It’s hard to find a proper surrealist these days. It’s not just a matter of
being slightly odd and slapping someone with a wet fish, or voting Monster
Raving Loony — especially now, in a world where lager ads have hijacked the
methods of a once-radical topsy-turviness. We’re so used to self-proclaimed
surreal images that we hardly notice them any more. It’s been said that
there’s more surrealism in 15 minutes of MTV than in the past 20 years of
the art world. The word has come to mean little more than wacky, just with a
bit more credibility.
But, this spring, we find ourselves bang in the middle of a proper surreal
moment again. It started seeping into our consciousness last year with the
Georges Bataille and Hans Bellmer exhibitions in London, and now its dreamy
little clouds are everywhere. There’s the forthcoming surrealism blockbuster
at the V&A, and, from Friday, even shopping gets turned on its head,
with a two-month makeover of Selfridges in London, where an entire floor is
being turned into an outlet called This Is Not a Shop. Highlights include
the instore absurdists Dadadandy, who will be launching their “limitless
edition” scentless perfume — the emperor’s new clothes in a bottle. Till
receipts will be printed with surrealist poetry, changing each week, for 14
weeks (cue irresistible shopping impulses — the full set will be quite
collectable).
As with their 20th-century counterparts, surrealism for today’s practitioners
doesn’t have to be about producing masterpieces. But the modern movement is
a broader church, taking in fashion, shopping, music, make-up and even odd
socks — anything that subverts rationality for the benefit of the mind’s
inner life. Surrealists such as the musician Bishi and the make-up artist
Phyllis Cohen are publicly spilling their psyches. But what on earth does it
all mean? “It is”, says Cohen, “a fight against the homogeneity of commerce.”
My current surreal favourites include the London Institute of ’Pataphysics
(best explained as the study of individual logic that gently yet
persistently overlays the boring reasoning we normally follow with its own
nonsensical, if flawless, version). For a more visceral experience, I can
wholeheartedly recommend You, Me, Bum Bum Train! — a club night turned into
a bad drugs dream, where you find yourself moving in a wheelchair from a
bizarre barber’s shop to a Scouts’ convention, through the middle-class
dinner party from hell and the worst jam session in the world, to a game
show in which you’re not allowed to talk or even move. It leaves you
questioning everything. And it’s lots of fun.
If you think the surrealist experiment at Selfridges — where 1½metre pencils
will be sold alongside oversized lollipops made from popcorn — is a
frivolous take on the whole thing, it’sworth considering that shopping,
particularly for clothes, is always something of a surreal experience.
Fashion designers such as Viktor & Rolf are worthy inheritors of the
surrealist mantle. My only complaint is that they have never made a men’s
version of their pillow-and-duvet suits, which would be invaluable for those
taking their first steps into the unknown. After all, there is, as the
symbolist Saint-Pol-Rouxshowed, one sure way to be a surrealist. Whenever he
went to sleep, he hung up a sign saying, “The poet is now working.” So just
go to bed, and enjoy your dreams.
BISHI
DJ and musician
Poured into a canary-yellow Dolce-esque satin dress with comedic padded hips,
the British-Asian folk-pop musician Bishi, 24, sings odes to the night bus
and to the occultist Aleister Crowley while wielding her custom-designed
half-size sitar like a rocker’s guitar. As she has supported the
avant-electro singer Patrick Wolf, her audience shouldn’t be surprised. “But
all the fans are like, ‘Wow, we’ve never seen anything like this before,’ ”
she says. “And I’m like, no, neither have I.”
As a second-generation Bengali, Bishi (full name: Bishnupriya Bhattacharya)
says she’s always felt an outsider. “I’ve always felt comfortable on the
outside — I don’t see it as an extreme,” she says. “I don’t shut
anything off — anything is a possibility.”
A club kid who came of age at Matthew Glamorre’s underground electro night
Kash Point, Bishi is also a DJ. She pioneered classical music on the
dancefloor — while dressed in a full sari, or sometimes just nipple
tassels. She describes her look as “Bassett’s Liquorice Allsort meets
Josephine Baker”.
Bishi’s love of juxtaposed extremes should earn her a big tick from the school
of surrealism. Plus, she’s fully conversant with the works of Buñuel,
Duchamp, Bellmer, Schiaparelli and Cocteau. To Bishi, however, the surreal
seems real; it’s reality that’s surreal. “The Cher video is way out there,”
she says. “And what I find really surreal is Gillian McKeith doing a health
show when she has a poo fetish. I mean, come on!”
