Nashville Arts Magazine

Susan Edwards | Twilight Visions

In a little over eight years, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in downtown Nashville has become a jewel in the cultural crown of the Mid South. The old Art Deco post office on Broadway, built in 1934, served the city for over 60 years, but it was destined to be a museum. In April 2001, after an extensive renovation, the Frist Center opened. Since that time, a dizzying number of shows and events—a new one every six to eight weeks—have passed through its doors, many of them conceived and organized by the center’s staff.

The Frist Center’s now-gleaming, white-marble presence belies a populist conception. Thomas F. Frist, Jr. and his family, through their foundation, led a community-wide effort to create a visual arts center. The subsequent public/private partnership with the U.S. Postal Service, the City of Nashville, and the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency led them to the historic building and surrounding land. A visual art center was born. There’s still a branch post office on the lower level of the building—just to keep it real.

The Frist’s Executive Director and C.E.O., Susan Edwards, agreed to sit down with Nashville Arts Magazine and talk about the museum and its current exhibit, Twilight Visions, a celebration in photography, film, and books of Surrealism in the 1920s on the streets of Paris. Photographers that included Ilse Bing, Brassaï, Man Ray and Germaine Krull documented the city’s many monuments and storefronts, its people, and the minutiae of their daily lives.

Innovative lighting, camera angles, and processing techniques helped blur the lines between reality and fantasy in the photographs they took. The result is both beautiful and repulsive, a fascinating mix of high art and popular culture.

The Surrealists seem a very intellectual group, and their art is specific to a particular time and place. Will the average museum visitor find something to relate to in the Twilight Visions exhibit?

So many people think of Surrealism as not a mainstream notion. My position is that it’s incredibly mainstream. A lot of the images in the show appeared in popular media of the day, even on postcards. The Surrealists had to make a living. And they worked in different genres with equal integrity but not always with equal opportunity. In fact, many of our most original voices have come not from positions of privilege but from the need to find a way to say what they want to say.

It was a particularly interesting time and place, Paris in the 1920s.

Yes. What happened in Paris in the 1920s paralleled what was going on in the rest of the world. Surrealism took hold in this interwar period—the time between the two world wars. There was global recession. Governments were in flux. Governments, workers’ unions, artists, magazines, everyone began to realize how important photography was. It was available for both art and for political movements. The impact of photography was international. Everyone understood its power. It was readily available.

And there were innovations.

Yes. Hand-held cameras became available during that time. Rolled film came on the scene. Printing techniques also improved. These things were huge.

Did they make photography more of an art form?

The histories of photography and art are inextricably linked. Photography is now taught in art departments. And that’s because from the time of its invention it always had these dual roles. What’s fascinating about the interwar period is photography becomes used in both realms. It flows nicely in both and straddles many worlds.

Obviously it has a huge role in advertising and media. It has a huge role in fine art. Photographs come from a not-very-long tradition, because we’re only looking at from 1839 to the present. What the Surrealists did is to make everything blur. The hierarchies break down, and the genres blend.

What is it that’s so compelling about photographs?

Actually, photography works very much in the same way music does, because one of the things that happens, in a very Proustian sense, is you may look at a photograph and have that remembrance of things past and be taken back there in the same way a song takes you back to that time in your life.

The photographs in the Surrealists show have a real sense of nostalgia—even if we’ve never seen the images before.

One of the enduring legacies of Surrealism is it has this long shadow of influence. Basically the Surrealists were trying to give us an expanded realism, to include dreams and the unconscious. Some of the concepts are psychoanalytic, a desire to look into the unconscious mind.

They are often looking at something that’s familiar, at once attractive or alluring but also repulsive. So in that sense they attach themselves to what Freud defines as the uncanny— that which we look at which seems familiar, but we also may step back from it. But we can’t stop looking. These impulses are very fundamental. It’s the Eros Thanatos drive—love and death. We’re attracted to things—rubbernecking on the highway. Why do we gawk? There are some scenes in the Surrealists’ films which are hard to look at. Yet we continue to look. That instinct often leads to our preservation. What if our doctors couldn’t look at the grotesque without a desire to heal it?

Talk about the process of putting a show together. How do you do it?

When I approached Therese Lichtenstein about doing a Surrealist show I said, ‘Let’s think about this part of the world and how people think about art.’ Some people think the notion of high art doesn’t have anything to do with them. They don’t know how very close to their lives this is.

How so?

[The Surrealists world] is the world of the flea market. Flea markets are very popular in the American South. It’s a world of chance encounters, finding that wonderful thing that has special meaning for you. In the peripatetic lifestyles of the Surrealists, they wandered Paris—mostly at night. And they found objects in the flea markets and then attached meaning to them. Much in the same way Freud did in dreams: you look at something and then you go back and interpret.

When she was putting together the show, Therese also thought about twilight and dusk, both literally and metaphorically, that time of day when things are both real and surreal.

You’ve referred to Twilight Visions as “breakthrough.” Why is this a breakthrough exhibition?

Because Surrealism signals a breakdown of the hierarchy. This wasn’t high art when it happened. It was just people getting together, talking to one another, constantly meeting in cafés, talking about their ideas and what they found in what they were reading—an exchange of ideas and philosophy. Now many of these images are familiar to us. Advertising uses them constantly.

Influence and appropriation are everywhere—it’s all there these days in television, on the web….

Yes, the flow is either from high art to “street” or mass culture, or from mass culture to high art. The point is there’s tremendous flow and exchange of ideas.

It’s going so fast. We really have to open our minds and be aware of how much we borrow. Marcel Duchamp said that in the future our education will have to include learning to interpret photography.

He anticipated photo shopping.

Actually Marcel Duchamp really becomes the hero of this period. He said that creativity isn’t just in the artist. The spectator adds his contribution to the creative act by deciphering and interpreting.

Do artists still congregate and share ideas?

Absolutely. A lot of the work is done in isolation, but artists, especially younger artists who may not have a place to show their work, are the ones who have to get together and find a venue for themselves. They exchange ideas, find venues, and work together, now through websites and Facebook.

At the Frist, who are you trying to reach? Who is the typical visitor to the Frist?

The founders of the Frist had a democratic mission; it was a former post office, after all. People came in to buy stamps or send mail. Always at the Frist we’re trying to make people visually literate. Our vision is to get people to change the way they see the world. But if I had to say the one group of people we absolutely try to reach, then I would say we aim for the curious.

We have the ability for everyone at every level of knowledge to get something and grow. There’s no prior knowledge required to come here. There are no educational, economic or social barriers. The museum is free to anyone under 18. We encourage people to dress casually. It’s on our website.

What’s your favorite art?

My appreciation changes. There are things I go back to, things that resonate. I’m like the general public. I like all the stuff. My interests shift every five minutes. Anyway, that’s kind of like asking which one of your children you like the most. So in answer to your question: I love them all.

by Linda Leaming