Word: artists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Getaway had just rolled off the studio assembly line, the work of a competent craftsman, it could pretty easily have been passed over and forgotten. It is, however, the work of a major American film artist. Sam Peckinpah's 1969 western, The Wild Bunch, looks even at this distance like a great film, and his other movies, from 1961's Ride the High Country to last year's Straw Dogs, form a body of work as substantial as any other contemporary film maker's. Such a director is owed more than a measure of indulgence...
While Morrow hammered away at his typewriter, Artist Marisol hammered away at the cover sculpture. Working from photographs, she spent ten days in her Manhattan loft chiseling the Nixon-Kissinger visages into her mind, then onto a carefully selected 135-lb. piece of pink marble (photographed in turn by Robert Crandall for TIME's cover). Those who have advocated a cover of a different shape, whether of a football coach or a militant feminist, must rest content until next year...
...thicket of verbiage protects, and supports, the most banal propositions. Recently, an artist named Jannis Kounellis showed (among other things) a live macaw, sitting on a perch that projected from a steel plate. "The parrot piece," Kounellis explained, "is a more direct demonstration of the dialectic between the structure and the rest, in other words, the nature of the parrot, do you see? The structure represents a common mentality, and then the sensuous part, the parrot, is a criticism of the structure, right?" Stripped of its jargon, this is a not very surprising revelation that parrots are not perches...
There are no aesthetic criteria for dealing with such works. If some artist shows a clutch of Polaroids of himself playing table tennis, this is called "information." But who is informed, and about what? "Information" has become the shibboleth of the '70s, a vogue word, as "flatness" was in the '60s and "gesture" was in the '50s. Information is somehow opposed to "culture." For all the pretense of entering the world out there, however, conceptual art remains inexorably culture-bound. Its very existence hinges on the privileged status of art itself, a status drilled into the world...
There is something indubitably menacing about the work of people like Vito Acconci, one of whose recent pieces was to build a ramp and crawl around below it, masturbating invisibly; or the young Los Angeles artist Chris Burden, who had himself manacled to the floor of an open garage, between live wires and buckets of water, so that (in possibility) anyone who cared to might kick over the pails and electrocute the artist. The sight of such gratuitous risk is a vulgar frisson for the spectators, and unlikely to appeal to those who believe that art and life interact best...