Word: surrealistes
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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...
...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...
...fatal which makes me change addresses." The character of these years - a melancholic idyll of transience, conducted in a series of sirocco-damp villas across a classical landscape - is built into his early paintings. It was reinforced when, as an art student in Munich, he encountered the dreamlike, proto-surrealist canvases of the 19th century Swiss romantic Arnold Böcklin. By the time he settled in Turin in 1911, the meditative cast of his mind...
...attitudes are one thing, results another. Generally, the constructions are the flimsiest area of Wiley's art. His watercolors and oils are a different matter. The White Rhino Injured, 1966, is a marvel of surrealist compression: the unfortunate pachyderm's skin is reduced to several turns of gray, wrinkled hosepipe surrounding a block of white meat from which pink blood flows; it is a funky but hauntingly succinct image of vulnerability. "I'm a maze of information about reflections mirrored in opposites," begins the caption to his punningly titled Wizdumb Bridge, 1969, and the declaration fits...