Word: surrealists
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...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...
...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...
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...