Tag Archives: Surrealism

Unica Zürn: “Here is the doll …”

In a recent dream, a man who looked very, very old … hundreds of years old … said to me: “Hey, dollface.” I love the word, and I knew something was about to be born of this word, from noticing the connotative beauty of it. This is a loaded word. Dollface. The word conjures the […]

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Hans Bellmer’s 110th Birthday Today

I don’t clearly recall the first time I discovered the artist, Hans Bellmer, but I believe, hazily, that it was in a women’s studies class while I worked on my Master of Fine Arts in poetry. I do recall becoming completely taken with him: imagining him alive, imagining him living daily life as a man, […]

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We Lost Many Dolls* This Week

It has been a sad week for art and poetry with the deaths of poet Wislawa Szymborska (88); the last living Surrealist poet and artist, Dorothea Tanning (101); and the pioneering contemporary artist, Mike Kelley (57). Wislawa Szymborska leaves us her poems. She wrote one of my favorite poems of all time, “In Praise of […]

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Warning Us of Our Human Behaviors: Two Wexner Center Exhibitions

The first thing a visitor to the Wexner Center saw up through July 31, 2011, was a sign by the ticket desk warning us of the shock therein, the little trinkets of shock and awe that would overtake us in the galleries below us. The curation of all of the shows I have had the […]

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My Favorite 21st Century Puppet-Master, Alexander McQueen

One of the strangest days was the morning I heard of Alexander McQueen’s death. It was strange because in the moments of that morning I was in a state of dark emotion that made his suicide even more eerie and oddly poignant. Lately, I have been watching his fashion shows again, the doll-like models whose […]

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