The Design Museum may need to keep an eye out for unsuitable acts on all the erotic furniture in its often delirious exhibition of perverse design. Perhaps they should put up a sign: “No sex on the sofas, please!”
Objects of Desire explores the influence of the surrealist movement on modern interiors and fashion. It is a celebration of design gone awry: instead of rational functionality, the creations here infiltrate the irrational into the practical, attacking reality in the name of dreams. A standard lamp in the form of a life-size horse, a comfy chair made of soft toys, and above all those lubricious, curvy, velvet and leather sofas, make this exhibition a delightful orgy of bad taste.
It starts by making you look afresh at two cliches of modern art: Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone and Mae West Lips sofa, both created in 1938 in collaboration with his English patron Edward James. As they bask in a bright spotlight that brings out the tautness and fullness of that giant red mouth of a settee, we’re encouraged to see them not simply as outrageous sculptures but actual items of furniture. James commissioned no less than 11 working Lobster phones from Dalí for his London house.
Dalí’s dreamy furnishings are the quintessential expression of the utopian ideals of the surrealist movement that started in Paris after the first world war. This was a revolutionary attempt to destroy the bourgeois social order by releasing the obsessive, compulsive power of dreams into everyday life. While Dalí is conventionally seen as a traitor to the movement, he emerges here as one of the great creators of the modern world because he hurled its aesthetic into fashion, cinema and shop windows.
There are genuinely shocking photos of his theme park wonderland, The Dream of Venus, a pavilion he designed at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Models in bondage gear cavort in a seaside sleazorama that still, today, looks provocatively hardcore. Yet it is also a homage to the first and greatest surreal architect of all, Antoni Gaudí, whose buildings in Barcelona are triumphs of imagination over normality.
There could be more about Gaudí here, and indeed, the wider art nouveau movement, which brought a conscious decadence to late 19th-century design. What the show does have is a chair designed by Gaudí in 1900 whose carved wooden curves, varnished and polished to a pearly sheen, include organic feet, eyeball bulges, a heart-shaped back, and arms ready to enfold and hug you. It probably wouldn’t be very comfortable but it expresses a dream of a chair that actually loves its owner.
That same fairytale enchantment takes some very bizarre forms here. Man Ray’s iron with studded nails is another object all too well known as sculpture – but in this context you are struck by its attack on domestic chores, and their hierarchies, in the name of unreason. Marcel Duchamp’s 1914 Bottle Rack is another masterpiece of surrealist obsession: what possessed Duchamp to exhibit this spiky metal object as art? Possesses is the right word, for he did not choose it, but it chose him. The same is true of a “slipper-spoon”, a curious wooden spoon with a shoe carved on its handle that André Breton found at a Paris flea market: it obsessed him and he got Man Ray to take the photograph of it that’s on show here.
Surrealism’s relationship with the world of things has never looked more peculiar. There is an intense, deranged magic to the totally uninhibited way these poets and perverts fetishised the material world. Man Ray’s photograph of the surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim shows her naked by a giant industrial wheel with black ink smeared over her hand and arm. It’s an image of her as a creator, the artist in a printworks, that’s as joyously erotic as her own sculpture of a furry cup (sadly absent).
The exhibition argues that surrealism has come hack into its own in the postmodern era, when designers once again frolic freely with form and imagery. But the exhibits prove otherwise. Near these obsessional surrealist visions is a glass table mounted on bicycle wheels by Gae Aulenti in 1993. It’s a homage to Duchamp, says the label. But it’s a thing without a soul. So are many of the more recent objects in the exhibition. That 2006 Horse Lamp by Front Design is really just a grotesquely ostentatious piece of furniture for an oligarch’s penthouse.
Such contemporary designs don’t live up to surrealism at all. That is because they don’t seem in the slightest bit obsessive. Postmodernism is ironic, playful, willed – but surrealism was none of those things. When Claude Cahun photographs herself in gender-bending guises it does not seem a choice, or a statement, but an inner necessity.
That may make this exhibition sound like a failure. On the contrary: it makes you see with great clarity how extreme and extraordinary this movement really was, and how hard to recapture. Seeing these jewels of surrealist intoxication next to Galliano fashion accessories and Björk videos just proves that surrealism, tragically, is dead. It is as dead as cubism – and as glorious. It was a modernist movement, after all: not the parent of today’s playfulness but something infinitely more serious and revolutionary.
Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design 1924 – Today is at the Design Museum, London, from 14 October to 19 February.