Her creative process is textbook psyche-plundering. “My music comes to me
visually — I have to see it first.” What does it look like? “Like a
Kenneth Anger film, with lots of colour and magic spliced together. Then I
puke it out. It’s a physical release.” Talk about a torrent of consciousness.
VIKTOR & ROLF
Fashion designers
“Our process is always upside down,” says Viktor Horsting. There’s a dramatic
pause. His design partner, Rolf Snoeren, keeps quiet. Notorious for their
awkward silences, they play this game until we’re almost in a “pinch me”
moment. Finally, Horsting speaks again: “We always start at the end and work
back.”
In their latest show, models carried their own soundtrack and lighting on
aluminium rigs. “The starting point was our desire to express autonomy,”
Horsting explains. “Each model is her own fashion show. The invitation
featured a desert island in the shape of our seal. It says we’re our own
country.” Pause. “Our work always turns out surrealistic,” Snoeren says.
Another collection, Blue Screen, was made entirely in blue, so that images
could be projected onto it, and for the Selfridges event, they’re designing
an upside-down shop window (left).
“The insanity of the idea is part of who we are,” Horsting says helpfully. So
do they lead a surreal lifestyle as well? They laugh. “On the contrary,”
Snoeren says meekly. “We are always working.” For them, fashion provides
escapism. “Reality is never enough,” Horsting says. “That comes from being
very bored as children.” Horsting would entertain himself by drawing, while
Snoeren read Andersen’s fairy tales. The Dutch dream team enjoy surrealism
because, they say, it’s a world where you are your own boss. Rather like
being king of your own country.
DADADANDY
Dada dandies
From Friday, a five-metre inflatable eyeball will hover in front of
Selfridges’ neoclassical facade. “We are rebranding the store as The Eye,”
says the Italian artist Simon Moretti, one half of Dadadandy, the duo
responsible for the department store’s new vision. “The eye is a recurring
surrealist theme, a metaphor for subconscious desires,” he explains. “And
the store is the temple of desire.”
The appeal of the surreal, Moretti says, “is that it’s a fantasy world where
anything is possible. There’s a lot of daydreaming in our lives. It makes
complete sense. I don’t understand the concept of normal”.
They are dressed in black knitwear and white shirts; their dandyism appears to
be in hiding. “To us, dandyism is more about a lack of creative inhibition
than lifestyle,” says Moretti’s partner, Paul Heber-Percy, a former
gallerist. “Iggy Pop is a dandy,” Moretti says. “You can do it without
wearing regency suits.” Dressing down makes it all the easier to be
guerrilla interventionists, which is how they see themselves. They are
particularly proud of their scentless perfume. “It doesn’t even need to be
worn,” Heber-Percy says. “It’s going to be an objet
d’art,” Moretti adds.
Just then, my id alerts my ego to a banner hanging on their kitchen wall. It
reads: “Dadadandy. The Hypnotising Fragrance.” Leaving, I start to feel
sleepy — very, very sleepy.
PHYLLIS COHEN
Make-up artist
Now you see her, now you don’t. In Surreal Striptease (left), the model peels
off her layers of clothing to reveal the shell of a see-through mannequin.
Except the body in the picture isn’t a mannequin. It’s real flesh, painted
by the make-up artist Phyllis Cohen.
“It’s funny to shake up people’s expectations of what’s normal,” she says
impishly. Her words induce a double take. Maybe Cohen’s own clothes are
unreal too.
Less a make-up artist than an artist who uses the face — and body —
as her canvas, Cohen, a Canadian by birth, is a Goldsmiths fine-art
graduate. In her work — for Dazed & Confused, Tank magazine, Zandra
Rhodes and Moschino, among others — she alludes to Magritte, Dali and
Cocteau. Faces segue into sunflowers, chocolate melts into make-up and
lipstick flows off lips to make moustaches. “Make-up is a good medium for
surrealism,” she says. “It’s more startling because it’s real-time, on a
real person, and you have a natural tendency to react to that. But you don’t
know how to, because it’s so bizarre.”
It also colours her life. Cohen’s surrealist sensibility makes even the
bonkers antics of the new-rave scene seem old hat. Twenty years ago, she was
clubbing in “soldier pads” (shoulder pads made out of toy soldiers,
obviously), had a sofa made from fake rocks (“actually quite comfortable”)
and once wore small circular mirrors in front of her eyes.
Now a mother of three, she projects her Daliesque dream sequence onto others
for a living. “It creates a talking point,” she says. Like, say, if she’d
turned up to an interview wearing just a G-string. She wouldn’t. Would she?
