The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 50

C-2 Friday, October 5, 1990 SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER 11 Top 10 Iraqi bumper nn hnarH -v ig. uon i ibb" wm wm 7 8. Have you hugged your hostage 8. If we could vote, I'd vote yes on Bond Issue 6 7. If chemical weapons were outlawed, only outlaws would have chemical weapons 6.

1 got my camel dunked at Raging Rapids Water Park 6. Baghdad Wolverines: 1996 Division Champions 4. Gay and proud of It 3. 1 brake for Kuwaitis, then shoot them and loot their homes Surrealism takes cultural spin non-t like mv driving? Call 1. Honk If you still have hands Courtuy ot NBC PICK OF THE MEN: Must be wonderful to be so wanted.

Robert Redford wants Michelle Pfeiffer to be his leading lady, in ever happen is the Donald Trump biopic he expected to make for Turner Broadcasting early this year. Boxleitner notes, "So many changes have happened, the script is obviously a vintage piece by now. Maybe some day there'll be a story about his rise and fall and rise again. Maybe a 11 1 JW "The President Elopes," in which hell star as well as be executive producer. Warren Beatty wants her to sign on as his "doll" mobster's moll Virginia Hill in the saea of NEW KID ON THE BLOCK: Don't expect any radical changes on "The Cosby Show" with the addition next week of a family member j.

Ww'; 1 7" Michelle Pfeiffer gangster Bugsy Siegel. And Alan Pakula wants her to play Tom Hanks' wife in "Significant Other." She's expected to make a decision soon. from a tough neighborhood. Erika Alexander, the 20-year-old who plays 17-year-old Hux-table cousin Pam, reports that so far the series writers Erika Alexander University Art Museum exhibits 1 75 diverse works By David Bonetti EXAMNEH ART CRTOC ERKELEY "Anxious Vi-sions: Surrealist Art," at the University Art Museum through Dec. 30, is a splendid exhibition of the art that most characterized European culture for 20 years, from the mid-'20s to the mid-'40s, and which left a legacy that is still, in many ways, troubling today.

Organized by UAM chief curator Sidra Stich, "Anxious Visions" is no recapitulation of received ideas. It takes a fresh point of view, and it seeks to make you look at surrealism as an art movement, not just of chimeras, dreamscapes and hallucinations not to mention of fashionable ladies wearing dresses imprinted with lobsters and hats that took the form of high-heeled shoes but of engagement with the political, social and cultural crises of its time. No 20th century art movement or set of ideas is more badly served through repetition of a collection of buzzwords and images than surrealism. Surrealism aimed to shock the viewer out of stagnant complacency into response. Surrealist artists and writers felt the only hope left for European culture was total revolution, and they devoted themselves through their art to radically change their world.

THE DOMESTICATION of surrealism through appropriation of its dissociating techniques to sell products in glossy magazine ads and television commercials only underscores how far we have come today from its revolutionary program. A greedy art market that turns all art, even the most transgressive, into commodities also vitiates surrealism's angry and anxious vision. (Look at the fancy frames on some of the paintings in the show, and youll see how easy it is to turn even the most unsettling imagery into decoration.) Any exhibition that forces us to reconsider a movement that has become a cliche is welcome; one that does it so well is something to celebrate. "Anxious Visions" is the first reappraisal of surrealism in the United States since the Museum of Modern Art's 1968 exhibition "Dada, Surrealism and Their THE VIDE0LAND VIEW: Bruce Boxleitner is delighted and relieved to be going into action as the lead of TNT's "Murderous Visions" TV movie. The assignment comes after what has been, he says, "a year of frustration for The former "Scarecrow Mrs.

King" star expected to be back at the series grind this spring. Instead, his CBS "Triangle" was canceled before it had a chance to debut. More recently he's been trying to put together TV movie projects to produce under his two-picture deal with the network, "but it's slow going," he says. One TV movie he doubts will are focusing "more on Pam the person than on her background." Alexander does hope that eventually the character can be used as a platform to bring in storylines that would be harder to do with the other members of the financially privileged Huxtable family. But the only burning issue dealt with in any of the four shows Alexander has taped so far is whether Pam should give up her virginity.

