Lovers of love and immeasurable possibilities

Joanna Pawlik: For many of our readers, you won’t need any introduction at all, but would you mind just briefly saying a few words about how you became involved in Surrealism?

Dawn Ades: Yes, thank you, Jo. I’m very pleased to be talking today about Surrealism and my long-standing relationship with it. To start at the beginning. I went as a post-graduate to the Courtauld intending to work on the relationship between word and image, and ended up writing my MA thesis on Hans Arp’s poetry and sculpture. This pushed me in the direction of Surrealism in terms of the rich material from the point of view of the relationship between verbal and visual. I started doing my PhD on the Dada and Surrealist journals. This was in the late ’60s and there had been exhibitions of Surrealism very much emphasising art and I felt there was a danger of the artists being detached from their context, and of the serious aims and concerns of the movement really being lost in favour of the visual arts.

I then became involved with the planning for a major exhibition of Surrealism at the Hayward Gallery—Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978). We started preparing for that in about 1976. But the catalogue for that eventually absorbed my research, so I never did finish the original PhD.

Joanna Pawlik: Did you encounter much opposition to the idea that the study of Surrealism might be enriched by looking at periodicals and so-called ephemera. Was it difficult to convince the Hayward that this was going to be a hugely influential show?

Dawn Ades: Very interesting question. I don’t think there was much opposition. I was called in by David Sylvester and Roland Penrose, I think on the basis of a very little book that I published in 1974 on Surrealism (which was good value, 64 colour plates for 95p). My interest in the relationships between the poets and the artists was already in there. I think if anything was controversial, it was still putting Dada and Surrealism together. I think there was a sense among those who working on Dada that it shouldn’t be only regarded as a lead into Surrealism. I was very sympathetic to that. I’ve always tried to keep them, in a sense, separate from histories of modernism.

Joanna Pawlik: Dawn, could you explain what was particularly transformative or eye opening about the exhibition?

Dawn Ades: Well, it was the first time I’d worked on an exhibition and I was completely hooked right away. Many of the artists in the show were still alive. I visited or had already visited many of them. Man Ray, Dalí of course, and others, and I got to know the Surrealists in the UK, like Conroy Maddox. There was a sense that the movement was alive. And, actually, the really controversial aspect of the exhibition was the question of when it should end. This was much debated in the committee. Some people felt that it should end with the death of Breton in 1966 and some people felt that it should end with the dissolution of the groups in Paris and some people felt it should carry on to the present.

Joanna Pawlik: What did the committee decide? I can’t remember the exhibition well enough to know when it concludes. [We consult the catalogue on her shelf].

Dawn Ades: The last section included the magazines Neon, Medium, Le surréalisme même, Bief, and La Brèche. La Brèche ended in 1965 so effectively the exhibition did end with Breton’s death. I think one of the weaknesses of the exhibition was that it could have had much more about contemporary activities. It didn’t have very much about the Chicago Group, for example, who clearly we should have included. And it wasn’t by any means a totally comprehensive selection of magazines. It really couldn’t be. And it was very Paris centred. There was a section of the exhibition which was dedicated to more recent work by Surrealist artists. There was some late Picasso and Ernst and so on, which was slightly detached from the main body of the exhibition, which had been centred on each journal, or group of journals, that was relevant for that moment. The late work appeared as a kind of postscript; the other artworks were all within the main gallery space. The installation was a kind of honeycomb, with smaller spaces which were partitioned off from each other, with curved walls. We pasted bits of the journals on the curved walls, and inside them was the space for the works of art. Documents, for example had Miro and Giacometti. They were kinds of enclosures within pages of the magazines. There were other aspects to each room dedicated to a particular journal or group of journals; the works of art, documents which included books, magazines, letters and so on, and also non-Surrealist work, from non-European cultures, such as the masks that the Surrealists themselves collected.

Joanna Pawlik: Dawn, you’ve mentioned Documents so let’s pause on this particular publication because it seems to me to be another of your huge interventions into the field of Surrealism studies. I’m thinking of the Undercover Surrealism exhibition in 2006. I wonder if you might elaborate.

