Word: surrealist
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...manic physical portrait of a city where everyone turns into a rampaging beast. This eccentric mix of humor and horror, of prattle and inarticulate profundity, influenced writers from Tom Stoppard to Edward Albee. The plays are widely taught at colleges and high schools and probably helped shape the surrealist sensibility of much contemporary TV comedy...
There was also Surrealism, which for many Catholic kids with artistic ambitions was the door out of orthodoxy. Kelley's work is larded with references to early eccentrics from the Surrealist pantheon, like the suicidal dandy Jacques Vache and the writers Raymond Roussel and the Comte de Lautreamont. On the other hand, his drawing is almost entirely derived from comic strips. Both confessional and obscure (why else would the museum have served up no fewer than 17 catalog essays to explicate it?), his work can nevertheless pack a flailing, provincial-surreal wallop -- now and then...
...presents the toys as elements in a free-form psychodrama about threat and vulnerability; they're like the dolls that witch- hunting lawyers use to elicit the evidence of children in abuse prosecutions. The most successful thing in the Whitney show is a reworking of Man Ray's famous Surrealist object, the wrapped-up sewing machine. Entitled Lumpenprole, it is a room-size afghan rug with (what else?) lumps, the size of children's bodies, beneath it. A burial shroud? A metaphor of silencing, muffling, the defeat of speech? Any of the above, or all, depending on your preference...
...hadn't kept going. Set in New York's Little Italy in the years following World War II, "Household Saints" is an exploration of the lives of three generations of Italian-American women that starts off rich in detail and comedy, and ends in an inexplicable twist of surrealist abandon...
...Keith Haring's cute squiggle salads, be thought more original, let alone more beautiful, than the best work of, say, Susan Rothenberg, Nancy Graves, Elizabeth Murray or Vija Celmins? Where are those formidable senior talents, the two Louises, Bourgeois and Nevelson, without whom no account of the post-Surrealist vein in America can be adequate? And what about -- but enough, enough already. One can see why there's a big self-portrait by Philip Guston, full of weltschmerz and peeking nervously over the top of a wall. He must have been expecting Norman of Beijing, not the other...