Dan Coombs, Ian Dawson and Ben Ravenscroft
17 October - 15 November 1998
Half way through the last century painting went from the responsibility of telling stories, the right ones, to the responsibility of telling truths, secular ones. And the pursuit of truths, paradoxically, with a little help from Freud arguably the greatest storyteller of all time, went from the conscious world to the unconscious world. And then, tendentiously, back again with some preordained relic of the journey. At one point it was held that the dreaming mind was unlegislated truth, and the dream the gate to art. This was fine up to a point and managed to sustain a movement for twenty years. Except that dreams are a difficult place to find truths - the early concepts of modern interpretation maybe, and the key to eroticism - but not many truths. As if a man dreaming of rain who said, 'I'm dreaming', or, 'it's raining', were telling the truth. Even if it was raining. In effect, surrealism, though producing a number of suspect artists, laid to rest a vestige of prevailing Academic discourse and cleaved the hips of criticism to an oncoming new art history. Though it didn't arrive fully for another thirty five years. In addition, it created in art a relationship to writing never previously known and a modern critical language that has, as a closer antecedent, Paris between the wars, rather than America after the war. Despite America believing itself the true inheritor of modernism and surrealism a blip along the way
