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Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art. Anna Dezeuze and Julia Kelly, eds. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. Pp. 200. $99.95 (cloth).
In 1933, a photo-essay titled "Involuntary Sculptures" was published in the surrealist journal Minotaure. George Brassaï's photographs depicted ordinary everyday items shot in extreme close-up and cast in raking light, which rendered them stark, shadowy and monumental. Salvador Dalì wrote the captions accompanying the photographs. These titular "sculptures" included a tightly rolled-up bus ticket, a curled sliver of soap, a seashell, bread, and a gob of toothpaste. Each item was photographed alone to produce a series of striking, almost unrecognizable images dramatizing the flotsam of everyday life. These "involuntary sculptures" offered both a riposte and a radical alternative to contemporary notions of what sculpture could be.
Brassaï's photo-essay demonstrated the transformative nature of photography and inspired new ways of understanding the work of art in all the surreal and "marvelous" ways of daily life, to quote from André Breton's own photo-novel, l'amour fou (1937). For the surrealists, the photographic strategy of estrangement offered a deliberately subversive mode of rethinking the everyday found object.
In that context, Brassaï's involuntary sculptures presented another kind of reality. They challenged the notion that photography merely mirrors the world "as it is." This reality gap, or fissure, provided a leitmotif for surrealists and art historians to contemplate the surrealist objet and photograph as complex, psychically charged and independent entities. Notably, Minotaure and other surrealist magazines, such as Georges Bataille's Documents, mediated the surrealist object almost exclusively in photographic form.
For the editors of Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art, surrealist...