Blasted Architecture

(Lee Miller,Bridge of Sighs, Kinghtsbridge, Lonson,1940)
Tristan Tzara suggested that the pantheon should be cut in half vertically, and the two halves set 50 centimeters apart, and the poet Paul Eluard predicted that “one day house will be turned inside out like gloves”. The house has a cosmic wholeness that we apprehend in childhood—four sides, four windows, a door, a pitched roof and a chimney. But it is also subject or attack, fragmentation, conflagration and collapse. The house that goes up must come down; this is especially true if we think of the house as a mirror of our won fragile being.
The first manifesto of surrealism in 1924 celebrated “psychic automatism” as central tenet of movement. Breton and fellow surrealists experimented with so-called “sleep séances” to induce automatic speech at the same time as in a trance. The ideal was to access the unconscious as far as possible unmediated by the rational mind. Although later rejected, it being impossible to deny the imposition of reason, the “sleep séances” certainly served as a playful and instructive way of loosening inhibitions and subverting convention.