Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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ICICLES--SIX FEET LONG, AND AT THEIR TIPS, as bright and sharp as needles--hang from the eaves: wild ice stalactites, dragon's teeth. I peer through them to see the world transformed to abstract whiteout. Little dervish snow tornadoes twirl across the blank. The car is out there somewhere, represented by a subtle bump in the snowfield. The old Jeep truck, a larger beast, is up to its door handles, like a sinking remnant: dinosaur yielding to ice age. The town's behemoth snowplow passes on the road, dome light twirling, and casts aside a frozen doe that...
Vermeer's visual music is utterly mysterious. He wasn't only abstract on the large scale of composition, negative shape and depth. When you look at the details, you see a system of coherent microforms in every representation of small pattern and texture, whether he's doing the faux-marble finish of a virginal case or resolving the optical glitter of a gold frame into tiny lozenges of paint. You're meant to enjoy both the illusion and the means by which it's brought about. Supremely conscious of his language, he puts all the machinery in the open--like...
...modernist master. He devoted a long life to distilling extremes of formal perfection from a narrow range of motifs. This perfection is never frozen: it always contains some organic character, an affinity to life and therefore to change. "I never seek what to make a pure or abstract form," Brancusi said. "Timelessness,'' "wholeness,'' "essence,'' "aliveness": such words inescapably recur in what has been written about him over the past 70 or 80 years. They are well-worn tokens, rubbed smooth by use, but you can't visit the Brancusi retrospective that is now in its last weeks at the Philadelphia...
This largely abstract culture war that is being waged in Israel seems a million miles away from the cold-blooded assassination of this November. Yigal Amir, after all, murdered Yitzhak Rabin for the purest of political motives...
From the start, abstract filmmakers sought to use light as a tool for communication without words. Color, movement, rhythm and music make up the vocabulary of these films. Though they range in length from seconds to 30 minutes, the majority of the films last five or six minutes, the perfect length for the unfolding of one chain of thought...