The blurring of a distinction between the natural and the artificial is part of the marvellous tradition that the surrealists inherited. It is obvious that the 1936 Surrealist Exhibition of Objects took some of its inspiration from the display strategies of the old wunderkammer and the Cabinets of Curiosity – with its intermingling of categories of natural, scientific, artistic, primitive, and found objects, etc. Much has been written in recent years on the highly attractive historical phenomena of the wunderkammer – something that seems to delight because its pre-scientific approach to taxonomy worked according to principles such as analogy and visual resemblance that might now strike us as more poetic than strictly scientific. It is, however, the wunderkammer that first really privileged the phenomena of hybridity – whether a hybrid of nature or a hybrid of art and nature. In their brilliant investigation of early modern natural philosophy, ‘Wonders and the Order of Nature’, Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park describe the wunderkammer as something that ‘exploited the old opposition between art and nature to feign pleasant paradoxes and also hazard new combinations of the two that subverted the distinction altogether. It was,’ they write, ‘in such collections of rarities and marvels that art and nature first mingled and ultimately merged.’ The blurring of the boundary between the natural and the artificial prompted natural philosophers to develop the concept of ‘the games of nature’ – or lusus naturae. According to Daston and Park again, ‘All of these [games] exploited analogies of form between natural and artificial objects. Some were hybrids of art and nature that played with analogies of form and matter,’ and they cite examples stones and minerals with image-forming patterns in them. Close to surrealist circles, Jurgis Baltrušaitis and Roger Caillois have both discussed the phenomena of pictorial stones, for example; stones that seem to present implicit analogies between the forms of nature and the forms of art, as well as examples of art following the morphological structures of nature, such as the nautilus shell goblet – the kind of hybrid artefact that plays with form and function in a not entirely dissimilar way to Dalí’s ‘Lobster Telephone’.

Of all the surrealists to have understood the conflict between the categories of the natural and the social, and to have worked very particularly with the relation between the marvellous, play and hybridity, it is perhaps the Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer who has most consistently explored these themes in the plastic realm. Švankmajer has a keenly black humoured view of the monstrosity that occurs when nature and civilisation come into conflict, or the comic hybridity that ensues from their confusion, which he explores in his three-dimensional work, collages, and films. His work, however, takes into account those two poles of surrealism that reach from the anxious acknowledgment of instinct as both irrational and deadly to a ludic and playful sense of the relationship between culture and nature. Much of Švankmajer’s work can, in fact, be defined as deliberately playing between culture and nature, and can be seen to take some of its force from either a blurring of the apparent boundary that exists between them or an exploitation of the ridiculous attempt to entirely separate one from the other.