Word: carelman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Laughter in the Louvre? As gross a solecism, one might think, as a belch in the Sainte-Chapelle. Yet for several weeks, visitors to the Louvre's Museum of Decorative Arts have been convulsed with mirth over the work of a puckish artist from Marseille, Jacques Carelman. With his collection of "Objets In-trouvables" (Unfindable Objects), Carelman has revived Surrealist humor and created the wittiest show to be seen in Paris in years. (It will open in Dallas next winter...
...point to any one source of inspiration for my unfindable objects," says Carelman, "I suppose it would be those old-fashioned mail-order catalogues, like the old Sears, Roebuck ones, with precise, naive drawings instead of the color pictures you find today." Thtfse catalogues define a dreamworld of real consumer goods; Carelman's show presents an actual world of fantasy goods. The 50 creations on display include a masochist's coffeepot with the spout over the handle, thus guaranteeing a scalding for anyone who uses it; an hourglass filled with pebbles, not sand, "for people...
...Says Carelman, 42, a onetime dental surgeon who has become well known as a designer and cartoonist: "I guess you could call me a critic of society, all societies-but especially the wasteful consumer society. My defense against the aggressiveness of objects is derision, humor. I deal with objects everyone is familiar with, like a hammer. I deform them and people get a shock. Children react the best, intellectuals second best...
Says Francois Carree, assistant curator of the Museum of Decorative Arts: "No one has better taken into account the all-too-rational limits of our system of objects. Carelman thinks of everything and everybody, of the prolongations of technology as well as new categories of ignored consumers: acrobats, mourners, the one-legged ... The infinitesimal shift thus revealed to us is what separates poetry from reality, and the most invigorating humor from the crass stupidity of profit making." A child at the show was more succinct. "As a convinced masochist," he told the artist, "I take...
...German scientist, critic and aphorist, whose name apparently strikes Carelman as inherently grotesque, like Major Major, P.D.Q. Bach or the presidential ticket of Wintergreen and Throttlebottom...
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