1/8 The Surrealism exhibition at @Te_Papa represents an enormous wasted opportunity. Te Papa could have drawn on its permanent collection & put European masterpieces alongside the Pacific art that inspired them. Instead, surrealism is misrepresented & our region ignored (thread)
2/8 The Surrealists revolted against European capitalism, whose rationality & clock-time they associated with the First World War. They looked to the colonised world, & especially the South Pacific, for alternatives. Surrealist leader Andre Breton was obsessed with Melanesia
3/8 Paul Eluard made the Surrealists' affection for the Pacific clear in his famous Surrealist Map of the World. He shrunk Europe, & expanded islands like Rapa Nui & New Guinea. Surrealist artists & poets acquired & studied Pacific sculpture.
'You frighten. You astonish' wrote Breton in his poem Uli, about a Mandak sculpture from New Ireland. Pacific artworks were 'repositories of the dreamlike and the magical', that transcended European oppositions between past and present, human and animal, death and life.
5 In the Exhibition of Surrealist Objects that Breton curated in 1936, sculptures from New Guinea, New Ireland, and the New Hebrides stood beside Surrealist artworks and artefacts of modern American consumer culture. They were a critique.
6 Te Papa has pulled a small, trivial Dali work from its own collection to join this travelling exhibition. But the museum holds many hundreds of powerful artworks from the Pacific, that could be juxtaposed with & illuminate the masterpieces of the Surrealists.
7 Te Papa & outlets like the Listener have presented surrealism as a bygone movement, part of European history. But the dialogue between European & Pacific surrealism continues in our region, in works like Andy Lelei's Ufological paintings & Tevita Latu's Selekarian provocations.
8 Te Papa offers us a genteel, Eurocentric show the Surrealists themselves would despise. If anyone wants to see the living spirit of surrealism, they'd be better advised to look at contemporary South Pacific art. Jamie Berry's Whakapapa/Algorithms 23 is at Papakura gallery now.
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