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News & ArtsFriday, April 24, 2009
Visual Art Currently Hanging
Posted by Jen Graves on Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 10:01 AM
Sabrina Small's stainy little ink drawings on paper (at Grey Gallery & Lounge) are fine. They are competent surrealism-lite (what many people call pop surrealism, which is a misnomer), maybe even a little better than competent, giving off sparks of weirdness beyond their easy subject matter (twins, especially conjoined—weird!).
But those paintings pretty much slid right off my consciousness after I saw them. What stuck are Small's stark felt hand-stitchings taken from protests in Berlin. They're so stilted and yet warm. One is above (Egged Cop), more are here, and this April 30 silkscreen party at the gallery is based on them.
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That's pretty awesome. The gallery's website says that two images will be available for silkscreening--do you know which ones they are?
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Another request for an explanation why 'pop surrealism' is a misnomer. I'm not challenging the idea; I'd just like to hear Jen extrapolate. Thanks.
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I should clarify: Pop surrealism is sometimes a combination of weak pop (Jim Dine, late Claes Oldenburg) and weak surrealism (Dali), but it never has any elements of real pop (Johns, Warhol: drawing attention to the techniques of mass reproduction that defined the rise of mass popular culture in nightmarishly overconfident postwar America) and only gets part of surrealism (most of which was a rehash of Dada techniques cloaked in an ultimately conservative version of Freudian pyschology, anyway).
Some of the works classified in "pop surrealism" are surrealism-lite, and others are taking off from other points entirely: history painting, German romanticism, you name it. But I haven't seen a single work of "pop surrealism" that has anything to add to the more critical lineage of pop. And often, the vibe I get from work that's classed as "pop surrealism" is actually, like most surrealism, pretty status quo in enforcing traditional gender stereotypes as well as conventional ideas about the illusory nature of art—as opposed to the way pop (especially Johns) threw "fine" art back into the world of real things.
Some of the works classified in "pop surrealism" are surrealism-lite, and others are taking off from other points entirely: history painting, German romanticism, you name it. But I haven't seen a single work of "pop surrealism" that has anything to add to the more critical lineage of pop. And often, the vibe I get from work that's classed as "pop surrealism" is actually, like most surrealism, pretty status quo in enforcing traditional gender stereotypes as well as conventional ideas about the illusory nature of art—as opposed to the way pop (especially Johns) threw "fine" art back into the world of real things.
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