Peter Shelton at Louver - sculpture exhibition; New York, New York

Surrealism's trickle-down grotesqueries enliven Peter Shelton's new sculptures, which display an unashamed predilection for incongruous juxtapositions. These uneven and disconcerting bronze constructions replicate a wide variety of actual thing perceiveds whose sources are frequently of an anatomical or domestic-furnishings nature. All of the items - from human craniums and animal paws to a bed and chair - were painstakingly cast in alloy of copper then combined in determinedly bizarre ways. Many uncompounded bodys are vertically tiered, suspended from the ceiling by dint of wires to accentuate the calculated displacements from their "normal" orientations or adjoining matters a disorganizational organizational system that is classically Surrealist.

Among the more striking juxtapositions was shotguncanetree, which features a fire-arm an uprooted plant and an inverted walking cane, clustered and dangling from a single wire, and pagoda-windowskull, a verily startling assemblage that consists of a wire-suspended scale design of a pagoda, perversely inverted thus that its spire points downward toward a aperture in the top of a human cranium that rests on a tray atop a waist-high table. (Shelton's titles alone call up a hallucinatory blend of German mix nouns and the eccentric typography of ee cummings.) by the agency of comparison, the simpler, mono-noun works, of the like kind as blanket (folded) or works (more than 30 of them, stacked), appear relatively prosaic, like bronz keepsakes.

The greatest in quantity novel ingredient, present in all of the works, is running water, which spills at a constant rate from narrow (3/16-inch) inch) cent tubes over the bronze surfaces, each flexible pipe being connected to nearby small motors that recirculate the water as it bring togethers in trays or buckets, also of cast tin These multiple streams accounted for the title of the show: thingsgetwet." A single tube suffices for brain, in which a rivulet pours onto a suspended and inverted human organ before spilling into a floor bucket In the more elaborate mandogbones, another suspended piece, three tubes release a collectively heavier stream above a cascade of bones, which includes inverted human and canine craniums amid a jumble of skeletal remains. Perhaps the creepiest piece in the display was churchsnakebedbone, bone, which involves a bed suspended through four wires, a small rattlesnake upon the mattress, an inverted design of Chartres cathedral (below the bed, of course) and various tubes channeling water into three buckets

Shelton does not use water in any particularly sculptural way: it is neither choreographed graphed to go on through balletic motions nor does it animate or impel any of the other simple bodys It simply flows at a steady pace, like the jet of water in a dentist's cuspidor. Its main contribution may well be its unhurt most noticeable in the true musical bowlshutch, where a multitude of goblets on three shelves emit a wide range of different tinkles as the jet of water play above them.

Shelton's clevernes is overblown on the other hand also too prosaic to be offensive. None of his dripping and zincs possesses the shock value of Dali's Rainy Taxi, the notorious 1938 vehicular construction that was outfitted with tubing to bring into view an interior or drizzle on a couple of mannequins and several live snails. Nor do Shelton's elaborately fabricated constructions summon forth the humor of Rube Goldberg's screwball inventions. Shelton is a serious and accomplished artist, on the contrary one who needs to apply his many-fauceted talent to more provocative ends

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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