Dawn Ades: Yes, a different way of looking at Surrealism was triggered through Documents. This began with Dada and Surrealism Reviewed. I came across the magazine, which David Sylvester already knew, and I found it fascinating. The committee debated whether or not it should be included in the exhibition. We went to talk to Michel Leiris, an old friend of Sylvester’s, and one of the original contributors to Documents and asked him what he thought. Should we include Documents in an exhibition dedicated to Dada and Surrealist journals? And he said “Yes, of course you should.”

And I sometimes feel that this was actually a sort of final tirade. That’s not the right word, but as a sort of final attack on Breton. I mean, you know, it did have the effect of actually shifting the focus away from him and towards Bataille, who had edited Documents.

Joanna Pawlik: Oh, I love that!

Dawn Ades: I think he knew perfectly well what would happen.

Joanna Pawlik: Documents would have the last laugh!

Dawn Ades: Yes, it was fascinating. And the Documents section in Dada and Surrealism Reviewed looked very strong. It was extraordinary. The others were wonderful too, but it looked just different.

Joanna Pawlik: Was the permission, so to speak, from Leiris what swung it for you to include Documents in the exhibition?

Dawn Ades: Oh yes, I think so. In the Documents case we had several copies of the magazine. We singled out relevant pages which were not just images of the art works, but ones that showed the whole range of interests of the people writing Documents. It was a matter of trying to make the relationship between what was shown on the walls and the works of art coherent.

Joanna Pawlik: If we jump from 1978 to 2006 it seems as though Leiris’s last laugh plays out over later exhibitions. How did you approach Documents differently in 2006?

Dawn Ades: Well, the 1978 exhibition only had one relatively small space to dedicate to Documents, so in having the whole of the ground floor of the Hayward we were able to relax and expand, and to become leisurely in the way we interpreted it. There was a great deal of film, for example. We showed some of the drawings by Lily Masson, that had been reproduced, when she was a child. She lent them to us and we had a lot of support from Masson’s family, which had close links to Bataille. It was a very cohesive group, working on the exhibition and catalogue. Simon Baker and I were curators and editors and there were terrific contributions, for example from Charlie Miller, Denis Hollier and Michael Richardson. We did a lot more background work on non-western art, on the archaeological aspects of Documents which really didn’t feature in the 1978 show.

Joanna Pawlik: And in 2006 was there any sort of pushback to this re-centering of Surrealism?

Dawn Ades: Well, that wasn’t the aim of the exhibition, because we were exploring Bataille and Documents in their own right, but it contributed to the effect of displacing Breton, though I have never subscribed to this, as much as I am a fan of Documents.

Joanna Pawlik: If we’re thinking about exhibitions that you’ve been closely involved with that have shifted how we’ve understood Surrealism’s histories and geographies, I wonder whether we might turn to your interest in Latin American Surrealist production. Might you be able to say a little bit about the institutional context for your own research?

Dawn Ades: Yes, I was extremely lucky to land at the University of Essex as a part-time lecturer in 1968 because it had a special interest in Latin American studies. I was a very junior member of the department and they said “Is anybody here prepared to do a course on Latin American art?” I’d been to Mexico and I spoke Spanish, so I said, “yes, I will!” I started very much from scratch, as there was no real precedent, and almost no art historical literature at the time. I started with the impossible ambition of covering the entire continent—and Mexico—from the earliest pre-conquest times to the present. I made several field trips to build up a slide collection, to teach with. Some of the photography was very challenging—especially the Pre-Columbian Maya reliefs, and the 20th century Mexican muralists. We ended up with two year-long courses; the first on pre-Columbian art and architecture, the second one on post-conquest, up to the 20th century. I had contact with the curators at the Hayward and they were interested in doing an exhibition of Latin American art. There was a resurgence of interest in Latin America in the 80s, and there was an important year that many museums wanted to celebrate the 500th anniversary of 1492, the “Encounter” with the New World. Because many rival exhibitions were foreseen, the Hayward decided to go early, in 1989. I was invited to make a proposal, and I suggested an exhibition that covered art from Independence in the early 19th century, up to about 1980. There was always the intention of doing an exhibition of contemporary art from Latin America, but it never happened, at least not at the Hayward.

