Word: surrealistes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Green Julia is a Rorschach-test play and an awfully good one. It is the first full-length drama by Britain's Paul Ableman, 45, who has previously written three novels and some 50 abstract and surrealist playlets. Like most plays of this sort, Green Julia is low on action and high on intensity of situation. The only characters that the audience sees are Robert Lacey, a young plant physiologist, and Jacob Perew, a young economist. For some time, Perew (John Pleshette) and Lacey (Fred Grandy) have shared a flat in an English university town. They also share...
...MOOD is one of distance, quiet, and mystery. Characters walk alone through courtyards edged by arcades shadowing old men, scenes recalling the surrealist architectures of De Chirico's paintings, or through landscapes of over-powering perspective: maize fields that extend to the horizon, forests so carefully cultivated that their trunks establish a sort of grid sweeping off behind the actors. Against such backdrops, human figures appear tiny, lost, joined together only be sweeping pans or long, fluid tracking shots. Narrower perspectives guide the eye: corridors that open out of a stuccoed wall, an avenue of tall poplars leading...
...Hara. $15. "Only the marvelous is beautiful," Poet André Breton once wrote, and René Magritte's paintings make that point. Since most of the excellent reproductions in this book cover entire pages without frames of white space, the reader is thrust into the Belgian surrealist's enigmatic world. An immense rock floats in the sky, a bottle becomes a carrot, a coffin sits on a wall. Mercifully, the text is minimal, for Magritte's content is captivating beyond words...
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...
...AVERAGE citizen of our culture might find himself in Huebler's situation--following a bird call. Yet, most of us would probably be intent on discovering the location of the bird, and determining whether it was a warbler or a Gymnogyps Californianus. (The Surrealist would be more concerned with painting a California condor ominously perched on a common park beach. While this conceptual artist is more concerned with locating the bird.) It is not surprising that Huebler does not paint bird images, but rather that he labels this a duration piece rather than calling it a location piece. The emphasis...