Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...short essays in which the instruments of the orchestra archly explain their characteristics. Thus the bassoon: "I am something of a deep thinker." Somehow, this unpromising libretto inspired Arrowood to portray each instrument being performed by one of his bewigged and frock-coated reptiles. The results are as absurd-and as charming-as Babar the elephant enjoying the Comédie Françhise...
...little if any serious alumni support. However, Harvard basketball is almost always respectable. After one disastrous season, Michael is breaking out his shovel, but his burial plans are just a little early. Judging a very young and inexperienced team on the basis of its first four games is absurd, and any objective reporter, not to mention a home-town one, would not make such a mistake...
...half-deaf nursemaid who apprentices him to a pirate instead of a pilot until he is 21 years of age and a birthday which falls with inconvenient quadrennial regularity on Leap Day, he acts as any Gilbert and Sullivan character worth his salt is bound to: he follows every absurd proposition out to its invariably illogical conclusion...
...exercises that Albers set would ultimately have a lot to do with the severe paintings Rauschenberg made between 1951 and '53: all-white and then all-black panels, the latter painted over a wrinkled mulch of newspaper, with no relationships of color. Twenty-five years ago, these pictures looked absurd; today they seem prescient. Art history has caught up with them, and the work of some of the most admired younger American painters?Robert Ryman's all-white paintings, Brice Marden's monochrome slabs of encaustic?can be traced back to them. "Albers," says Rauschenberg, "did give me a sense...
...this distance, to be "coded." The title of Odalisk, 1955-58, directs us to a favorite image of those two sultans of French art, Ingres and Matisse?the harem nude. Rauschenberg parodies that: the box on its post alludes to a human figure; a torso, teetering on its absurd harem cushion. The sides of the box are plastered with pinups and reproductions of classical nudes. Finally, the stuffed chicken on top of the box reminds us that one of the many French terms for an expensive courtesan is a poule de luxe...