everyday

The food that we eat : ‘Fish and Chips’

…..free association and finding the marvellous in the familiar….

Surrealism is generally considered to have begun in 1924, a group of artists, sculptors and poets coalescing around a French poet called Andre Breton. Their periodical, first published in that year, was called ‘La Revolution Surrealiste’. As suggested by Durrozoi, it “clearly announced the group’s intentions: to bring about an authentic revolution in the strongest sense of the term in the intellectual and cultural domain, a revolution to be defined and guided by surrealism alone and by what the movement sought to bring to light.” (Durozoi, 1997:72)

This surrealism used artistic texts; written, especially poetic, texts, sculpted pieces, paintings, and such like, putting together items which were not usually associated with each other. Rather than creating a nonsense, as reported in Durozoi, page 71, Andre Breton believed that “ The two terms of the image are not deducted from each other….they are the simultaneous products of the activity I will call surrealist.” Durozoi himself believed that ‘the beauty, … the marvellous, of the image, constitutes an enrichment for the mind”, and that “the power of the images is proportional to the degree of arbitrariness that they display as the terms draw closer: the more contrary the referents seem, the more satisfaction the subjects offer …and [the more] justified they seem.” (Durozoi, 1997:71)

The Surrealist movement progressed from the ideas Dadaism, which was an artistic movement that had flourished from after about the first decade of the century, in a number of European cities, and for which Marcel Duchamp was a leading light. This group essentially wished to break entirely free from all of the established artistic rules. Duchamp is quoted, “As early as 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn. … In New York in 1915 I bought …a shovel on which I wrote ‘in advance of the broken arm’. It was around that time that the word ‘ready-made’ came to my mind to designate this form of manifestation.” (Richter, 1997:89)

“Dada not only had no programmes, it was against all programmes. Dada’s only programme was to have no programmes..” (Richter, 1997, 34) The Dadaists sought to challenge conformity, but the Surrealist ideas which followed set about challenging the accepted rules in a more systematic manner. So “ Surrealism was in some ways a continuation of Dada, but its outlook was more positive.” (Bolton, 2000:4)

Breton had felt that the source of the work produced should be rooted in dreams and in the sexuality of the artists, perhaps a reflection of the attitudes of those intra-war times, and much of the work is centred around those ideas. He felt that dreams were a truer reflection of the individual’s desires and this, in the time of Freud, (who was also loosely associated with various members of the movement), found support. Many of the artists, in a range of different media, thus at least experimented with the Surrealist group’s ideas. The onset of war, in Spain and later in the rest of Europe, broke up the movement a little, some artists becoming involved in the war, others eventually leaving and going to the United States.

There was also a witticism, a humourous facet, to their observations, as they juxtaposed artefacts and the very best of their works also conveyed ideas important to them in their times. Europe in the 1930s was a place and time when unemployment and general recession were ever-present concerns. With the application of new technology to almost every type of production threatened to create further unemployment, as humans were replaced by machinery, the mechanical monsters frequently depicted in Surrealist work., Thus, for example, Richier’s ‘Berger des Landes’ shows rural shepherds perched upon the stilts that they used to allow them to see over their flocks as the shepherds carried out their duties. Yet the piece has three legs, these rural agricultural workers are being made to look like the machinery that was beginning to replace them on the land. Richier used a ‘found object’ some flotsam, for the head of the sculpture, another throwback to the Dadaist roots of Surrealism.

In modern times the concerns may be different, yet Surrealism is still with us. The forms have changed a little, yet the underlying spirit lingers on, for example in the humour of Kennard, and in the use of shape as seen in work by Henry Moore and Rachel Whiteread, the former distorting the human form and the latter, in her Embankment piece, using multiple copies of a rigid solid to create her overall effect.