Regarding the connection with Surrealism—I did quite a lot of work on this. Frida Kahlo, for example, was well-represented. And there was another artist, a woman artist from Mexico who deserves to be better known, Maria Izquierdo. She’s tremendous. She was the first, certainly in Mexico, to live independently from her paintings. She died in the late ‘50s. She was more or less contemporary with Kahlo, but she’s much less well known. The connection with Surrealism also came through Antonin Artaud, whom she befriended when he went to Mexico in 1936. She learned about Surrealism, or at least his version of it, and it feeds into her work in various quite interesting ways.

The exhibition at the Hayward was called Art from Latin America 1820 to 1980. I didn’t want it to be about being Latin American, I wanted it to be broader than that. I travelled a great deal in Latin America at the time and I made many friends. There are many lacunae in the exhibition which I now regret. It was impossible, of course, to include everything. Particular strengths, in terms of the loans that I managed to acquire, were works from Mexico and from Argentina. And one of the discoveries, for me, was Arte Madí, from the 1940s. I was visiting the store of a major collector in Buenos Aires and there was one of the metal grills you hang works on, covered in these little objects, which were completely unidentifiable in terms of things that I was familiar with. They were an extraordinary sort of abstract Dada, and mobile. Very strange! So, I included those as special group.

One of the most important rooms in the show at the Hayward was guest curated by Guy Brett—in many ways this has had the greatest impact, introducing the work—or rather re-introducing, because some was shown at Signals gallery in the 1960s—of Helio Oitcica, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and so on. This was where the really radical things were happening in Latin America at the time.

Joanna Pawlik: Could you say a bit more about what else you’ve done that opened up our understanding of Surrealism’s reception in Latin America after that exhibition? I’m thinking of your anthology of essays on Surrealism and Latin America.

Dawn Ades: Oh yes. [We reach for the book from her shelf] This arose from the period when I was a visiting fellow at the Getty Research Centre. Rita Eder, the former Director of the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at UNAM, who is a friend of mine, happened to be there at the same time. We decided that we had to have a project that took advantage of our very particular circumstances. We put together an anthology called Surrealism in Latin America, Vivisimo Muerto that reflects a lot of discussions we had together about whether Surrealism was actually alive or dead. The title implies that it’s a very, very living dead. I suppose my interest in the journals carried on and affected this publication, because there’s a special section on Wolfgang Paalen’s Dyn. This was one of the exciting things about the way Surrealism was responded to and enriched in Mexico; in particular, the way it enabled people to look at the past. The pre-conquest period still haunts Mexico and Octavio Paz, for example, wrote about the way that past still haunts using Surrealist ideas and Surrealist techniques. And I fell for Cesar Moro.

Joanna Pawlik: What was it that what made you fall for Moro, Dawn? What spoke to you so much?

Dawn Ades: He was a poet and a visual artist, and seriously committed to Surrealism. He went to Paris, he knew Breton very well. Along with Westphalen, his great friend, another poet from Peru, they planned a magazine, which was called El uso de la palabra, and was announced in 1937 in a double-page spread in the middle of Minotaure in a section on “Surrealism around the world”. It hadn’t yet appeared, and unfortunately, before they could actually produce their issue, people in Paris produced L’Usage de la parole in December 1939, the same title. So, when theirs was published in Lima in December 1939 they were accused of plagiarism. So, I was defending Moro, who constantly seemed to be losing out in one way or another. He moved to Mexico and was involved in organising the big exhibition of Surrealism there in 1940. His letters about this to Westphalen and the trouble he had with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera are excruciating. Kahlo and Rivera insisted on occupying the biggest space, the best walls!

Joanna Pawlik: The European Surrealists’ appropriations or mobilisation of so-called non-Western cultures are often accused of a kind of primitivism, fetishization or an exoticization. What’s your sense of how might we take stock of their interventions into or representations of so-called non-Western cultures?

