Word: bourgeoises
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In China steamy video cassettes from the black market are a very hot item. What Americans term blue movies, the Chinese call yellow, but by any name, erotic films make party officials see red, as does anything that smacks of a "decadent" bourgeois Western lifestyle. All VCRs must be registered...
Happily, the occasionally indelicate symbolism cannot ruin Jean-Claude van Itallie's sensitive, arresting new translation. He has dispensed with the halting speech patterns common to translations of Russian works, and has given the characters modern idiosyncrasies and sympathies. Masha's idiotic husband, Kulygin (Richard Grusin), says bumblingly to anyone...
At the same time Bourgeois's imagination has a nasty side, as real acts of exorcism must. The fantasies her art expels into the chaste gallery space have as much to do with incest and cannibalism as with the more usual aesthetic satisfactions of MOMA. The most vivid of...
"It is a very murderous piece," Bourgeois points out in the cata logue, with some understatement, "an impulse that comes when one is under too much stress and one turns against those one loves the most."
Some may find such imagery not merely archaic but positively oldfashioned: invocations of the chthonic and the primitive have been standard modernist fare for three-quarters of a century. But Bourgeois uses her primitive quotations to get past the conventional groupings of modern art history-the litter of isms that...