Word: furred
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...mystifies with new angles until perspective exposes the banality of his subject. This is tinplate Godard, confusing instead of intellectually surprising. Take for instance, the scene of David's train arrival. He steps onto a deserted platform and confronts a raucously singing spike-heeled floozy who throws open her fur coat to reveal a chintzy Miss America costume. Then four creatures who look like skid row relics show up with battered horns and even more battered music. Not only is it imitative of Fellini, but it is totally irrelevant...
When Lucas Samaras was a small boy in Macedonia, his father was the village furrier. "I spent a couple of summers in the business to find out what it was all about," he recalls. "Part of it was to stretch wet skins, fur down, on a board and pin the edges down. Later, when the skin is dry, you remove the pins and the skin is hard." In some ways this fragment of memory suggests the works of art Samaras was to make in adulthood: the pins, the textures, the extreme sensual contrasts (soft hair against the stink of tanning...
Manic as Samaras' "transformations" are, they still possess a system and a history; his subverted objects have a common ancestor in Meret Oppenheim's surrealist icon of 1936, the fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon. Yet they are not mere footnotes to Surrealism. Samaras has a way of undercutting, or predicting, his more "mainstream" contemporaries; in 1961, for instance, he laid 16 square textured tiles flat on the ground, four by four, as a sculpture. In the Whitney, it looks like a waggish parody of Carl Andre's floor pieces-until you remember Andre's sculptures...
...petal oil, which move fast on the streets back in Warsaw or Lodz. East Europeans who visit the Soviet Union commonly report, as does one Pole: "The Russians are literally willing to buy the shirt off your back." Poles, Czechs and East Germans return freighted with Russian cameras and fur caps for the local market. Vacationing Hungarians find that their most reliable moneymaker is their salami...
...grays in favor of the baby pinks, brilliant yellows and other bright pastels usually reserved for spring. To top off the show, Smith's 19-year-old sister Doris diddy-bopped out in a 1972 bridal outfit: a strapless white Lurex gown worn with a white fake-fur jacket and a gauzy veil with a feather stuck in the side...