ART-PRESENTATION: Delirious,Part I
The decades between 1950 and 1980 were beset by upheaval. Military conflict proliferated, while social and political unrest flared around the globe. Among artists, writers, critics, and philosophers, a growing disenchantment with what was perceived as an oppressive rationalism was matched by a mounting interest in fantastic, hallucinatory experiences (Part II).
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archive
The exhibition “Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950-1980” at Metropolitan Museum in New York explores the embrace of incongruity, irrationality, and disorientation among artists living in Europe, South America, and the United States. Divided into four sections, Vertigo, Excess, Nonsense, and Twisted, the exhibition includes 100 works of art by 62 wide-ranging artists, many of whom otherwise seem to operate at cross-purposes with one another. About a third of the exhibition is drawn from The Met collection. Linked by a distrust of rationality, the selected works alternately simulate and stimulate delirium, straining the limits of both legibility and intelligibility. Ultimately, Delirious will ask if it is possible to understand a significant amount of postwar art—even seemingly rational art—as an exercise in calculated absurdity. In the works featured in this exhibition, delirium assumes disparate guises depending on the artist, object, and period in question. Not only did artists cultivate different varieties of delirium, they also chose to express them in different ways, for different reasons. Delirium might pertain to a work’s form, style, and technique; its perspective and point of view; its content and subject matter; or all of the above. Some artists strove to represent delirium, others to perform it, and others still to induce it: to precipitate vertiginous, hallucinatory states of being in viewers. Antonio Berni, Dara Birnbaum, Among others are on presentation works by: Tony Conrad, Hanne Darboven, Nancy Grossman, Philip Guston, Dean Fleming, Eva Hesse, Alfred Jensen, Yayoi Kusama, Sol LeWitt, Lee Lozano, Anna Maria Maiolino, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, Jim Nutt, Hélio Oiticica, Claes Oldenburg, Abraham Palatnik, Howardena Pindell, Mira Schendel, Peter Saul, Carolee Schneemann, Paul Sharits, Robert Smithson, Nancy Spero, Paul Thek, and Stan VanDerBeek,
Info: Curators: Kelly Baum, Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky, The Met Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue, New York, Duration: 13/9/17-14/1/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu & Sun 10:00-17:30, Fri-Sat 10:00-21:00, www.metmuseum.org
