Word: alexandrian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...pastoral mode is a dream of escape. It rises, in literature, with a resentment of big-city life -- in the Alexandrian period, around 250 B.C.; two centuries later, with Vergil's Eclogues and Georgics, it is in full spate; and from then on, Latin literature pullulates with rustic shepherds, flutes, nymphs and country retreats. When the classics were revived by Renaissance scholars (no strangers to urban anxiety themselves), the fantasy of the locus amoenus, the sylvan wilderness as "delightful place," moved to the forefront of the Western imagination. There it still reigns, vastly complicated and mutated by real necessity...
...commonplaces as I SHOP THEREFORE I AM). But no one could accuse it of the air-headedness that marked its immediate predecessor. This is a tighter, more conservative Biennial, attentive to the internal rhymes of current art and to the cross relations between artists. What we have is an Alexandrian fallback -- a sense of the basically academic nature of most "advanced" American art, its recoil from making big parodies of invention, its desire to navigate honorably in a cultural trough whose sides are lined with art fans...