(din of crowd)
(single piano note)
KELLY BAUM:
The exhibition is titled
"Delirious: Art at the
Limits of Reason, 1950 to 1980,"
including 100 works of art
by 62 different artists.
About 30% of the works
are in The Met's collection.
Several of them
have never before been seen,
and these are artists
who would not normally
share space together
in a gallery.
Instead, it surveys a vast and
very disparate group of artists
grappling with a similar set
of concerns,
realizing them
in very different ways.
The premise of the exhibition
is that delirious times
demand delirious art.
Delirium is a word that I apply
to works of art
that are alternately absurd
or hilarious
or disorienting--
in a word, irrational.
I wanted to focus on the period
defined by the fallout
of the second World War,
but I also wanted to capture
much of the social and political
unrest of the 1960s and 1970s.
The exhibition is divided
into four sections:
Vertigo, Excess, Nonsense,
and Twisted.
And each section
is meant to demonstrate
a different engagement
with the idea of irrationality.
And the delirium certainly
accelerates
as viewers move
through the galleries.
Among the works of art
is a series of 13 photographs
by the Cuban American artist,
Ana Mendieta,
in which she took
a pane of glass
and pressed it, hard,
against her face.
Another is
Yayoi Kusama's ladder.
Kusama took an ordinary ladder
and then covered it
with women's high-heel shoes,
and also these appendages,
and they proliferate and
eventually consume the ladder.
I think the experience
of seeing the exhibition
will be not only cerebral
or intellectual,
but also deeply visceral,
and I think this exhibition
provides a window,
not only onto the past,
but also onto the present.
(urgent piano music)
