A Portrait in Surrealism

  In a sense it is a truism to claim that a country is painted in the vivid colours of surrealism. What else is a nation, but a surreal conjunction of a slice of history, with a series of political groupings, a number of institutions, with a tax and spending policy and a set of powers, both related to a land mass, which seeks to affect the world beyond, with a collection of customs…. And how could such a constellation be anything other than the most surreal of enterprises?  One where very different images are forced into odd juxtapositions, and made to reflect each other, under the dream light of a nation’s gaze? The very idea of a nation, is surely the most surreal of undertakings! A super-reality that creates its own logic. But it is also clear that this portrait goes beyond the relatively superficial – ‘nations only make sense as surreal’ level, and infuse not merely the form but also the practice of our everyday lives. Five great theses of surrealism can be identified, and all find their echoes within a state.

  The first thesis is that very disparate elements are forced or seen to reflect one another, a reflection which comes in two forms. On the one hand there is a notion that within a nation everything ought to be consistent. There ought to be a thing called ‘joined up government’, where actions in one place, reflect actions elsewhere. Policies cast then shadows on other policies. The shadows are themselves of differing forms. In the ideal surreal state, each reflection is crystal clear. We have a joined up travel and economic and ecological policy; where actions in the one department strike chords, bells are rung, and reflect policies in another. Each little world of a department reflects both all the rest, and all others capture an image beyond them all – an image of a properly worked out across-the-board policy. At least it ought to in theory. In practice, a far darker surrealism is more easily discerned. This surrealism sees the reflection not as something planned, but rather as mere unintended/unattended consequence, and mirroring. The policies of the one department, say ‘traffic’ and our desire for cars, have their effects elsewhere, in the health department or the environment, and that other department must simply live with it. Each department is the shadow of the others, in the sense that each spends a lot of energy and time, dealing with the problems which the other departments create. These two are locked in a deadly embrace. Such is the difficulty of governing folk (getting them to eat certain foods or out of their cars, in the face of advertising and endless appeals to do otherwise), that it appears impossible to move into the second ideal world. One is left with partially joined up polices, partially thought through, and then abandoned in the face of events, for much quicker fixes. Promising joined up government is the promise that is cheap for all incoming governments to make (they paint the ideal), and utterly impossible to enact.

  On the other hand we have an idea that all our policies reflect something else – they reflect something called ‘national character’. We then reflect in them that as a nation we are generous to foreigners (or over generous) or stick to our principles, or follow laws. Policies are then a way in which we paint a portrait of ourselves to ourselves. Or better they are what we feel make us different from other nations, and yet here of course we are only really interested in caricature and distortion. We are not really interested in whether it is possible for any policy to reflect anything so disparate as a national character – we rather simply assume that they do (it is part of their justification) and then see that character only in terms of how it is a victim – a victimhood that is expressed through the way others variously misuse our character and ride roughshod over our policies. The national character is painted then in the oddest of colours in these policies. It is all too often painted negatively. We paint our abuse, in the way others use our policies and the way in which we enforce them. Our painting of ourselves, becomes then the most surreal of portraits, for it is painted only in the way that others abuse us and how we respond to that abuse. (Migration/immigrants, the dole, EU laws.)

  Beyond both of these points is the fact that a nation frames a series of distinct elements, a history, a geography and slice of the global economy, a welfare policy, etc.: And this framing creates or rather demands such reflection. To frame a piece of elements that would otherwise be interacting elsewhere, in other canvasses or as part of a greater global whole, is then to demand that a portion of the world is bought into reflective harmony, where actions in the small scale are made to spin off against each other. The surreal nation then paints its reflections (or counter-reflections) on the small scale, within the frame of a country, reflections that actually relate to, (and perhaps have their roots within), the colours of far greater global shifts and challenges. That is, a nation only operates in creating reflections in the nation, of colours and forms whose reflection is surely far beyond the canvas itself, a reflection that is global or even stellar, in its union. A surreal enough enterprise.

  The second thesis of surrealism is that everywhere, there are unlikes caught up as consequences one of the other. These unions of differences might be simple enough. Different things from widely different worlds enter the canvas together, and the composition is such that the viewer is invited to create a link between them. In the same way that any instigator of a ‘national debate’ will use this methodology to get the debate going, be it on an interview by the media or a political speech. One starts then a debate about immigration, by picking a series of statements about immigration, birthrate, the nature and function of culture, the state and the workplace…. These statements then resonate in the hearers, blend with their experience, and mix together, to create a series of reactions. These reactions then interact, and a debate occurs. This ‘debate is seldom a local affair, as it is all too frequently a handful of prejudices, a collection of slogans, and a manifesto of simplistic policies, all of which are collected within a sanctimonious air (that these must be linked because we feel they are). Democracy is then the system in which debates are surreal, volatile, and barely comprehended.

  But there is a second aspect to this surrealism. It is not merely a matter of co-option and connection, but also the swapping of form and function. Apples take on the guise of faces (and yet remain apples) or phones become crabs in form at least… surrealism works then by unpicking easy assumptions that just as we know what a thing is, we also know what it does. A paradox that lies at the heart of every state, is that States are the engines for saying they are doing one thing - enacting policies - and then creating something very different, or becoming caught up in different consequences. To reform the jury system of the constitution looks good on paper. We say of course everything ought to be reformed, and yet when the new policy comes in, we discover that there was more in the old policy than that stale form one thought one knew so well, as its function (the way it actually operated) was so different from its form (what we thought it was). The law or the constitution has proved then very difficult to reform, as has health care or even transport. In theory, one knows what one ought to do, what one would do if one was starting from a blank canvas, if the forms were all they seemed to be. And yet as their function spreads beyond their form, any action which one takes, has effects and creates ramifications elsewhere: this is true whether it is the reform of the justice system, or else the banning of political groups, a banning that then risks turning that group from expressing the extremist wing of a community in form and function (it is where those who are extreme end up), into something very different - that is, into martyrs - a fact which such groups clearly constantly court.

