Word: surrealistes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
Anti-taste is still an attitude; one can sustain it well or badly. A lot of the work shown here, from Seymour Rosofsky's clumsy paintings to more overtly "aesthetic" objects like Don Baum's lumpen-surrealist assemblages of dolls' limbs or Cosmo Campoli's inert tributes to Brancusi, is a wretched thesaurus of cliches. But subtract them and a deposit of vitality remains...
Beside Paschke, relatively straightforward Chicago surrealists like Kerig Pope seem serenely traditional. Pope's Two Infants Observing Nature, 1962, with its odd transformations of vegetable, flower and corncob into a glossy wonderland of Popsicle colors, is a confectioner's version of vintage Max Ernst. It could serve as a visual text to Pope's views on Chicago's painting and his own: "The thing that interests us and delights us is the strangeness of the world, its surprises and mysteries, the impossibility of explaining it. I don't go along with science when it looks...
...years since Salvador Dali separated from the surrealist movement, he has leaped from one extravagant triviality to the next, combining the roles of circus freak, spangled elephant and Barnum himself. The performance is tinted with sadness. Dali is undoubtedly the last of the great dandies, but nobody accepts his own belief that he is the last of the great artists, heir to Vermeer and Velásquez. The baroque costume jewelry, the monarchist-Catholic oratory, the worn stock of crutches and soft watches-all have dust on them. Even the trembling antennas of that fabled mustache have apparently ceased...
Madness threatens to become the fashion in the arts, not as the stuff of drama and melodrama (it has always been that) but as an aesthetic creed. Some of the best, as well as some of the worst, novelists of the '70s are carrying out French Surrealist Andre Breton's definition of art as "a cry of the mind against itself." In Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man, a psychiatrist systematically freaks out, illustrating the advantages of what might be termed "planned madness." In Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Doris Lessing suggests that madmen...