Marilyn Beck and Stacy end Smith Salvador Oali's "Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War, 1936 1 SUIT DU JOUR: While the playoffs are on, Roseanne Barr played Tuesday at 7 a.m. pur time. More than 1,000 radio stations haye signed up. ft, is making her own double play. She and her husband, Tom Arnold, sued the National Enauir- BRANDO TRIAL DELAYED: A judge Thursday postponed for '48 er and the Star I i for more than $145 million a tt mummy 1UI Roseanne Barr publishing what the cou- nearly a month the murder trial of actor Marlon Brando's son, Christian, because prosecutors can't get Christian's half-sister, Cheyenne Brando, back from Tahiti.

pie said were excerpts from Barr's love letters. I Christian Brando She apparently was a witness. Christian is accused of killing Cheyenne's boyfriend. Superior Court Judge Robert Thomas set a tentative date of Nov. 5.

The reason Cheyenne can't leave Tahiti is because she's being held there by French authorities, who are charging her with complicity in LENN0N TRIBUTE: John Lennon's 50th birthday will be marked with a celebration beyond even the slain rock star's Utopian vision: his peace anthem "Imagine" playing simultaneously for 1 billion people in 130 countries. "This idea appealed to me, because not only will we cover the whole world, but also there's something that's very small," said Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, who will speak briefly before the song is 1 Mi 1 Compiled from Examiner news services "Pere Ubu," 1936, by Dora Maar, one of many women represented 3 the 30s end, the coming war that will make World War I seem only a Heritage." Because of high insurance costs and the reluctance of lenders to let their possessions travel, it will not tour; but because it is such an important event, it will remain in Berkeley for nearly three months. "Anxious Visions" includes some 175 works in all media. Surrealism's stars Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Rene Magritte, Joan Mird, Yves Tanquy and Pablo Picasso are featured, and Dali, Ernst, Mird and Tanquy particularly weU. But the exhibition highlights many lesser-known artists whose contributions to the movement were significant Surrealism was an international phenomenon headquartered in Paris.

Stich has included fascinating works by little-known Czech, British and Latin American artists that add interesting cultural spins to surrealism's French voice. Czech artists FrantiSek Janousek, Jin-dfich Styrsky and Toyen make such a strong impression that they will demand greater attention in future accounts of the movement The show includes no North, American artists. Surrealism was a foreign concept to artists here in the 20s who didn't yet understand that the cultural catastrophe facing Europe would soon leap across the Atlantic, changing American life irrevocably. But in the '40s, surrealism provided the crucial element to the mix that turned into abstract expressionism. A late painting by Arshile Gorky, such as his 1947 "Agony," would have been an interesting addition to the show.

SURREALISM WAS perhaps the most misogynistic 20th century art movement For surrealist artists and writers, woman as aggressor and victim was a central metaphor, The surrealist body violated, ravaged, cut up and reassembled is usually a female body. For male surrealists, women were the objects of a mad and violent love. There were women surrealists. Many were surrealist wives. Stich has not made the issue of surrealist woman-hating a central issue in her study, but she has included a wide selection of work by female fellow travelers of the male chauvinist surrealist brotherhood.

Dora Maar (mistress of Picasso), Frida Kahlo (wife of Diego Rivera), Kay Sage (wife of Tanquy), Leonora Carrington (lover of Ernst), Dorothea Tanning (wife of Ernst), Lee Miller (lover of Man Ray), and others such as Aileen Agar, Claude Cahun, Ithell Colquhoun, Meret Oppenheim and Remedios Varo are represented by work that varies in interest and quality but which seems essential to a broader understanding of the surrealist enterprise. Stich didnt undertake the years of study necessary to mount such an exhibition to redress either nationalist or gender slights, however. Her goal was to see pirrealisni Today is Friday, Oct. 5, the 278th day of 1990. There are 67 days left in the year.

rehearsal takes over its role. On this date World War I was not only a cataclysm that destroyed the West's faith in itself and exposed the bankruptcy of its values, it was also a physical trauma that left its wounds visible to all. Stich starts off the exhibition with photo days In order to help stockpile grain for starving people in Europe. In 1953, Earl Warren was sworn in 88 the 14th chief justice of the United States. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson announced he was undergoing gall-bladder surgery.

