It’s like a smaller version of the remarkable “Tangible Things” show that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Ivan Gaskell put together at Harvard three years ago. Beside paying implicit (and deserved) credit to the richness and variety of those holdings, the show reminds us of just how arbitrary are the distinctions made between art and craft - or, more broadly, art and non-art. It brings together an exuberantly eclectic array of items from various Bowdoin collections. “The Object Show” plants itself atop that long, wide, and often-invisible fault line between material culture and art. The show very happily complements “Beneath the Surface.” The Surrealists’ protestations about incongruity and fantastical juxtaposition are here put into practice. Ignoring borders of the aesthetic sort is central to “The Object Show: Discoveries in Bowdoin Collections.” It, too, runs through June 1. “Portrait of Thomas Bacon” by George Platt Lynes. In a charming touch, the Breton, Dalí, and Buñuel portraits are photomat pictures. The Ernst portrait is Frederick Sommer’s famous double-negative view in which the artist seems to be dissolving. Photographs of all of them, except Magritte, are in the show. The great figures were writers (André Breton) and painters (Max Ernst, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí) and filmmakers (Luis Buñuel). Photographers didn’t need to strive for surreal effects, those being in the nature of the medium. The great figures of Surrealism weren’t photographers. But all of them took at least some photographs with highly surreal effects, and examples from all of them are in the show. No one would call Berenice Abbott, Bill Brandt, André Kertész, Aaron Siskind, or Brassaï a Surrealist. The show runs through June 1 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Quite rightly, “Under the Surface: Surrealist Photography” includes both. Surrealism, an artistic movement, gave rise to surrealism, a way of seeing the world. Whether through coincidental encounter or darkroom manipulation, the medium could produce boundless disorientation and dislocation: the inexplicable made visible and lent plausibility by the camera. Cameras were the ultimate Surrealist hardware. The Surrealists took as one of their chief rubrics a phrase from the French poet Lautréamont: “the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” Forget sewing machines. Freud, with his theory of the unconscious, enabled Surrealism.
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