Word: surrealists
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...funny how easily the ineffable verges into the insufferable. Conceptual art has a way of churning minor ground into dust, and Ono's work is full of attenuated Surrealist gestures, as in Four Spoons, a plaque holding three spoons and the crater of a missing fourth. In Pointedness, a crystal ball sits atop a Plexiglas pedestal engraved with the words THIS SPHERE WILL BE A SHARP POINT WHEN IT GETS TO THE FAR CORNERS OF THE ROOM IN YOUR MIND. You can try lending weight to this by comparing it to the gentle paradoxes of Zen and the subtleties...
Mark Morris, who loves opera almost as much as modern dance, has cooked up a new version of Four Saints in Three Acts, the 1934 surrealist collaboration between Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein. This production, which blends dance, mime and slapstick in the fanciful Morris manner, had its world premiere in London in June, and will make its eagerly anticipated U.S. debut at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, Calif., on Sept. 21. Michelle Yard, a much-admired addition to the Mark Morris Dance Group, is St. Teresa, and word is that she, pictured above with John Heginbotham, dances like, well...
...Gorey's literature was also a bit Surrealist. The text of his short books was often as ambiguous as his illustrations. The short verses often did not follow each other smoothly. But most characteristic of Gorey's literature was his unique ability to describe tragic events with bizarre humor...
...surrealism, the movement to which Dali's work was central. She has done an excellent job of showing and analyzing the ways in which illusion, the act of making marks that get read as "real," acts in his painting. No illusion, no Dali. This isn't true of other surrealists, or painters who went through a surrealist phase, like Joan Miro. But Dali's effort to make dreams concrete, to lead the viewer into a state of radical doubt about the supposedly fixed nature of reality, is the entire key to his art. And without the most obsessive and paralyzing...
Gorey's taste for deadpan absurdity is sharpened by what he has called his "unreasonable interest in surrealism and Dada." He is a great fan of surrealist Max Ernst, and, just as Ernst rearranged 19th-century engravings into his own fantastic collages, Gorey recombines the elements of forgotten Victorian novels, reshuffling the set pieces and stock characters after his fancy. One of my favorites, The Object-Lesson, is constructed along these lines, piling delicious non sequitur on delicious non sequitur, like this: "It was already Thursday, but his lordship's artificial limb could not be found; therefore, having directed...