The Naked Eye

Beschrijving

Tent. Tel Aviv, Shpilman Institute for Photography, 00-04-2013, 00-01-2014. - Groepstentoonstelling toont een overzicht van de surrealistische fotografie in de eerste helft van de 20e eeuw uit de verzameling van het gelijknamige instituut en het Israel Museum te Jerusalem. - The exhibition presents rare examples of Surrealist photography in the first half of the 20th century from the collection of the Sip and the collection of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Surrealism rejected the old artistic-cultural order and strove to shatter the orders of bourgeois society by laying bare the depths of the human soul and liberating man's innermost urges and aspirations. In an attempt to introduce a stratified platform for new aesthetic perceptions, Surrealist photography strove to present a different reality and undermine the perception of "direct vision" by creating imaginary, fantastical, dreamlike images. The title of the exhibition, "The Naked Eye," is analogous to André Breton's notion of the "savage eye" (l'oeil sauvage), which contrasts the immediacy of pure, savage vision (its perceptual automatism) to the traditional bourgeois order. The dominance of the eye image in the Surrealist visual repertoire, which was associated with expressions of passion, desire and violence, was congruent with the attempt of the movement's artists and members to change the modes of observation and vision to enable direct, subconscious perception, as opposed to thought and planning. The first part of the exhibition focuses on Surrealist thought as manifested in photography: "the eye," "the coveted woman," "the doll," "the mannequin," "nightmarish/dream images," etc.