Dawn Ades: They’ve been much criticised for appropriation of non-Western cultures and non-Western art, and for romanticising them, for instance in Breton’s article on Mexico in Minotaure. I feel there is a lot of misunderstanding about the nature of their interest in the so-called non-Western, and what they were finding so fascinating in the visual arts and in the case of America, the poetry. I mean, I’m not sure they can be totally excused from that perspective, nor their rapacious acquisition of masks and so on. But we can put their interest in a different light by looking at the ways they tried to understand other cultures, not just through the prism of their own aesthetic or intellectual assumptions. The question of the reaction of those whose work was being appropriated is very interesting, and it is perhaps changing. When Breton visited the Hopi in 1945 he was desperate to talk with them, but was unable to. When I was preparing the exhibition for Vancouver, The Colour of my Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art (2011) I was keen to borrow some of the Yup’ik masks the Surrealists had acquired. It was crucial to get the agreement of the First Nations’ representatives, which we did. In fact people weren’t objecting, but actually in a sense were keen to participate. There was often something mutual, a sort of exchange going on. We even borrowed the magnificent Kwakwaka’wakw Peace Dance Headdress which had been in Breton’s collection, and was returned by his daughter Aube to where it had come from. It had been confiscated in 1922. The U’Mista Cultural Society, who now care for it, were, I understood, pleased to see the way it had been so highly valued by the Surrealists, if in a different context from their own, rather than being impounded as an evil pagan object.

Frida Kahlo is one of the flash points in terms of invoking debate about relationship between Surrealism and non-European cultures. People constantly say she wasn’t aware of Surrealism before she met Breton in Mexico. That’s fine but in a way, the whole point is that Surrealism was open to her and for a time she was happy to be associated with it. Surrealism really isn’t a style, it was not imposing something. Art historians tend to speak in terms of style, and that can be a problem.

Joanna Pawlik: The print version of this issue of International Journal of Surrealism explores the theme of Surrealism and pandemics. I wonder whether you might say anything about the Spanish Flu pandemic as a context for Surrealism’s origins? Does contagion provide us with additional ways of thinking about notions of cultural contact and cross-border exchanges?

Dawn Ades: You’re right to remember the number of deaths from flu in 1918 was much greater than those in the war, but I think it’s also very interesting that so many of those who founded Surrealism were actually doctors, or who trained in some way in the medical field. Not just Breton, also Aragon and others. That I think is quite striking. Why should people interested in medicine or in psychiatry move into Surrealism? I think that was fostered by the experiences during the war and shellshock. Whether I have anything to say about the recent pandemic, I don’t know. If one was going to look at immediate concerns and current crises, I would say that the environment is the current concern to which Surrealism is most interestingly positioned.

Joanna Pawlik: That’s super interesting. Dawn. Can you elaborate a little? Does Surrealism have a particular capacity or facility to articulate the environmental crisis that we’re currently facing?

Dawn Ades: Well, I think this may be extremely controversial, but one of the things I feel Surrealism actually encourages you to do is to, is to give greater agency to nature and greater agency to the not-immediately-human. So, there’s a contradiction in some ways in terms of Surrealism being so interested in the human and the psyche, but also being interested in, and in a sense supporting, the notion that the human is not necessarily the centre of the world. I think from that point of view, there’s a great deal in Surrealism that that we can learn from.

Joanna Pawlik: What you’re saying about a potential radical de-anthropomorphisation in Surrealism makes me think of the ‘The Myth of the Great Transparents’ that Breton writes around 1943, which blew my mind when I read it.

Dawn Ades: Yes. It’s wonderful. The idea that you just have to think of yourself as, not necessarily, at the core of the world, but there might be other cores or other worlds . . .

Joanna Pawlik: Given your expertise in Surrealism in Latin or Central America, do you find presence of a more pronounced proto-ecological consciousness in work produced there?

Dawn Ades: Well, one artist who I could think of in that context is Roberto Matta. He was incredibly prolific as a painter, but there’s a constant exploration in his practice of the relationship between man in the world by de-centering man and re-centering him.

Joanna Pawlik: Are there any other parts of Surrealism you might identify that can account for the continued fascination with it. What about its anti-colonial or Marxist politics?

Dawn Ades: Absolutely. I think its anti-colonial politics are very important. One of the areas that the recent exhibition at Tate was very good at [Surrealism Beyond Borders], was pointing to how far Surrealism has travelled and how it has been useful to artists and writers, individuals or groups, in many different contexts.

