MetaFilter posts tagged with surrealism

A Fez-wearing superhero in a music video

KirkJobSluder — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:18:00 -0800

A superhero in a fez (video link) gets an organic artificial hand and fights a pinball sarcophagus in a world reminiscent of Heavy Metal and La Planète sauvage. Music by Birdy Nam Nam. Video animation directed by Steve Scott.

the foreign exchange student

dhruva — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:26:15 -0800

The foreign exchange student "Some years ago we had a foreign exchange student come to live with us. We found it very difficult to pronounce his name correctly, but he didn’t mind. He told us just to call him 'Eric'." A short story in pictures by Shaun Tan. Previously.

Ourgothlaundry?

The Whelk — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 07:38:06 -0800

The Art & Life of Annie Truxell [via mefi projects]: Annie Truxell is a well known painter who has lived a long and fascinating life. Her adventures have been legendary, encompassing Greenwich Village in the 50s, London in the 60s and India in the 70s. She was friends with Franz Klein, Bill de Kooning, Truman Capote, Terry Southern, Mati Klarwein & many other wild & woolly people.

Fuck art, let's be hedge fund managers

gerryblog — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:00:50 -0800

Marc Johns: Drawings on paper, drawings on sticky notes, drawings on rat traps. Twitter, Flickr. Interviews.

Karl Waldmann's Collages

OmieWise — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:26:05 -0800

The Karl Waldmann Museum, where you can see all of his collages.

"I attach even more importance to the spectator than to the artist."

Damn That Television — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:18:03 -0800

Somewhere between dada and surrealist, Marcel Duchamp revolutionized art with his "readymades," a term for found objects taken directly from society. Except, maybe they weren't. Rhonda Roland Shearer (widow of Harvard paleontologist and natural selection spokesperson Stephen Jay Gould) makes a convincing argument that Duchamp's readymades were anything but.

Flotsam and Jetsam

homunculus — Fri, 29 May 2009 18:00:17 -0800

The portfolio of Christian rex Van Minnen. [Via]

Jolifanto Bambla O Falli Bambla!

jonp72 — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:53:55 -0800

In 1916, Hugo Ball would fulfill his own dadaist manifesto by reciting his own nonsense poetry at the Cabaret Voltaire (not that Cabaret Voltaire), while wearing a Cubist costume or a cylinder with the number 13 covering his face. Ball's poem, Gadji Beri Bimba, inspired the Talking Heads song, I Zimbra, but his most famous poem is Karawane, a pioneering example of sound poetry. Karawane has more conventional avant-garde versions on YouTube, but none is more surreal than the recitation from memory by Marie Osmond (yes, that Marie Osmond) from a 1980s broadcast of Ripley's Believe It Or Not!

This is a 36 page website of metaphysical concepts & visionary art presented in a profound sequence.

Esoquo — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:12:52 -0800

Victor Kahn. Jim Warren. Artie Kornfeld.

Short B&W surrealist film

Manhasset — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:39:07 -0800

The Eye and the Fly is a video advert (for what, I don't really know) that I think is very well done. On first viewing, it immediately reminded me of Zbig Rybczynski's classic short, Tango, which has been linked on MeFi before.

Heiko Müller

homunculus — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:05:36 -0800

Heiko Müller - Paintings and Drawings. [Via]

Rosenbaum, The Plausible-Fabulist

ninebelow — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 07:13:41 -0800

Like others before him Benjamin Rosenbaum is making his debut short story collection, The Ant King And Other Stories, available from his publishers, Small Beer, as a free download. More than this though, he is holding a competition to find the best derivative work inspired by it. These include "translations, plays, movies, radio plays, audiobooks, flashmob happenings, horticultural installations, visual artworks, slash fanfic epics, robot operas, sequels, webcomics, ASCII art, text adventure games, roleplaying campaigns, knitting projects, handmade shoes, or anything else you feel like." Benjamin Rosenbaum is not a character from The Scarlett Pimpernel, a poet or a writer of children's books as 'Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes', by Benjamin Rosenbaum' makes clear.

Camille Rose Garcia

homunculus — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:30:41 -0800

Ambien Somnambulants. New works by Camille Rose Garcia. [Via] Last year Garcia had an exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art which the museum made a series of videos about. You can watch them on YouTube.

