By Agatha Bordonaro

In the years after World War I, Europe experienced a profound cultural shift. Barriers across disciplines were breaking down, and traditional views of society were being reimagined. Freud and his theories of the subconscious and dreams were circulating widely, while technological developments were revolutionizing studies in archaeology and ethnography.

Surrealism emerged during this period as the leading avant-garde movement. Surrealists contested not only divisions between art and the everyday, but also looked beyond Europe, at the non-West, in order to redefine culture and art. At the same time, thanks to new methods of collection, ethnography and archeology flooded museums with objects that were now treated not necessarily as works of art, but as documents of a given culture. Artists were inspired by these new perspectives and methods, while museums experimented with novel ways of showing objects, thus changing their meaning. 

This interaction between surrealism, archaeology, and ethnography are now on display in Objects – Ways of Seeing: Archaeology, Ethnography, Avant-garde (Objets en question: Archéologie, ethnographie, art), a new exhibition in Paris co-curated by Princeton French Professor Effie Rentzou, together with Alexandre Farnoux, Polina Kosmadaki, and Philppe Peltier. Housed in the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Objects highlights artists such as Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, and André Masson, who together with archeologists and ethnographers, all ask the central question: What makes an object into a work of art? 

“The Surrealists were very much interested in the non-Western world,” explains Rentzou, noting that many artists were reading ethnographic literature and collecting objects from native cultures around the globe, particularly Oceania and the Americas. “What they found appealing about these objects was not the aesthetics—they were interested in the aura of the objects, in their magic qualities, in the way that an object can affect your mood, your way of seeing things. Very often they would juxtapose these objects in collections with art objects they would create themselves or objects from their own culture.”

Objects is organized into four parts, each themed around a different concept from ethnography, archaeology, art, and museology. The first section, called “Terrain,” takes its name from ethnography. “The first thing that ethnographers would do is limit a terrain for their research. Artists were doing the same thing,” Rentzou explains. “Surrealists would approach the flea market as a terrain for which they would go out on a mission and collect objects. Or for a photographer like Brassaï, his terrain was the city itself: He went out in Paris with a camera and would systematically photograph urban walls on which there were graffiti, making a whole inventory of graffiti in the city.” 

The second part of the exhibit, “Excavation,” is based on the archaeological process of digging to “unveil things that are hidden,” Rentzou says. “We transposed this to art and thought about how artists are conceptualizing this process of going deep and unveiling things that are hidden.” For example, some Surrealists used the ancient myth of the labyrinth and the minotaur as a metaphor for “digging out all these parts of our psyche that have been repressed,” Rentzou says.

The third part of the exhibit, titled “Exquisite Corpse,” takes its name from the surrealist collaborative drawing and writing game where participants would take turns contributing to a work, with each addition being made without seeing the previous contribution. This part of the exhibit focuses on the many ways artists, ethnographers, archaeologists, museum curators, and magazines would juxtapose works of art, archeological objects, and ethnographic artefacts to create new connections among them and new perspectives.

“By bringing them together, you start asking yourself what they have in common, what they don’t have in common, and break down existing categories,” Rentzou says.

The fourth and final section of Objects, titled “Double Museum,” ponders the role of the museum in defining works of art. In choosing whether to display objects as singular masterpieces or as part of a collection, or some combination in between, “there is this question of what is exemplary and what is not,” Rentzou explains. “An object is never a given. The way we package or contextualize objects very much influences the way we understand them.” 

Objects – Ways of Seeing runs through June 22.