An interesting article in the Tate Online Research Journal by Ian Walker about the surrealism' of natural form and the tendency to interpret them close anthropomorphically. My interest was attracted by the association of rocks and surrealism.

It is an art history article about Eileen Agar, the rocks of Ploumanac'h in Brittany and English surrealism in the 1930s. I know very little about the English Surrealist Group other than it being marginal and dismissed as foreign rubbish.

Agar interpreted the rocks as heads and faces, bodies and monsters. The unconscious, images chosen from free association and dreams, and the process of automatism. does not seem to have been a part of the configuration. The cultural insights of Freud's dream narrative techniques and his analysis of unconsciousness mental life do not appear play a role in this photography. Hence the term 'natural surrealism' is used for this photography work.

It is unclear why they are surrealist--because they disclose the illogical and the absurd through imaginative juxtaposition---eg., a fur-lined cup?To divorce the art-historical movement known as Surrealism from its Freudian underpinnings is to no longer have Surrealism---surrealism is representations of libidinal repression.

I appreciate that he French surrealists interpreted Atget's images of vanished Paris as the spontaneous visions of an urban primitive—the Henri Rousseau of the camera, and not as the work of a competent professional or a self-conscious artist but as the spontaneous visions of an urban primitive—the Henri Rousseau of the camera. In Atget's photographs of the deserted streets of old Paris and of shop windows haunted by elegant mannequins, the Surrealists recognized their own vision of the city as a "dream capital," an urban labyrinth of memory and desire.