Word: constructivist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...From 1950 to 1960, years of heedless American growth, cars multiplied and the great fast-food empires were born: McDonald's, Tastee Freez, Jack-in-the-Box, Burger King, Dunkin' Donuts, Mister Donut, Pizza Hut, Burger Chef. The architecture that resulted was a sort of Sunbelt peasant modernism, simple constructivist cartoons in steel and glass, designed to catch the attention at highway speeds. Usually, as Langdon says, it was a case of "form faking function." Cosmetic A-frames were slapped onto plain boxes; McDonald's golden arches never supported anything. The "modernism" of the fast-food stands was superficial...
...catalog, written by its curator, John Elderfield of MOMA, far surpasses in lucidity and thoroughness anything else on Schwitters and becomes the authoritative work on the artist. It evokes in brilliant detail the aggressive and sadistic side of Schwitters' lost oeuvre, which was grandiose and trashy but done with constructivist precision. One of his avant-garde friends, on first viewing the Merzbau's bizarre grottoes and columns (which included such elegancies as a "Sex-Crime Cavern" and a bottle of the artist's urine with artificial flowers in it), thought it "a kind of fecal smearing--a sick and sickening...
...which the scraps of paper and little objects surface and vanish, overlapping like leaves on a forest floor. He called them all "Merz" constructions: the name was a fragment of a printed phrase advertising the Kommerz-und Privat-Bank, but it became generic. In these works, cubist ambiguity, constructivist utopianism and a sweet irreverence that was entirely Schwitters' own are knotted together as a gift to the future. The idea of the urban poet as a scavenger was by no means new. It had been around since Baudelaire's ragpicker in the 1860s; in 1882 Van Gogh praised the city...
...funnels and other nautical paraphernalia on his buildings. A passion for high technology dominated his first well-known works: the Leicester University Engineering Building in 1959 and the Cambridge University History Faculty Building in 1964. Both ignited controversy. Both look like acrobatic feats of steel and glass that resemble constructivist factories, highlighting mechanical gadgets like window- cleaning gantries...
...cubism was not, as has naively been said in the past, "set off" by the "discovery" of tribal art; the perception of one reinforced the perception of the other. Sometimes the most striking "family" likenesses appear between works that have no possible connection. A case in point is Russian Constructivist Sculptor Vladimir Baranoff-Rossine's Symphony No. 1, 1913, a figure done in swoops and slats of painted wood that one would swear-if there were not clear evidence that he had I never seen it - was based on an openwork Baga bird headI dress from Guinea...