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When Duchamp's confederate wrote in defense of Fountain that the only works of art America had given the world were its plumbing and its bridges, she might have been remiss not to mention the Dollar Store.

This mini-mall staple is a bona-fide USA original: no other culture could have spawned the genius that allows the suburban shopper to acquire a condom-packet keychain, 5000 pipe cleaners, a slutty-mental-hospital-inmate halloween costume, and a box of olive-fuschia construction paper in an afternoon, all without having to break out the Mastercard.

Now in Corpus Christi Texas, local artists are paying tribute to all the phantasmagoria, convenience, and parsimony afforded by this unique retail institution...and playing around with the now aged Duchampian institution of found art. The Islander Art Gallery in Hamlin Center (which just happens to be next to a Dollar Store), is now displaying work solicited from contributors who were required to provide pieces inspired by or made with Dollar Store products. A plethora of vaguely witty submissions ensued, including the mixed media Untitled Fork and Untitled Spoon (composed of the eponymous plastic untensils) and my favorite, an actual Cambell's soup can stuck in a dollar store frame and hung on the wall. (Through July 2nd.)

virtueel (bike) roadblock

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Wired magazine's"Beyond the Beyond" blog has kept up a fairly good tally of forays into Augmented Reality, meaning technology-aided fusions of our virtual and terrestrial worlds. Past entries have included a "Top Owl" helmet offering synthetic digital visual aids for pilots, and a computer-generated light-show playing across Sydney's famous opera house and skyline. This cutting edge field is clearly bait for avant-gardists to come.

Already a recent post on Beyond the Beyond showcased a piece with some of the self-referential, everyday absurdity that Dada and its successors popularized. Sander Veenhof -- the computer scientist and conceptual artist who received a degree in 'instable media' and has designed, among other things, a web platform to facilitate the stalker-stalkee relationship -- recently designed a "virtual stoplight" for the island of Terschelling in the Netherlands (for the theater festival Oerol). It's merely an iphone app diplaying the floating road-appliance. However if enough smartphone users gawk into their devices, it will in fact bring traffic to a halt...through the well known process of rubbernecking.

We eagerly await the further artistic output of Veenhof, and the flowering of A.R.

Claude Cahun Self portrait [as weight trainer] 1927, printed 2011 inkjet print Jersey Heritage Collection

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There is something about surrealism that inspires people to cast off their inhibitions, act out their dreams and fantasies, play with words, and invent bad puns. That is exactly what the organizers of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s major summer show, The Colour of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art, were counting on.

On certain Fridays, the Vancouver Art Gallery hosts live performances—FUSE events—and its June 17^th evening of dance, cabaret, and visual art cheekily entitled L.H.O.O.Q (after Marcel Duchamp’s infamous punning title for moustache Mona Lisa) was modeled after the surrealists’ sense of play. Performers, including MOVE, House of La Douche, The Dusty Flowerpot Cabaret and many more, transformed the gallery space with their own works inspired by the Surrealists, either by re-interpreting historical works or inventing new ones. To be sure, gender politics and psychoanalysis were explored and exploited. Sections of Surrealist texts were projected, an early modernist opera performed in drag and historic manifestoes presented along with contemporary speeches.

The massive exhibition itself showcases 350 works by André Breton, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Cornell and René Magritte among others—the most comprehensive Surrealism retrospective ever mounted in Canada. The opening gala event was a Surrealist Dinner entitled “Revolution by Night.” It kicked off with a “Prelude to a Dream” (a surreal salad), then segued to “The Illusion” (French onion soup soufflé). The palate cleanser of liquid nitrogen, or Dragon’s Breath, made way for the main dish, which was, of course, entitled The Revolution. A “Cumulus Conclusion” or meringue cloud topped off the meal.

Meanwhile, the paintings, sculpture and drawing were supplemented with a film program highlighting early works by Charlie Chaplin, F.W. Murnau and Luis Buñel and tracking surrealism’s influence on the contemporary cinema of David Lynch and Terrence Malick.   Bringing the work closer to home, the curator, Dawn Ades, delved into the connection between the mostly European Surrealists and indigenous British Columbia and Alaskan art—presenting actual pieces collected by Andre Breton and Enrico Donati and acquired during pilgrimages made by Kurt Seligmann and Wolfgang Paalens (members of the Surrealist circle from Switzerland and Austria, respectively). Native masks and headpieces from their collections are shown side-by-side with works of Max Ernst and De Chirico. Were the surrealists aesthetically intrigued with these pieces? Did they feel that artists of these cultures were better able to access and authentically interpret their unconscious than Europeans? The exhibition leaves these questions up for speculation.

Regardless, this summer’s the time to head to Vancouver to reacquaint yourself with some old art friends and make some new ones: Colour of My Dreams will not be traveling after its closing on September 25^th. Don’t forget to bring your unconscious along—it will have more fun than you.

Mcsweeney, Duchamp: A Likely Pair

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McSweeney's Internet Tendency just published, as is their wont, an entire biography of Marcel Duchamp made only of pop single titles. (I'm listening to it now on Grooveshark.) How many of the references do you get?

(By Dorothy Gambrell)

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Assemblage, or sculptural construction utilizing found or mixed materials, was one of the most radical genres invented by the early 20th Century Avant-Gardes. It became a staple of the output of such figures as Marcel Duchamp, Dada's Raoul Haussman, the Constructivist Vladmir Tatlin, and the American Surrealist Joseph Cornell, and it appeared in post-war Pop Art courtesy of Robert Rauchenberg and Jasper Johns.

One the earliest and most powerful examples of what the assemblage can accomplish is Umberto Boccioni's Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses (1915), now part of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. A rough, hodgepodge relief in cardboard, wood, paint, paper and metals, its apparent primitivism belies the sophistication of its abstraction. A step ahead of Braque and Picasso even, it threw open the pictoral plane to forge a plastic intermingling of figure, time and landscape (in pursuit of the continuity of matter and subject through speed, a Futurist obsession.)

Due especially to the philosophical discoveries of Gilles Deleuze,  the assemblage came to be used in postmodern thought as a metaphor for the complex, entagled institutions of the contemporary world. The idea was that the constituent parts of nations, cities, ecosystems etc. worked together as temporary, discontinuous "machines," but could be always severed and regrafted (reassembled) in new formations.

It's evident that the assemblage still fascinates, and lively artistic production in the field continues. Currently the Charles Taylor Arts Center in Hampton, Virginia is showcasing eye-catching, conceptually rich pieces made by natives of the state. Nancy B. Richard for instance, who often fuses hi and low-tech in her work, employs materials such as paintbrushes, old wooden shoes, glass bottles, yarn and poetic text in "Positive Aspects of Negative." The form that emerges from the chaotic juxtapositions is that of a cart and horse: perhaps harkening back to that venerable patriarch of the assemblage technique.