I’m looking forward to Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire, at the NGV. I had a friend in High School who was a huge fan, and who took me to films of Dali & Gala (Dali’s great love & muse) leaping out of giant eggs on the Catalan coast and caused me to read his hugely entertaining books (e.g. Diary of a Genius which is out of print but check your library). I preferred the paintings of Magritte & De Chirico, but I loved reading about Dali’s life and milieu.

Flicking through the April Issue of Frieze Magazine, I found this quote by US artist Carol Bove (in Frieze Magazine’s ongoing series ‘Ideal syllabus’ in which an artist, curator or writer lists the books that have influenced them) for one of her most influential books - Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute by Anna Balakian,

“I have the growing urge to consider the persistent and largely unacknowledged influence of surrealism since the 1920s and I find it in all sorts of unlikely places. It is the shadow of modernism.”

I found myself agreeing with her. Books like Vitamin D, The Upset, and Limited Edition are full of artists with a surrealist ancestry, and Leonora Carrington’s works sprang to mind looking at Mark Ryden’s work, and others of his ilk.

Just arrived are some long awaited titles from Phaidon Press. Especially two new titles in Phaidon’s Contemporary Artists series: Chinese artists Ai Weiwei & Zhang Huan. Underlying the current babble of the news media, on topics of car salesmen and the lives and demise of pop culture personalities, were the haunting words of eyewitnesses to the Tiananmen Square Massacre (20 years ago, 5/6/09). What is china to us, today? A massively complex & fascinating culture - words that easily fit with these two artists, as well as quite brilliant and awe inspiring.