Word: burlaps
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...exploded on college campuses, among them Northwestern and Vanderbilt. The last attack prior to this week, in Salt Lake City, Utah, in February 1987, may have sent the bomber underground after a witness described a man with reddish-blond hair, a thin mustache and ruddy complexion dropping off a burlap bag that later exploded outside a computer company...
...BOTTOM LINE: In bronze, burlap and tree trunks, a powerful Polish artist forges the drama of human loss and survival...
There are small sculptures at Marlborough, Abakanowicz's hallmark figures, molded from resin-stiffened burlap. Headless and repetitious, they look "expressionist" but aren't: their true ancestors are ancient kouroi and Egyptian scribes planted on their plinths. It is amazing to see how much inward dignity Abakanowicz can give to a human figure made of cloth, and how many subtle variations she can infuse into a whole row of them. They are funereal: the wrinkled burlap reminds you of mummified skin. When Abakanowicz lines up 10, 20 or 30 more or less identical figures, as in Infantes, 1992, you think...
...loves series and variation. The biggest single work at Marlborough is Embryology, 1978-81 -- a whole landscape of some 600 stuffed burlap "rocks," ranging from mere pebbles to big boulders, an extraordinary array that suggests cocoons and gravid wombs as well as stones. Her chief metaphor, as Brenson (who wrote the catalogs for both shows) points out, is "the enchanted forest," which "can be traced back to animistic peoples for whom trees and forests were fearfully and delightfully alive." The tree trunk refers to, and sometimes becomes, the human torso. The "mutilated Eden" of Poland's forest turns into...
...that. Each wrinkled bole with its splayed limbs and fissures keeps its tree-ness and does not become mere timber, raw material. Abakanowicz preserves the body of the tree, and then she fits this body with metal shells, prongs and armatures, sometimes binding it as well with strips of burlap like mournful bandages. Thus you find yourself looking at something large, somber, mutilated and of irresistible physical power. Brenson points out that the War Games pieces are all, in some degree, elegiac; they convey a mourning for < violated nature, because nearly all the forests of Poland have been cut down...