Word: banality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Dubuffet's interest in the rudimentary and the inchoate meant that conventional subjects were dissected into their most ignoble components. His excremental landscapes and turnip-men, set down in meandering lines and harrowed clods of pigment, were not ordinary -- they were frighteningly banal. "It is where the picturesque is absent," he remarked, "that I am in a state of constant amazement...
MALLON'S DISC-JOCKEY style of tour through his chosen diarists is amply anticipated by an introduction that rambles on (without any of that great Rambler Samuel Johnson's wit) about the progress of his own diary and his own rather banal generalizations about the practice of keeping a diary. Also included by way of introduction are generous quotations from his own diaries, such as a passage which he agrees is "pretty self-pitying stuff" written while Mallon lived near Harvard Yard and was "tired out from a semester of trying to learn Greek." It seems quite inappropriate that...
...creates surface expectations of major art (complexity, depth, psychic intensity and so on) without discharging them in explicit meanings. He wittily exploits the affinity between artist and charlatan. A symbolist with roller skates, he moves very quickly across a vast terrain of appropriated motifs, and the results are usually banal. Even in today's morass of worthless "personal" imagery, it would be hard to find a sillier painting than one in the Castelli show of a green whirlpool a la Poe with a man and his separated genitals disappearing into...
...comes from Butchering Livestock at Home) is at once whimsically ironic and bitterly true. Moore's basic here and throughout is that can be as radical radical and ridiculous as the globular mollusk's loss of a tentacle during sex. The stories deal with pain of the most banal and yet terrible sort--the pain of relationships and marriages gone bad, of broken families...
...performers dig beneath this mannerism to suggest years of buried sorrow. Nancy Marchand, as the family's self-described cutup, has the gift of making banal observations sound witty. Anne Pitoniak, as the eldest and prissiest, combines dictatorial will with genuine dignity. Peggy Cass is the family entertainer, Elizabeth Franz its happiest housewife and Gisela Caldwell its edgy protofeminist, whose eventual crack-up seems to result from her discontent with women's lot. The most affecting performance comes from Bette Henritze, as a stroke victim whose singsong speech does not obscure a larger tragedy. When she admits...