  The third deep thesis of surrealism is that there is an enticement to understand. This has two aspects of its own. On the level beyond the canvas itself, the very idea of surrealism is almost synonymous with the idea that there is something wrong somewhere in the work, something that needs to be thought about and understood. A work of surrealism works then in advertising its enigma, in various differing ways. Bruegel does it is the title, Magritte is querying the title, or Dali by composition, but in all the message is the same; there must be more to this than meets the eye, more than is contained within the canvas lines, and the world painted. Likewise then a state or nation is invariably assumed to be an enigma. There is more to the foreign office or any government, or the defence services than meets the eye. There must be a collection of secrets to be inferred, of secret agents, and hidden violences, that go beyond the world which we are given. (We have all seen The Men from UNCLE…) To talk of a nation is therefore to envoke an enigma where the painted reality cannot be what it seems: here must be something, some point beyond the lines and walls we see. The surreal painter often expresses this ‘beyond’ by including themselves in the canvas. Their own perspective is a part of it, their limited viewpoint, caught up in the rest and so part of the painted beyond. Likewise the bemused citizen feels their own perspective as a hindrance to seeing that greater truth, the truth of the state, known only to a select few ( ‘the great and the good’, or the secret service or the Queen, or…).

  There must be a point beyond the canvas, a point where everything makes some kind of sense or which resolves the perceived chaos. And yet at the same time the canvas itself, the image, must have its own logic, its own internal sense. There is then a world within a surreal canvas, a world where people are doing whatever they ought to be doing. They are painting pipes, and labelling them, or turning into flowers or maenads. The surreal world is then paradoxically perhaps also totally contained within its own logic. The frame is an absolute wall. The same way that very many (if not all) policies of government make sense within the arguments (local and national) themselves and yet make no sense if seen as part of a wider picture. The surreal picture state or daub, frames its own logic, and does so in spite of the fact that to the person beyond, that logic is flawed or only partially true. In both, the power of the surreal is to make the watcher with and without the canvas be aware of both facts. We feel that there is something wrong, some enigma (even if we cannot spot the what it is); and yet are absorbed within the logic of the canvas-state itself. We live then, in a world of guessed conspiracies, of global collapse - a world which is pitched against the orders and logic of states (and theirs and their citizens’ freedom to speak or consume – nobody comes out without a loony hat).

  Fourthly surrealism thrives off that most modern of political-media devices, the gap between words and things. Things happen, people speak other languages in the street, marches and deaths occur, banks fail to loan or loan too easily; at the same time, everyone keeps a running debate of these occurrences, everyone dreams of coming up with the language to define an epoch or nation. ‘Define the debate’ we are told and you will have the source of power for a decade. As if one can define anything in this way. As if the weight of words and the weight of events were not different. Words work in their own logic, a logic which of course reflects or relates to or engages with the world of events, and yet remains apart, remains distinct. Moreover this distinction works upon the side of words. As they are something apart, they have power over the event. Language organizes, and inspires. It sparks new events or makes us organize those we have. It thrives then on the fact that it is never simply describing the world. But rather at each and every point it is smuggling into its descriptions, little rituals of power and little demands upon other worlds of events and their flows. It is forcing them or requiring or expecting them to conform. Political debate which pretends to describe the world, to sum it up in mantras or statements of actuality, is always then attempting to build an other world and suck the listener up into their clarion call. The party campaign inhabits a surreal edge where a description of a world becomes also a proscription of a part of it: A factor that we are blinded to by our very system. We want democracy to deal with the real world: unfortunately it can deal only with the world that it is itself creating – the surrealist’s paradox of words and things.

  Finally, surrealism works in a dream light. The world painted, or the world debate, the idea of the state or nation are always abstract and removed. Their power then lies in never being simply real. They are then open to our dreams and to our expectations, to whatever we project upon them. Political campaigns are very much the apostles of this projection, this shadow light. One does not speak policies, so much as put up images and slogans - images and slogans that invite others to respond, others to project their hopes and fears, onto oneself, or one’s words. Debate slips behind image, and projection: The very ambiguity of a photo and a simple mantra (the ‘This is not a Pipe’ image of the last thesis), opens up what one can be saying. One could be saying everything or anything in the dream light of surrealism. We are all then represented, at least in our fantasy life, in this dream light of heroes…

The nation as surreal portrait, is then caught in the final paradox of art or politics. Every canvas has to appeal to a world beyond itself. It must move into the beyond, and never be what it seems. And yet of course it can never move beyond itself, as it exists within the frame, within the limits that framing creates, and the constrictions it makes. The surreal picture of a state then defines at once the fact that it is somehow never enough, that there ought always to be more, to be something else, something beyond. And yet the portrait or state does so on the condition that this ‘other’ cannot be reached, and can only be defined within the limited canvas - and perceived in the failure of the canvas to itself go beyond. We know then the state, the nation is no good, and yet cannot move beyond the framing of that nation, that actually allows us this knowledge: The surreal state’s final paradox.