PARIS — Where the newness of art comes from (when it comes) is something of a conundrum.
Tag: Surrealism
Posted inArt
The Twisted Delights of Abject Art
During the summer, as Labor Day approaches and people flee the city for vacation, Ferris wheels and circus tents can be seen in the distance announcing the arrival of fairs across the counties.
Posted inArt
Slicing Up Eyeballs in a Surrealist Game
The startling 1929 surrealist silent film Un Chien Andalou made by Luis Buñuel in collaboration with Salvador Dalí is now a deeply unsettling video game.
Posted inArt
Reconstructing the Legacy of Surrealism
A Surrealism of hokey séances and dripping clocks has long superseded the movement’s political and conceptual radicality in the contemporary imagination.
Posted inOpinion
From Dalí to Leonardo on the Backs of Playing Cards
When Brazilian artist Sōnia Menna Barreto was a teenager in São Paulo, her mother used to stay up all night long playing cards with her friends. That memory sunk into Barreto’s consciousness, surfacing in a surreal series of trompe l’oeil paintings the artist has been creating over the last few years.
Posted inArt
Nancy Cunard’s ‘Black Atlantic’
PARIS — The display for Black Atlantic by Nancy Cunard at the Musée du quai Branly evokes a period when the artistic and literary avant-garde became intertwined with the political and the glamorous.
Posted inArt
From Lynch to the Lynchian and the Dreams in Between
Hypnotherapy, a group show at Kent Fine Art, gives David Lynch fans a chance to revisit the iconic filmmaker’s alarming artwork a year after his solo turn at Jack Tilton. But that’s only one, conspicuous though it is, of its strengths. What really matters is the opportunity to experience a museum-quality exhibition that approaches the pitfalls of latter-day surrealism with as much intelligence and refinement as this one does.
Posted inOpinion
Model/Surrealist/War Photographer Revealed Through Thousands of Images
Some people manage to live many lives in their one existence, and Lee Miller with her journey from Poughkeepsie to the Surrealist scene of Paris to the front lines of World War II was definitely a woman whose life could not be singularly defined.
Posted inOpinion
Artist Who Embodies Teenage Intellectual Angst Is Getting a MoMA Retrospective
What will this new retrospective at MoMA, which opens September 28 in New York, reveal about the psyche of the Belgian artist who loves the radical juxtaposition?
Posted inArt
Automatic Transmission: Drawing Surrealism
Surreal. It’s one of those words like insane or awesome that’s taken a beating from aggressive misuse. I’ve heard the term applied to both a bus driver wearing a funny hat and the sight of the second plane hitting the tower. “It was so surreal,” that long e sung out like an animal’s cry of distress, is one of the more commonplace characterizations of any even vaguely untypical experience. The show currently at the Morgan Library and Museum, Drawing Surrealism, affords an opportunity to get reacquainted with the ideas and art behind the now overly familiar adjective.
Posted inArt
Slithering Toward Us: “Drawing Surrealism” at the Morgan
How much more powerful to say “drawing surrealism” than something like “surrealist drawings.” It gets the action into the art, which is, often, exactly where it is. Unweighted by color, untrammeled by, oh you know, something like the history of painting and how the surrealists (in whatever grouping you choose to deal or not deal with them) dealt with that history. Very often, not at all.
Posted inBooks
Surrealism in a Minor Key: Recent Translations of Ghérasim Luca
Considered through Deleuze and Guattari’s somewhat idiosyncratic interpretive lenses, Ghérasim Luca is a minor writer — minor in the sense that he relentlessly pushes language toward its limits, that he deterritorializes it, that he transmutes it from a mere instrument of representation into an extreme style of intensities. This is to say that Luca should not be deemed “minor” in any canonical sense — quite the opposite in fact — for within Deleuze and Guattari’s system of thought, to be called minor is an honorific of the highest order. This is also to say that Luca should be recognized, once and for all, as a figure on par with the other so-called “minor” auteurs within Deleuze and Guattari’s pantheon: Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, Pasolini, and Godard.