Joanna Pawlik: In this history of your involvement with Surrealism and the field, you have mentioned how you had the opportunity to go and speak with Man Ray or Leiris. How is it different for current or future generations of Surrealism scholars who do not have access of that sort? Are there any benefits or limitations to not having such opportunities?

Dawn Ades: I suppose there are advantages in being able to talk with figures such as these, but there may be limitations too. For example, being able to take a more objective view, being a little more independent and being able to see patterns that may not have been so obvious when we’re too close to the source. There are still many living Surrealists for contemporary students and curators to talk to. I mentioned the Chicago group before, and that’s still very much alive and we didn’t include them in the 1978 exhibition and that’s sad. Another was Ted Joans who wasn’t included in the 1978 exhibition, but he knew the exhibition and liked it. That was a missed opportunity to look at music and jazz in Surrealism. There were people working on the 1978 exhibition who wanted to keep it historical, keep it bookended with the death of Breton. It’s much easier now to see how that is not necessary.

Joanna Pawlik: You mentioned that not being able to confer with a living artist or poet could potentially be some form of advantage, because it affords a slightly greater distance or objectivity. Are there any moments in your curation or writing where you feel that there was some tension, perhaps, between how closely you were working with a particular figure and what you wrote?

Dawn Ades: Interesting question! I don’t think I was ever hampered in any way and felt pressure to write something that someone told me. Dalí was the artist with whom I had most to do while he was alive, and while I was writing my monograph on him.

Joanna Pawlik: I remember a story you told at your retirement party that you knocked on his door in Cadaques!

Dawn Ades: I did. This is when I was a PhD student. I was trying to go and talk to all the surviving Surrealists. And so, I just went and knocked on doors. This was the ‘60s and artists were not totally surprised about that. You know, I was not the only student who was doing that. I knocked on his door and was told by the person who answered that he was willing to see me. And so, I talked to him and talked to him again several times. He was, in a sense, so unpopular then and was regarded as having sold out completely, both in terms of politics and in terms of aesthetics. Talking to him was very interesting and he was so generous with his ideas. He actually pointed me in the direction of Bataille and Documents. He was the one who said, “You ought to look at that, because it’s really interesting!” I’d forgotten that, but it goes back to him. I decided I would try and write a serious book about Dalí, which was a good thing, but it was rather unbalanced towards his work of the 1920s and 30s, and very little on the on the post-war work, which I found more difficult. I don’t think there was anything in particular that he wanted me to write about. He would have liked to control things and he was against it being published in a series of books about artists because he thought he should always be completely unique.

Joanna Pawlik: Dawn, why do you think Dalí urged you to look at Documents?

Dawn Ades: His official position was that he was Surrealism. But he was aware that he had been excluded from Breton’s group. I think he also felt perhaps that Documents was going to be this Trojan horse in the history of the movement.

Joanna Pawlik: Oh wow! I love the idea of Dalí and Leiris almost having the last laugh. Except, of course they haven’t, because Breton’s hasn’t entirely gone away. Why is that?

Dawn Ades: Oh, I think I think it was all sorts of things. He was a lover of love; his sense of immense possibilities in things; his honesty about failure, about his work and of others. I used to go and talk with Elise Breton quite a lot, and his apartment was untouched basically since he died. I got a very strong sense of his presence, and he was really incredible.

Joanna Pawlik: For my final question, I wanted to ask you about PhD students and how the landscape in which they’re currently researching differs to when you were at the Courtauld.

Dawn Ades: I think the whole life of research must be easier than it was in our day, in terms of finding an archive, and there is so much more literature around today. Archives are more accessible—you can write an entire project using digital material only. One of the things I’m most thrilled by and proud of are the achievements of the PhD students who worked with me in one way or another.

And in that in that light, I would just like to mention a great contemporary Surrealist journal. I was just sent Oyster Catcher by an artist, Janice Hathaway. It’s published in the Northwest coast of Canada. I’m glad you reminded me about this because I think it’s important to bring it in too, to acknowledge that Surrealism is alive and going strong.

Joanna Pawlik: On being alive and going strong, and on being lovers of love, and immeasurable possibilities, let’s leave it there. Thank you, Dawn.