Art: Unfindable Objects

Laughter in the Louvre? As gross a solecism, one might think, as a belch in the Sainte-Chapelle. Yet for several weeks, visitors to the Louvre's Museum of Decorative Arts have been convulsed with mirth over the work of a puckish artist from Marseille, Jacques Carelman. With his collection of "Objets In-trouvables" (Unfindable Objects), Carelman has revived Surrealist humor and created the wittiest show to be seen in Paris in years. (It will open in Dallas next winter.)

"If I had to point to any one source of inspiration for my unfindable objects," says Carelman, "I suppose it would be those old-fashioned mail-order catalogues, like the old Sears, Roebuck ones, with precise, naive drawings instead of the color pictures you find today." Thtfse catalogues define a dreamworld of real consumer goods; Carelman's show presents an actual world of fantasy goods. The 50 creations on display include a masochist's coffeepot with the spout over the handle, thus guaranteeing a scalding for anyone who uses it; an hourglass filled with pebbles, not sand, "for people who don't want to grow old"; a pipe with four different faucets for water at different temperatures; a hammer with a handle so bent that nobody can hit his thumb; a cat-shaped traveling bag with handles and a perforated Plexiglas nose for taking one's pet tabby on a trip; an "absorbent bottle" made out of sponge, "to double its capacity"; and an undulating Ping Pong table, to "project the ball unpredictably."

Art lovers of a philosophical bent may ponder an empty frame bearing the label A Knife Without a Blade Whose Handle Is Missing. Georg-Christoph Lichtenberg, 1742-1799* The more athletic ones can equip themselves for the outback with a bizarre weapon whose barrel undulates like a snake: it is a kangaroo gun, "whose specially studied trajectory enables the bullet to follow the bounding animal."

Says Carelman, 42, a onetime dental surgeon who has become well known as a designer and cartoonist: "I guess you could call me a critic of society, all societies—but especially the wasteful consumer society. My defense against the aggressiveness of objects is derision, humor. I deal with objects everyone is familiar with, like a hammer. I deform them and people get a shock. Children react the best, intellectuals second best."

Says Francois Carree, assistant curator of the Museum of Decorative Arts: "No one has better taken into account the all-too-rational limits of our system of objects. Carelman thinks of everything and everybody, of the prolongations of technology as well as new categories of ignored consumers: acrobats, mourners, the one-legged ... The infinitesimal shift thus revealed to us is what separates poetry from reality, and the most invigorating humor from the crass stupidity of profit making." A child at the show was more succinct. "As a convinced masochist," he told the artist, "I take my hat off to you."