Looking for the marvellous in the everyday, I had, in my mind, a catalogue of pieces seen at the Tate Modern. And I began to see these possibilities everywhere. Thus, Louise Bourgois’s ‘Amoeba’, a white casting, I saw in the icing sugar that a cake decorator was using. A bowl of sugar cubes, reminding me of Whiteread’s ‘Embankment’ installation, was certainly marvellous; light reflecting from the crystals, emerged in a range of colours, from pinks to blues. Out at dinner, my party was offered sugar for our coffees in the form of brown crystals encrusted upon sticks. I was at once reminded of the Richier piece, and was later able to rework her piece using the ‘found objects’, the restaurant’s sugar sticks.

The sugar items were part of the formative process for my main topic, the production of the food that we eat. Yet I was unable to develop any amusing pun or spark, (Berger’s ‘punctum’), as the Surrealists would have it, from the ideas involving sugar.

Whilst re-stocking a pond within the last month, I had joked about ‘fish and chips’, and soon a variety of chips had sprung to mind to accompany the fish being released into my ponds. These puns had remained with me, and so I was able to retain my focus upon the food that we eat. I had the fish, so I had to set them with a variety of chips.

The stone chips, set around some parts of my house, and the nearest pond, were the first to be considered. Computer chips are a modern ever-present, and, of course, the traditional ‘Fish and Chips’ would make up the final part of my triptych. The colours were certainly striking, the artefacts and situations sufficiently everyday and ‘found’, but to be true to the Surrealist tradition, I had to develop a narrative.

As the goldfish were the basis for this line of thought, I produced three pieces with the fish present. The fish initially swim in a sea of stone chips. Using masks in Photoshop I was able to create other fish from the chips, visible because the layer that they were formed from has been shrunk slightly to give a smaller sized stone chip. A prominent blueish chip gives the ‘hidden’ fish their eyes. These lifeless ‘stone chips’ fish, mirror the living ones. The fish have been here since before humans have walked on the planet Earth, yet the harvesting of the seas has resulted in many species becoming endangered. The living fish disappearing, the mirror device suggesting the extinction of the species; to be visible only as a lifeless trace outline, as a fossil in some stone strata, becoming stone itself.

The second piece was created by placing the fish into an impossible position, a standard Surrealist methodology. The colours, red/orange against the largely green background provide a striking artistic effect. As the 1930s used automated machines, the present uses computers. The production of food becomes another business, using computer-aided processes, and the tools of business. Sonar and on-board fish-locating computers find the creatures, automatic pilots navigating the vessels towards the shoals, and the catches are sold like any other commodity.

The third piece uses the idea of the fish and chip shop. The shopkeeper offers the viewer fish, in the form of the goldfish in the bag, in the style of the fairground, along with the plate of cooked potato chips and salad as he might normally offer to the customers in his restaurant. The tension in the photograph is created by the idea of the alive fish being presented in the joyous style of the fairground, in a place (!) where customers are usually happy to receive dead fish. The viewer is reminded that they eat living creatures. Set in an actual fish and chip shop, the logo on the man’s shirt makes clear what is being offered. Each item presented individually would be more than welcome; this duo, this presentation of fish and chips, is an unacceptable offering. The surrealist juxtaposition of the two items, as well as punning upon the phrase, makes the viewer consider what ‘fish and chips’ actually is derived from.

So the legacy of the Surrealists is with us still. To follow their tradition we have to comply their rules, presenting the viewer with an unusual, an uncomfortable, a ‘marvellous’, juxtaposition. At once, both striking to behold yet able to deliver an observation on some facet of everyday life that gives us cause for concern. ‘Fish and Chips’, a commentary upon our use of the planet’s fish stocks, attempts to do that.

Bolton, L., (2000) Art Revolutions : Surrealism London: Belitha Press

Durozoi, G., (1997) History of the Surrealist Movement translated from the French by Anderson, A., (2002) Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Richter, H., (1997) Dada art and anti-art translated from the German by Britt, D., (1997) London: Thames and Hudson.