In 1978, author Isaac Bashevis Singer was named winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1983, Solidarity founder Lech Wale-sa was named winner of the Nobel P6flC Prizs In 1988, Republican Dan Quayle and Democrat Lloyd Bent sen clashed in the only vice-presidential debate of the campaign. In 1989, a jury in Charlotte, N.C.. convicted former PTL evangelist Jm Bakker of using his television show tp defraud followers of $3.7 million. graphs from the popular press.

In one ghoulish image, war survivors display their hideous disfigure ments. In another, bodies blasted as a' movement grounded in the experience of its time rather than as a record of the dreams of its practitioners. She doesn't intend a grand revision of surrealist theory as formulated by its chief propagandist, Andre Breton, who emphasized the liberating function of dreams and the unconscious. She doesnt reject the Freudian basis of surrealist thought and practice. But she leaves aside well-rehearsed aspects of the subject and focuses instead oh contemporary events and philosophical currents seldom discussed in relation to surrealism's genesis.

Stich finds the devastating experience of World War I to have left an indelible memory on artists who either fought in its infernal trenches or witnessed its aftermath. She divides the exhibit into three sections titled "Surrealist Figures," "Surrealist Environments" and "Confrontational Scenarios," and in each, the War to End All Wars plays a part And as into bits cohabit a trench with un In 1813, the Battle of the Thames was fought in Upper Canada during the War of 1812. The British troops were soundly defeated, and their Indian ally, Tecum seh, was killed. In 1892, the Dalton Gang, notorious for its train robberies, was practically wiped out while attempting to rob a pair of banks in Coffeyville, Kan. In 1921, the World Series was broad- cast on radio for the first time, with sports writer Grantland Rice describing the action between the New York Yankees and the New York Giants, who wound up winning the series.

In 1931, Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon completed the first nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean, arriving in Washington state some 41 hours after leaving Japan. In 1947, in the first televised White House address, President Harry Truman asked Americans to refrain from eating meat on Tuesdays and poultry on Thurs r) Jr. i wounded soldiers. Stich points out that these were experiences of a new kind, and they marked every one. Stich makes a persuasive argu ment that such experiences affect' ed the way surrealist art looked as Today's birthdays Actor Donald Pleasence is 7 1.

Actress Glynis Johns is 67. Comedian Bill Dana la 66. Singer-musician Steve Miller is 47. Actress Karen Allen is 39. Rock singer and famine-relief organizer Bob Geldof is 36.

much as the unleashing of the un conscious. After seeing the picture of the disfigured soldiers, you cer tainly see the distorted features of See SURREALISM, C-16 The New York Times The Daily Doodler BASS ticket-order service 762-2277 Ticketrpn information and reservations 392-7469 Events Hotline for S-Fj 24-hour recorded information on tventa, theater music, dance and sporting events. AIbo in Japanese, Spanish, German and French 391-2001 Oakland Arts and Entertainment Hotline: 24-hour recorded information on theater, dance, music, special events and sport? 835-ARTS KJAZ Hotline: Recorded update of Bay Area jazz performances 769-4818 State Department of Parks and Recreation: Reservations and general information on camping 1-800-444-7275 Redwood Empire Association: Information on Redwood Empire (eight California counties) including events, hotels, restaurants an.d wineries Weekdays, 9 to 543-8134 East Bay Rmnnl Parks? am to 5 551 5 si i tIl ST? nTeTt CHiiWs AWL OBC olsjl NHii'tjo ij "cm. kBl T0t tF CInIlHh rftls' TnAB NE iT" Jn hT irIo rDjoicTrtirTtHjE" I HUn't's TIbil El ICIaTlIlTA 1 10 EUA I atltUb rtTlN Inauv ono has MIA ppPlA DOC A Mas YjNlO DCTj A A lflqEtD TTBit bie cTk' vjao BsPolwTl 1 tlilll 2 stf nJ3 JmO FT DHfc i MMA MS 1 1 A I Ciacometti's "Invisible Object: Honda Holding the Void," 934-35 11 11 till pi 'f.