Floria Sigismondi: Bowie, The Cure, Surrealism And Me

How do you incorporate Surrealism in your works?

I believe that our subconscious communicates in symbols. Symbology is the language of the subconscious. I put myself in states where images and ideas flow freely without the interruption of the intellect, I don’t judge them no matter, how strange they may seem. I play a lot with juxtaposing ideas. For example, I was looking back at a video I made for Leonard Cohen for the song In My Secret Life. For this, I had figures with big egg-shaped heads, doing very mundane things like vacuuming, playing a record and kissing. The two heads fit into each other, one concave and one convex. I found playing with the augmentation of the body, creating the unfamiliar, while doing very familiar things, was something I found exciting.

Another example is a film I created for The Cure, titled The End of The World, where Robert Smith was moving in an otherworldly motion, as inanimate objects in a house moved on their own around him. My favourite image was wallpaper peeling off the bedroom walls, revealing another wallpaper underneath while the bed sheets wrapped themselves around his body like a snake. Using objects and places in unnerving ways helped create the feeling of discord. The idea was when your world comes falling down there are things we discover underneath. Surreal images like these can be whimsical yet dark.

Robert Smith of The Cure in the video for The End Of The World courtesy floria sigismondi

Absolutely. There does seem to be this tipping point between the sinister and the comical with Surrealism. Which I think a lot of people enjoy.

Yes, because you can use Surrealism to make quite strong statements in a playful way. I like creating provocative images by combining ideas on top of each other for heightened effects. One image comes to mind, entitled, Family Eating Media, where I put a family around a table eating media in a two-walled kitchen set, in the middle of an oil field. The son was chomping on a vinyl record, while the mother sat staring off with lifeless eyes.

Still from *The End Of The World* by The Cure courtesy floria sigismondi

Didn’t you once bulldozer down a house in the name of Surrealism?

Yes, I actually bulldozed a house in that Cure video, The End of the World. I wanted to create a feeling of domestic life coming apart. I want to tear down a house. It was the perfect symbol. I didn’t have the money to build a house and then tear it down but then, in what appeared to be magic, I actually found an army base that allowed me to tear one down. How serendipitous, I thought! That’s going to be my end of the world and so, I went out, got a bulldozer and tore it down. It ate it like a dinosaur chomping at dinner. Houses are great symbols and maybe that’s what’s so provocative about Magritte’s L'empire des lumieres. Houses - we live in them, then we die and then other people come in and use it for an amount of time and then they pass away and so on. Memories layered on top of each other. As the saying goes, “if these walls can talk”. So, the home is, sort of, this shell of people’s dreams, of people’s lives.

We are now just over a century on from the beginning of Surrealism. What kind of legacy do you think it has today? Do you think today's artists are still inspired by Picabia
or Lalanne?

If you look at the history of painting, the rich paid for artists to immortalize them. Then photography came along and documented it perfectly. The camera told artists, “I can do that better, shattering painting to bits, but painting didn't die, it reinvented itself. Artists had to forge harder, dive deeper to find something to say, to have a point of view on reality. Surrealism was born and became the language of the subconscious and dreams. This laid the path to how we see images today. To show the unseen.

In terms of how you look at it in your own work, do you see those kinds of influences as Surrealism? Or do you see them as just your personal aesthetic? Are you trying to be a Surrealist?

I know my relationship with creativity. Even if I’m given a task to tell a normal story, I can only hit it through the Surrealist lens because that’s what comes naturally. There are people that document reality in a perfectly normal way. It does the job of capturing a moment from one perspec;ve. I always take the back door in, turn it upside down, shake it up a bit, disassemble it and then put it back together again. I can’t help it. It’s my visual language and how I communicate. I prefer that to the use of language. My family immigrated from Italy when I was two years old, just as I was learning Italian and English at the same time. It was quite difficult. I found comfort in images, in the imagination, in daydreaming.

"When I first met Bowie we talked for six hours about art and images. I went away and couldn’t wrap my head around what he wanted to do..."

When you worked with musicians like David Bowie, or Björk, did you zoom in on the Surrealist aspect to their work and seek to connect with them on that level?

Yes, I connected to the quality we had in common. David Bowie and Björk are very visionary artists. When I first met Bowie, we talked for six hours about art and images. I went away and couldn’t wrap my head around what he wanted to do. He left a great message on my answering machine in the Nineties. He encouraged me to make it my own. He really understood the creative process and how delicate it is and that set me off to find my language in his world. It was a big turning point for me to witness someone making art out of his life. In my eyes he was making this big painting with his life and having a blast. I wanted to live my life like that. He was always pushing and breaking barriers. I remember laying in a hotel room in New York after meeting him thinking, I could live my life like that. I can still hear him, “Oh - don’t listen to them!” Whoever them is to you.

So, you grew up in Canada, right? Is Canada particularly Surrealist in a French kind of way?

I had a very creative childhood in Canada. My father gave opera singing lessons to a talented artist,Tibor Nylasi, and in return he would teach my sister and I art. We were learning very sophisticated techniques at the age of nine.

And am I right in thinking that you’ve recently been working in Mexico?

Mexico City, yes.

Mexico obviously attracted quite a lot of surrealists in the 20th Century. Did you see much evidence of that legacy there?

I absolutely connected with Mexico City and the people, there is a sense of Surrealism within the culture. I think there’s a big part of spirituality that is very much alive and this brings forth the hidden dimension that allows for Surrealism to still feel alive. Families go to the pyramids in the spring to recharge their energy and sit with the gods of the pyramids. Painted murals are everywhere giving the city beautiful colour and imagination. Surrealism blossomed in Mexico bringing us artists like Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo or Remedios Varo
to name just a few. It’s a magical place, where the dead are amongst the living. It reminds us that life is not finite, and there is so much more to explore within the hidden layers of consciousness.

For more information on Floria Sigismondi's projects, check out her site here!