Word: avante
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...been called "aural wallpaper," "music for the Birkenstock crowd" and "yuppie elevator music." Its titles evoke a holistic, hot-tubbing world: Etosha -- Private Music in the Land of Dry Water, Aerial Boundaries, Nirvana Road. Although its composers include musicians prominent in the rock avant- garde, it is marked by a meditative aesthetic whose goal is often creative anonymity. A laid-back synthesis of folk, jazz and classical influences, it is called, by rough convention, New Age music. But what exactly...
With Miami Vice and his terrific debut feature Thief, Writer-Director Michael Mann honed his nouveau slick style: a strong silent leading man with a superb supporting cast, a flair for intelligent camerabatics, a bold, controlled color scheme, an assertive avant-rock sound track. Here he has found another subject to suit that disquieting style. Manhunter should keep viewers riveted throughout, and queasy through the next full moon...
...Every second book jacket, it seems, has a thick, angular sans serif typeface derived from the Wiener Werkstatte, the seminal crafts collaborative established in the city in 1903. Nearly the whole crop of high-design coffee services and teapots marketed since 1980 seems to have been plucked from an avant-garde Viennese workshop sometime before...
...forebears look dowdy by comparison. Loos' nemesis Hoffmann, though, was the absolute master of furniture and domestic objects. No one has designed handsomer seating in the 20th century. His best-known and most widely copied chair was designed for the Kabarett Fledermaus (1907), a club by and for the avant-garde. The regularity of its limbs and parts is strict, but as with all the best Wiener Werkstatte work, severity is not carried too far. Six wood spheres, billiard ball-size, tucked under each arm and atop each leg, are a perfect ornamental gesture, precise and machined but irrational...
Some artists have a flair for creating maestrohood from a succession of scandals; Kokoschka was one. Almost from the moment he left art school he assumed center stage in the Viennese avant-garde, enacting its fixations on love and death, abandonment and deviancy. Painting apart, he worked hard to earn his nickname "der Tolle" (the crazy man). George Grosz remembered him at a ball in Berlin, gnawing on the fresh and bloody bone of an ox. He sometimes hid among the waxworks of criminals in the chamber of horrors of the Berlin Panoptikum, and sprang out with a howl...