Ingrid and I went to see The Subterranean Sky – surrealist art from the collections of Moderna Museet.

We were confused and disappointed. Most of the works exhibited were not actually examples of surrealism, or at least not what we thought surrealism to be. Maybe we’re not educated enough.

There were some works of obvious, well-known surrealists such as Dali and Magritte, and Bunuel. And a rather bizarre umbrella clad in sponges. I have to wonder if the sponges looked so dead and brown and close to disintegrating into dust when the work was first made.

But then a whole lot of what I would have called abstractionism and dadaism: drawings generated automatically by the artist’s hands as they were shaken during a train ride; lines depicting nothing. One of Alexander Calder’s mobiles. Why were they there? No idea.

Robert Rauschenbergs “Mud muse” was, in my opinion, also not surrealism, but it was at least kind of fascinating. A pool of liquid mud that bubbled and erupted at seemingly random moments. The eruptions were energetic enough that the pool was surrounded by a splash zone with small dried spots of mud. It turned out to be not random but triggered by sound. I was hoping that meant sound detectors, but no, it was controlled by a recording that was, disappointingly, not even made audible.

So… yeah. Not very impressed.