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Displaying the marvelous

Name: Displaying the marvelous
Author: Lewis Kachur
ISBN: 9780262112567

by Lewis Kachur

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Overview

Surrealism in its late phase often abandoned neutral exhibition spaces in favor of environments that embodied subjective ideologies. These exhibitions offered startled viewers an early version of installation art before the form existed as such. In Displaying the Marvelous, Lewis Kachur explores this development by analyzing three elaborate Surrealist installations created between 1938 and 1942. The first two, the "Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme" (1938) and the "Dream of Venus" at the New York World's Fair (1939), dealt with the fetishization of the female body. The third, "First Papers of Surrealism" (1942), focused not on the figure but on the entire expanse of the exhibition space, thus contributing to the development of nonfigurative art in New York. Kachur presents a full visual and verbal reconstruction of each of the exhibitions, evoking the sequence that the contemporary viewer would have encountered.

The book considers Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí, two artists who are not usually compared, within a common framework. Duchamp specialized in frustrating the spectator, using his ironic wit to call into question the definition of the work of art. Dalí was a master at disorienting the senses by establishing and then undermining everyday spatial and object properties. The Surrealist challenge, as voiced by André Breton, was to evoke the marvelous. Duchamp and Dalí extended that challenge to the physical and commercial realm of the exhibition installation.

About the Author, Lewis Kachur

Lewis Kachur is Associate Professor of Art History at Kean University, New Jersey.

Recently, Lewis Kachur has had two Marcel Duchamp-related conference proposals accepted for presentation at national venues in the coming academic year:

Naming and Embodying the Rose, Modern Language Association, Los Angeles, January 7, 2011.

Dirtying the Corner: Duchamp, Rauschenberg and Surrealist Exhibition Interiors, Surrealism and the Americas Conference, Rice University, Houston, forthcoming Nov. 6, 2010.