ‘contemplation space’ will enable stressed world leaders to "reconnect with their unique purpose in life" by making "an individual journey leading to the highest place within", and thus "create better balance in the world". (To that end, Patterson conducted R&D among the Buddhist Dzongs of Bhutan and the Greek Orthodox monasteries of Mount Athos and Meteora.) As the Sanctuary is approached by a labyrinth – and leaders have to leave their secretaries at home – some may find that, after reaching the highest place within, they are unable to find their way back out. Vassar’s idea may not be so dumb after all. It’s certainly more surreal than anything young Loris could dream up, even on a $300m budget, simply by virtue of being serious. When you have to pinch yourself repeatedly while reading the papers, you know the game with surrealism is up. That artistic chapter is now closed. Young wannabe surrealists will just have to get real or, failing that, follow their destinies as artistic leaders by reconnecting with their unique purpose and journeying to the highest place within. Unfortunately there are no promises from Vassar to provide purpose-built facilities, but next year’s Linz festival is offering a more traditional alternative, inviting applications to become the Hermit in the Tower and retreat up the cathedral steeple for a week. There may be competition, so book early to avoid disappointment – www.linz09.at. For the rest of us in need of reconnection, there’s always the pub. Laura Gascoigne | ||||
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Laura Gascoigne All of this site is | ||||
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