Word: surrealness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...there is something almost surreal in the contrast between the detachment and formal purity of Khmer sculpture and the circumstances under which so much of it precariously survives. To walk into this show is to shift gears; to be immersed in an extremely slow-moving tradition to which the idea of innovation, beloved in the West, means little or nothing. Compared with Indian sculpture, from which it ultimately derives, Cambodian art is quite restricted in its range of subject: there isn't the same bewildering pullulation of different gods. In Cambodia the same cast recurs again and again: the Buddha...
What is left for our poor Mr. Peepers as a symbol of manly pride? The scenes would seem surreal if they weren't already so familiar. An investment banker braves the brutal terrain of Park Avenue in a vehicle built for climbing sand dunes under enemy fire. A claims adjuster clambers aboard a car designed to haul caribou carcasses, so he can pick up his wife's fuchsias at the suburban garden center. Did the old man flip his jeep on Omaha Beach? Then his son will have a Jeep too, to drop off the kids at the multiplex. Vroom...
This scene, from Jean-Luc Godard's poignant, invigorating For Ever Mozart, lasts only a few seconds--yet it serves as a surreal image, a joke and a requiem. After 40 years, Godard can still astonish and amuse in the cinematic shorthand he virtually created. Now two of his films, both about moviemaking, are on view: the 1995 For Ever Mozart and Contempt, his 1963 meditation on sex, lies and celluloid, newly restored after long being out of theatrical circulation. So it's time to praise Godard for what he was and still...
...when the bulletin flashed: Gianni Versace had been shot. Drummond dashed out the door and drove straight to the designer's South Beach villa, where his blood still stained the front steps. What she discovered there was more like a Versace catwalk than a crime scene. "It was totally surreal," says Drummond. "There was a squirrel on a leash perched atop a man's head. A dachshund wearing a necklace pranced about, and models were everywhere, mugging for the cameras...
...opening exhibition, curated by O'Keeffe's controversial, longtime assistant Juan Hamilton, comprises 117 pieces and serves as a walk-through of O'Keeffe's career. Among the works on view are early masterpieces from the Evening Star series, which presage whole generations of American abstract art. The surreal animal skulls floating with flowers in their eyes are here, along with the kind of gynecological exposure in the guise of Blue Flower, 1918, that made early audiences cough nervously. And there is the late work From a Day with Juan, 1977, whose white ramp jacked up into heaven presents...