Shine a light

'Invisible Rays' illuminates Surrealism, with the help of flashlights

WALTHAM -Imagine stepping into an art gallery lit by just one light bulb. Visitors would need a flashlight to look at the paintings.

Marcel Duchamp designed the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, and a portion of the show was in the near dark; flashlights were distributed to patrons. The darkness mimicked the fertile, chaotic shadows of the unconscious, which Surrealists saw as the source of creativity and, indeed, liberation.

Now step into "Invisible Rays: The Surrealism Legacy," a deep and moody exhibition at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, organized by the Rose's director, Michael Rush, with work from the museum's collection. The gallery is dim, lit by a few bare light bulbs dangling on long wires from the ceiling. Autumn leaves (actually, their synthetic counterparts) cover the floor, shushing against your feet as you walk through. A stack of flashlights stands at the door; you really can't see the art without one.

It's enchanting, even romantic, despite the fact that looking at paintings, photographs, and prints with a flashlight is an often frustrating and only occasionally enlightening way to view art. It seems strikingly contemporary - exhibit design as art installation. That today Duchamp's dark gallery would be marked as installation art suggests how radical Surrealism was in its day, and how it is so much a part of art-making today, we take it for granted.

Rush illustrates that by including several modern and contemporary works among the close to 60 pieces in "Invisible Rays." To get a sense of what falls under that umbrella, consider what the Surrealists, a group founded in the 1920s by writer André Breton, took as their bailiwick: automatic drawing, biomorphic imagery, dream states, nonsequiturs, fluid sexuality and identity, a concern with death and decay, and an aversion to rationality and linearity.

The Rose has a rich Surrealist collection. This show includes works by early Surrealists Dalí, de Chirico, Max Ernst, Magritte, Joan Miro, and Yves Tanguy - but not Man Ray, who is represented in the collection. It darts through the 20th century up to now, embracing present-day artists who acknowledge a debt to surrealism. Rush had to draw the line somewhere - otherwise the pool of contemporary surrealist artists would be too impossibly wide. He also cheekily includes Picasso, who resisted the label, but did participate in Surrealist exhibitions.

Roberto Matta's untitled 1956 20-foot-long canvas hangs near the entrance. Matta sought to capture the human psyche on canvas, and was an early proponent of biomorphism. This piece is a dreamy whirligig of motion, with biomorphic and industrial shapes flying through a green and orange gloaming.

Directly in front of it hang two stills from Matthew Barney's 1994-2002 film project "The Cremaster Suite." Barney slips into and out of costumes and identities in the mythic film series that explored masculine social roles and biology. Here, two Barneys face off: One wears a giant pink pompom headdress and a satin napkin hangs from his bloodied mouth; the other is covered in mucus-like wax. Barney and Matta's works bracket the themes and generations of surrealism.

One magnificent wall holds works by Ernst, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. Of those, only Ernst was technically a Surrealist - his spooky, painterly small canvas "The Mask" shows bright-eyed masks peering out of faceted forms like ghosts emerging from the depths.

Rauschenberg's collages made plenty of surrealist disassociative juxtapositions. He tops "Second Time Painting" (1961) with a classic surrealist symbol - a disabled clock (a stand-in for the linear world), here positioned upside down over a slashed open pair of shorts, a sweatshirt, and a brash array of paint strokes. Johns's brilliant 1957 "Drawer" looks like a dresser drawer, complete with pulls, carved out of the face of the canvas. The invitation to open it is hard to resist - and the sense of something unknown inside is a juicy metaphor for the unconscious.

Tanguy's 1948 sci-fi landscape "Land of the Sleepers" is still viscerally eerie; it's blushing sky is a tonal match to the swarming red blood cells in Ross Bleckner's unnerving 2000 painting "Large Slide" nearby - biomorphism goes literal. Tanguy's depiction of space coincided with Dali's - their landscapes look as if they go on forever.

An appropriately odd Dali, "Portrait of Louis Sachar" (1961) is made even odder when you know that Sachar was the brother of Brandeis' founding president, Abram L. Sachar. Louis Sachar, looking prim in a suit but with his head off-center on his shoulders, stands in the foreground of a velvety desert, with a looming tower and the sky opening as if with the word of God.

The surrealists knew how to set the stage for alternate realities, a style photographers and filmmakers have milked over the years. We see it here in works by Gregory Crewdson, known for elaborately staged, nightmarish images such as the untitled 2001 work portraying a drowned woman floating in water inside a house.

Then there's Tracey Moffatt's dark 1989 film "Night Cries," in which the lurid tones recall Tanguy and Dali. Moffatt deploys several surrealist themes: "Night Cries" tells the story of an old woman's death, skipping back and forth through time, weaving in memories and dream images against the backdrop of an obviously theatrical set.

The exhibition title comes from Bréton, who said "Surrealism is the 'invisible ray' that will one day enable us to win out over our opponents," meaning those too occupied with reason. Surrealism is such a standard in art today, it seems utterly reasonable. I'm not sure whether that means the Surrealists lost, or that they won.