Home Pig

homunculus — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:55:33 -0800

The art of Joe Vaux. [Via Changethethought]

The Paintings of Fred Einaudi

homunculus — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 20:10:09 -0800

The Paintings of Fred Einaudi. [Via everlasting blort]

A More Subtle Brilliance of Execution

desjardins — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 06:06:07 -0800

Virtual Morphologies - the dark surreal stylings of J. Karl Bogartte. "In 1973 I accidentally discovered that by moving things around on the ordinary copy machine (and in effect, subverting its intended purpose…), strange conjunctions revealed themselves. At the beginning of 2000, I just as suddenly abandoned this process and leaped into the 21st century, exploring the computer and the realms of digital surrealité."

Terminus

homunculus — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 18:20:36 -0800

Terminus. "After inadvertently offending a strange entity that accosts him on his way to work, a 1970s businessman quickly finds himself in the midst of a bizarre predicament." 205.2 MB Quicktime available here. [Via Neatorama.]

George Melly RIP

motty — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 03:48:36 -0800

George Melly, singer, writer, and expert on Surrealism, has passed away aged 80.

La idea inicia su proceso de superación del objeto y establece una descontextualización Dadá.

amberglow — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 13:21:32 -0800

Chema Madoz -- photos

Surreality

squalor — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 13:21:24 -0800

The most effective Surreality is that which is entirely Unintentional (15-minute Google video). A delightful balance between amusing & disturbing. Harvested from Doctor Macro's MGM Shorts page. Previously.

The Queen of Montmartre

Skeptic — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 14:19:38 -0800

Kiki de Montparnasse aka Alice Ernestine Prin was a French country girl down on her luck in early 20th century Paris. She would however become a great muse of the avant-garde art scene of the Années Folles, posing for and befriending the likes of Chaim Soutine, Moise Kisling, Amedeo Modigliani, Utrillo, Foujita, Calder, Per Krogh, Pascin, and, most famously, Man Ray, with whom he entertained a steady (if not particularly monogamous) relationship before Lee Miller. During their tumultuous eight-year romance, Kiki was the model for several of his most famous works (with some Surrealist art films thrown in for good measure). She also competed with Jean Cocteau for the affections of sailors in Southern France, was a good friend of Tristan Tzara and received letters of support of Aragon and Desnos when she was jailed for public disorder. A life of excess that ultimately led to her early death in destitution in 1953 also provided stuff for several biographies (the latest one, appropriately enough, a graphic novel), as well as a Hemingway-prefaced autobiography which was banned for obscenity in the US until the '70s, and the odd art exhibition...

J.J. Grandville

mediareport — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 13:08:16 -0800

Very odd illustrations from caricaturist J.J. Grandville's 1868 book L'Exposition de l'Avenir. More oddities from 1829's Les Métamorphoses Du Jour (some in color here), and lots of delightful garden scenes from his 1847 classic Les Fleurs Animees (vol 1, vol 2). Some consider Grandville one of the earliest proto-surrealists. [more Grandville links in this great post at BibliOdyssey]

Surrealish sites

owhydididoit — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 20:10:13 -0800

If you enjoy strange art, you may like these artists' sites:

Courtesy Max Szoc.

The wilder planet of Roland Topor

elgilito — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 18:05:52 -0800

Topor et moi. Roland Topor was the graphic artist behind the beautiful Planète Sauvage (Cf. a few posts below) but his body of work also included founding the Panic Movement with fellow oddballs Jodorowsky and Arrabal, writing plays and novels (The Tenant, turned into a movie by another Paris-born celebrity of Polish extraction and amateur of bizarre, Roman Polanski), and making strange and popular TV shows for children (YouTube clips from the 80s). Except for the kids shows, most of the links are quite NSFW with abundant sex and/or violence, though in a cartoonish, disturbing, surreal, or even political way: Topor once said (YouTube documentary in French starting with his Phallunculi series) that to renounce sex was to banish oneself from mankind. Topor himself was also a familiar figure of the French cultural landscape, instantly recognisable thanks to his manic cackle (heard at the beginning of this video where he explains how to make art from random pornographic images), that he (over)used to play the madman Renfield in Herzog's Nosferatu.

Hippopotamouse - authentic works of victorian surrealism

MetaMonkey — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 09:37:24 -0800

Hippopotamouse - authentic works of victorian surrealism