TMC Reviews… Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism (Manchester Art Gallery)

by Strawberry Cheesecake

The book which accompanies this exhibition suggests that the role of women in the surrealist movement has largely escaped recognition. This is something of a reassurance that my own prior ignorance as to the scope and significance of this role is at least more widely shared. The name alone piqued my curiosity when I saw it advertised: there are few things likely to appeal to me more than such a juxtaposition of the angelic and the anarchic. As it turns out I wasn’t disappointed. Angels of Anarchy at the Manchester Art Gallery exhibits a stunning and powerful body of work which has received far less attention than in it deserves.

In fact this claims to be the first major international exhibition in Europe and, in itself, I found this extremely striking. So too the way that many of the themes explored (the fluidity of identity, the deconstruction of gender binaries, becoming and transformation) predate vast swathes of postmodernist philosophy prone to congratulating itself on its own social radicalism. It turns out that Claude Cahun (below) was gender fucking before Judith Butler and co were even born.

It’s somewhat difficult to make out in the reproduction of the photo but the t-shirt reads “I am in training don’t kiss me”. This is just one (favourite) example from a whole host of works on display in Angels of Anarchy that visually deconstruct and destabilize ideas of gender, identity and sexuality.

So why have the aforementioned radical philosophers penetrated intellectual life (if you’ll excuse the expression) so much more than the women artists of the surrealist movement? It seems that for all its genuine radicalism surrealism often remained a male endeavour with women artists inadvertently marginalised by their male contemporaries (in itself an interesting parallel to the male domination of the new left in 60s which created the conditions within which second-wave feminism emerged). As the curator, Patricia Allmer puts it, surrealism “often remained blind to its own gender politics, locked in a heterosexual, sometimes homophobic, patriarchal stance positioning and constructing women (and never men) as artists’ muses, femme-enfants, virgins, dolls and erotic objects”.

So the artists on display in this exhibition faced an implacable double bind, as they struggled both to articulate an active female voice within the surrealist movement and also to find a place for that nascent voice within wider society. To some extent perhaps this challenge proved insurmountable and the extent of their intellectual and aesthetic innovation, predating and pre-empting more widely recognised feminist intellectuals of a later era, has therefore been largely unrecognised. That is until Angels of Anarchy.

The intelligence and articulacy with which this historical and social context is presented plays a large part in making this exhibition the utterly compelling experience it is. Of course the other is the sheer quality of the work on display.

The image I found most striking in the collection was Insomnia (above), produced in 1947 by the Spanish-Mexican artist Remedios Varo. It takes a moment for the full power of the work to sink in. As your eyes are drawn into the labyrinthine layout of the house, the omnipresent gaze starts to bear down from above and a suffocating sense of domesticity emerges.

The most challenging work on display was without doubt Lee Miller’s Amputated Breast on Plate (above). As a fashion photographer in New York in the late 1920s, Miller borrowed this amputated breast from a lab before laying it out surreptitiously, ready for consumption, in the halls of American Vogue. This also happened to be her employer at the time. She subsequently found herself removed by the building’s security.

However short of an item-by-item account of the work on display (something I have neither the time nor talent to do) it’s impossible to do justice to Angels of Anarchy. So if you can see it please do and I promise you won’t be disappointed.

…

Angels of Anarchy is on until January 10th at the Manchester Art Gallery. Click here for more information.