Word: avant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...subvention." What pussycats our supposedly radical artists are. They not only want the government's permission to create their artifacts, they want federal authorities to supply the materials as well. Otherwise they feel "gagged." If they are not given government approval (and money), they want to remain an avant-garde while being bankrolled by the Old Guard...
...whose Fresh Gasoline, 1989, a 9-ft.-high bulbous yellow pod, is the most startling work in the show. The creepy beauty and rich surface texture of Tsubaki's monstrous blob, with tentacle-like branches sprouting from its top, recall a fascination with the grotesque that characterized some Japanese avant-garde art of the 1950s and early '60s. Its inspiration: Japan's bombed-out landscape after World War II. Strains of this extreme aesthetic are still visible today in the ghoulish makeup and gestures of butoh dancers. Similarly, Shoko Maemoto creates souvenirs from a nightmare alley where fairy- tale fantasy...
Whether new or vintage, all Peoples eyewear shares a kind of avant-garde antiquarianism. These are the specs Benjamin Franklin would have worn if he'd been into performance art instead of kite flying. Two Peoples best sellers: frames that combine tortoiseshell eye pieces and temples with a wire bridge (Nick Nolte sports a pair in the recent New York Stories); and clip-on sunglasses, the sort that '30s movie stars would attach to their specs to check out a polo match over at Will Rogers' place...
...black. The performers all act as ably as they sing, notably Michael Ball as the doomed boyish hero who ages into embittered manhood, Ann Crumb as the woman with whom everyone falls in love but who loves herself more than any of them, Kathleen Rowe McAllen as a pansexual avant-garde sculptor, and Kevin Colson, an eleventh-hour replacement for Roger Moore as an urbane older man much valued for his money...
...nude children in erotic poses, a man urinating into another's mouth, and other violent and homosexually explicit poses. When some of the work was exhibited at New York's Whitney Museum last summer, there were averted eyes, even among those who make a career out of being avant-garde and supersophisticated...