Out of the ordinary

Haze is similar in its charm and surprise. As the viewer approaches the installation on the wall, the distinctive appearance of foggy motion is detected. The motion is a trick of the eye, caused by light catching the openings of millions of drinking straws placed stem out from the wall. Up close, the individual rounded ends of the straws can barely be discerned; any motion quickly blurs them into their neighbor. Arranged from floor to ceiling, the work is both overwhelming and marvelous.
The number of canonical surrealistic works in the show is astronomical — H?ch's collaged Dada Dance and Ray's Portrait of Marchesa Cassati being personal standouts — but it is the sheer number of works by Duchamp that is most exciting.
Operating along similar lines is the work of Brooklyn, N.Y., sculptor Tara Donovan, whose first major museum survey is on display in Cincinnati's Contemporary Art Center.
Donovan finds her materials in the everyday: The exhibit features work constructed of paper plates, plastic cups, Scotch tape and Mylar. Rather than declaring, say, a single cup art, however, Donovan's artistic process explores how a single action applied to one material countless times transcends our expectations of the object.
Recognized as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Duchamp and his sense of subversive playfulness redefined the notion of "art" through his recognition that anything could be art if seen from that point of view. His Fountain is a white porcelain urinal turned on its side and signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt. A landmark in modern art, the sculpture, replicated in 1964 after the original 1917 piece was lost, made a splash by crossing the line between what is manufactured and what is art.
Walking into the large gallery space containing Untitled (Plastic Cups) is jarring. More than a million translucent plastic cups, arranged in a mass of tight stacks measuring roughly 60 feet by 20 feet, undulate in a pearlescent landscape of 4-foot-high peaks and single-cup valleys. The sheer number of cups overwhelms, then delights.Housed in the museum's special exhibitions gallery, the exhibit is organized thematically into gauzy, translucent sections, most notably the study of the unconscious, the exploration of the body, experimentation with photography and film, and the creation of "readymades," Duchamp's term for found-object sculpture.