Word: artfully
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...liquor by the drink. But the city is on a culture kick. In the past decade, Wichita has opened a flying saucer-shaped civic center that dominates downtown, a 12,200-seat coliseum for conventions and cattle shows, one of the nation's better Indian museums, two art museums, a planetarium, a zoo and three new libraries. That hardly makes the community a rival to, say, Chicago. Yet almost everything is up to date in this Kansas city, and that is a good sign for the nation that surrounds...
...years ago, the word salon was scorned in the art world. It suggested a chaotic visual mob scene with thousands of mediocre paintings and sculptures stacked from floor to ceiling of an exhibition hall, accepted or rejected at the whim of reactionary committees. Good art, it was felt, did not disclose itself in crowd scenes. It was found in small concentrations in private galleries, or in tightly curated theme shows in museums, or in artists' retrospectives. Lately, however, some virtues of the 19th century salon system−for until the rise of the private dealer in contemporary art after...
...most museum visitors. What the five curators who chose the show have given us is a pan around a diverse, though often bland horizon, rather than a squared-up essay in the dominance of some historical direction. And rightly so: one lesson of the past ten years in American art has been that movements have vanished with the death of the avantgarde. The very idea of collaborative groupings, once an essential part of modernist practice, seems to have lost its strength−at least for the moment. In fact, it takes some effort to remember the days...
Some of the minimal work in the Biennial, like Brice Marden's wax-encaustic panels, is beautifully made, but the craftsmanship is placed at the service of no discernible idea; it is art's answer to the well-made play, a kind of systematic decor-though (mercifully perhaps) with out the metaphysical pretensions of its ancestor, Barnett Newman's work. More likable are the folded tracing-paper drawings by Dorothea Rockburne, with their spare geometry of arc and line appearing through superimposed translucencies of paper−the product, if not of passionate invention, at least of rigorously...
...more orthodox figurative art, there is no lack. Philip Pearlstein, that master of the art school nude−the flesh always rendered cold, the formality of the body emphasized by photographic-style cropping−has produced one of the best paintings of his career in Female Model on Platform Rocker, 1977 -78, with its uneasily tilting floor line and stutter of shadows cast by the slats of the chair across the pale wall. California's Robert Graham is represented by a group of his small, fragmentary bronze torsos, minutely finished, imbued with something of the erotic dandyism...