The Surreal House has it all: cannibal dolls, an upside down piano that plays by itself and a resident skeleton.
Trying to navigate the concrete twists and turns of the Barbican Centre is always a bit of a daunting prospect if you ask me. Once inside the vast, commodious space, the runways and grey walls are strangely comforting, roomy and all excellently signposted. It's getting into the cavernous thing which is always my problem. Anyway, I digress (already). Within this labyrinthine building, another architectural triumph dwells: The Surreal House. At times unnerving and playfully chilling, the sixteen rooms of this two-storey edifice – a winding maze of darkly mysterious and intriguing chambers – consider the fundamental importance of the house within Surrealism.
Things start absurd before getting decidedly darker in tone. Outside, next to the doorbell (a woman's breast mounted on a black velvet backdrop by Duchamp) the farcical, utterly ridiculous Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill Jr, is projected onto a wall. In the premonitory first room, The House of Freud, Rachel Whiteread's stone sarcophagus, Black Bath, sits threateningly in the middle of the dark space, surrounded by blurry blown up pictures of the door to Freud's Viennese apartment. The large, glassy peep-hole gleaming from the dark wood makes me feel as though I'm being watched. Far off in the background the shrill echoes of some forgotten instrument course through the dark silence.
In the Theatre of the Domestic, the source of the music becomes apparent. A grand piano is suspended upside down in a vast atrium as the keys tap out a high pitched sequence of notes of their own accord. The temperature is noticeably colder and a draft sweeps through the hall, slightly stirring the trim of a set of heavy velvet curtains. As I stand transfixed by the giant shadows the piano casts, an almighty crack makes me jump out of my skin. The instrument above spews open, the lid swings back in a reverberating shudder and the keys spill forward like a set of large matchsticks, dangling from the piano in a cacophony of alarming noise.
In another room, Jan Svankmajer's unsettling film of cannibal dolls is engrossing. In a dolls' house, the unruly furniture ushers the residents down a hole in the floor to a table where they are ironed out flat and put in a bird cage. Wax dolls heads stew and bubble in copper pots and pans on a toy stove, while over at a table, set for tea with floral crockery, a baby doll helps herself to a ladle of watery plastic dolls' arms which she slurps up whole.
Things get scary in the Haunted Room. There's a life sized wax figure of a child slumped over a desk, and in a side room a film, which I'm too petrified to watch more than five minutes of by myself, shows a girl locked in some kind of cellar where she discovers a chest of potatoes. As she carefully picks up the spuds and puts them in a wicker basket they keep disappearing. Trust me, its the stuff of horror films. Past a set of Louise Bourgeois stairs that lead nowhere, Edward Kienholz's The Wait is possibly the creepiest thing there. In a room by itself, you stumble upon what appears to be a fairly normal domestic scene until you realise the old lady occupying an armchair is actually a skeleton. Her withered decaying clothes cling to her bare bones and a mummified cat sits on her lap. On a table beside her, photos of male relatives in military uniform stand one behind the other. The only living thing in the room is a budgie in a cage which tweets intermittently.
Over in the Curve, German artist John Bock keeps up the surreal feel of things with his performance, sculpture and film installation. Along the huge curved wall, three pronged, chaotically cluttered, brightly coloured pods parasitically feed off the walls and hang from the ceiling. There's a noodle bar filled with Chinese lanterns, a kind of second-hand shop specialising in clocks, and a clothes store stuffed full of shirts and clothes hangers. A pod-adorned motorised vehicle, complete with a kitchen travels up and down the Curve delivering actors to clamber throw the cubby holes of the pods. It's both weird and very cool.
Having had my fill of Surrealism I head back into the real world of glass-office fronted Moorgate. If I'm honest I think I preferred the pretend one, even with the scary potato-gobbling basket. At least there were no bankers or Costas.
The Surreal House is at the Barbican from 10 June - 12 September.
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Image Credit: (top to bottom) Paul Nouge , Le Bras revelateur, From Subversion des images, 1929-30, Archives & Musée de la Litterature, Brussels, Copyright DACS 2010.
Rebecca Horn, Concert for Anarchy, 1990, Copyright Tate, London.
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