“For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.” The Poetics of Space 1958

Priére de Toucher (Press to Enter!) 1947, by Marcel Duchamp 

 This week I had the pleasure of seeing the Barbican’s latest major exhibition The Surreal House which explores the relationship between Surrealism and architecture and “the house” as a vessel of wonder and desire. Habitats are examined from the typical child drawn, to haunted houses, caves, castles, cages and even the womb and failed utopian architecture like the Villa Savoye, and the work of Gaudi and Le Corbusier. The whole show is especially well curated, with the first floor exploring the domestic and the interior, opening with a house made of skin, Freud’s furniture, a haunted suspended piano by Rebecca Horn, and Louise Bourgeois’ Femme Maison and the mezzanine showing a view from above. We are lead through a beautiful synthesis of ideas in cinema, object, paintings and architecture linked by the emotional connection to a sense of place.

Concert for Anarchy, Rebecca Horne, 1990

I have been thinking about the concept of sense of place and emotional attachment to the idea of “the home” quite a lot recently, especially as I live a long way from “home”, and that house, in which I spent my formative years, recently burned down.  Tarkovsky’s film ‘The Sacrifice‘, 1986, which closes the show, presents the protagonist burning down his own house to be liberated from enslavement of sentiment and nostalgia that plagues modern life. Losing a lot of belongings and spaces with memories attached to them is devastating, a house is “more than a machine for living” (said Le Corbusier), there are dreams, memories and desires that resonate with every door handle, lamp shade and window, which the Surrealists explore in this show, however they can also constrict us.

Joseph Cornell’s boxed assemblages made me think about creating new habitats between four walls. Moving a lot in the last few years, filling new, alien spaces with collected objects and experiences it becomes a home, only to be stripped bare and feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable.  The Surrealists used the house as a metaphor for the unconscious mind; it’s filled with knick-knacks and memories; some important, some not – but it’s when something goes missing that the comfort and homeliness we crave,  makes way for a darker, lonelier place.

The Surreal House is “veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive and magic-circumstantial”  (Andre Breton in the L’Amour Fou (Mad Love) and now showing at the Barbican until 12th September, 2010. Highly recommended! 

XOXO