Tea on Fur, Wet Fur on Lips

One formula for a memorable Surrealist artwork goes like this: take a familiar everyday object and change one of its elements so that it’s no longer useful but instead fantastic or absurd. There’s the telephone that Salvador Dalí transfigured in 1938 by affixing a plaster lobster to a handset cradled atop a rotary dial. There’s Man Ray’s Gift (1921), for which the artist glued tacks to the soleplate of an iron. And there’s the impossible monocle concocted by