Word: cults
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...choice on to me; you won't find me jogging in Central Park at night. I want something better for my daughter. I want fathers to raise boys to respect women as equals and keep their fists to themselves. Some cherished male folkways may have to go -- the cult of hyperviolent heroes like Rambo, for example. Too bad. I want men to confront their own aggression, the pleasure they take in its depiction and the excuses they make for its enactment -- that no really means yes, that wives need to know who's boss, that "bad" girls are fair game...
...already medieval and the century's teens virtually Pleistocene. The curators do their best with this, reprinting front pages of Parisian newspapers that Picasso, Braque and Gris cut their collage materials from, or hanging photographs of the kinds of shopwindow display that, they persuasively argue, reinforced the cult of the Surrealist object in the '20s. But the effort to put long-gone popular culture in a museum is like trying to resurrect an old perfume in a room...
...hold on. The tale seems eerily parallel to Rushdie's predicament. There is a storyteller named Rashid Khalifa, also known as the Shah of Blah, who loses the gift of the gab and can no longer entertain. What's worse, his condition is mysteriously linked to a fanatic cult that wants to wipe out not only made-up tales but also human speech. Children may take all this as make- believe, but adult readers are free to perceive some veiled autobiography, plus a wistful prophecy: in the end, the good guys live happily ever after...
Shapiro first earned attention in the '70s with pieces that reversed the cult of Big Size in American sculpture -- a bronze house 9 in. high, for example, or a lilliputian metal chair sitting on the floor. Seen in the huge white-wall and oak-floor gallery spaces of early SoHo, these looked totally out of sync with their surroundings. Yet the contrast between the object and the space around it was part of Shapiro's project. The smallness seemed to gather and focus the room, stretching the distance between your eye and the sculpture, while giving the dumb-looking thing...
From his early cult films to a hit soap opera, he has traveled a road as unique as his obsessions. He has already proved that an eccentric film artist can change the way America looks at TV. Can Twin Peaks now become a mainstream habit...