Best of
Surreal

1998

The Fantastic Art of Beksinski


Zdzisław Beksiński - 1998
    60 color illustrations. 10 photos.

It Happened Like This


Daniil Kharms - 1998
    "Hilarious as well as absurd."-Book Links

Pixel Juice


Jeff Noon - 1998
    A selection of fifty stories from Jeff Noon's head, each one strange, telling, disturbing, or sometimes just plain wierd.From the breakdown zones of the mediasphere and the margins of music culture, Jeff Noon samples the image mix. Product recalls, adverts for mad gadjets, dubcut prose remixes, urban fairytales, instructions for lost machines, almost-true tales, dreamy one-pagers, word-dizzy roller coasters. With new stories from the Vurt cycle and other revelations, including the discovery of an 'off' switch for the human body this newly revised edition marks the first time that Pixel Juice has been made available digitally.

Surrealist Women: An International Anthology


Penelope RosemontGisèle Prassinos - 1998
    Indeed, few artistic or social movements can boast as many women forebears, founders, and participants-perhaps only feminism itself. Yet outside the movement, women's contributions to surrealism have been largely ignored or simply unknown. This anthology, the first of its kind in any language, displays the range and significance of women's contributions to surrealism. Letting surrealist women speak for themselves, Penelope Rosemont has assembled nearly three hundred texts by ninety-six women from twenty-eight countries. She opens the book with a succinct summary of surrealism's basic aims and principles, followed by a discussion of the place of gender in the movement's origins. She then organizes the book into historical periods ranging from the 1920s to the present, with introductions that describe trends in the movement during each period. Rosemont also prefaces each surrealist's work with a brief biographical statement.

Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation


Whitney Chadwick - 1998
    An impressive list of contributors explores the byways, bringing this tragic, funny, and engrossing story up to recent times." -- Lucy Lippard, author of "The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art" During the 1930s and 1940s, women artists associated with the Surrealist movement produced a significant body of self-images that have no equivalent among the works of their male colleagues. While male artists exalted Woman's otherness in fetishized images, women artists explored their own subjective worlds. The self-images of Claude Cahun, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Remedios Varo, Kay Sage, and others both internalize and challenge conventions for representing femininity, the female body, and female subjectivity. Many of the representational strategies employed by these pioneers continue to resonate in the work of contemporary women artists. The words "Surrealist" and "surrealism" appear frequently in discussions of such contemporary artists as Louise Bourgeois, Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman, Kiki Smith, Dorothy Cross, Michiko Kon, and Paula Santiago. This book, which accompanies an exhibition organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center, explores specific aspects of the relationship between historic and contemporary work in the context of Surrealism. The contributors reexamine art historical assumptions about gender, identity, and intergenerational legacies within modernist and postmodernist frameworks. Questions raised include: how did womenin both groups draw from their experiences of gender and sexuality? What do contemporary artistic practices involving the use of body images owe to the earlier examples of both female and male Surrealists? What is the relationship between self-image and self- knowledge?Contributors: Dawn Ades, Whitney Chadwick, Salomon Grimberg, Katy Kline, Helaine Posner, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Dickran Tashjian.