Word: meret
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Sights like that are jarring to the senses because our experience tells us that certain things, both in and out of nature, do not go together. Meret Oppenheim's fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon is always upsetting, no matter how often one looks at it, because we tend to keep certain textures and functions separate in our minds. Snow on a beach is not upsetting in the same way, but it startles the imagination. Where a child built a castle in the sand, he might make a snowman in winter. Or he could build a fort, two forts...
...ends pointing inward. The whole inside of the cube is lined with these enormous glossy hairs. You can't not see it as organic: sea anemone, vagina. And it refers back culturally too, since its obvious predecessor is that icon of oral sex in the Museum of Modern Art, Meret Oppenheim's fur-lined cup and spoon. What happens then to the famous hands-off character of Minimalism -- austere objects fabricated by remote control, factory-made to specifications issued by the artist...
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...
...researches in books that surpassed in popularity the works of Anatole France, Pierre Loti. He founded the French Astronomical Society, edited a monthly review, L'Astronomie. In the War of 1870, he served France, spying upon the Prussian troops with his long telescope. An admirer, one M. Meret, presented him with a country place at Juvisy, where he built an observatory, passed his time peering at the planet Mars and collecting ghost stories. Never a great scientist, he was still mumbling about the probable inhabitability of Mars while his colleagues were concerned with the atomic structures of stars...
...Heavens, The Atmosphere, Urania, Omega, The Last Days of the World, Astronomy for Amateurs. For 58 years, he has never taken a penny of author's right for his work, Annuaire Astronomique, published annually. Out of sheer admiration for his selfless devotion to his studies, one M. Meret provided him with a country estate, "La Cour de France," upon which M. Flammarion erected the Observatory of Juvisy, and where he to this day is fascinated by the study of the planets- in particular Mars...
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