Word: cutout
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...script. What they may mean (assuming that these spurts of buckeye American surrealism are meant to have any narrative meaning) is utterly opaque, but in the Whitney he is at it again, in his klutzy, feckless way, in a room dominated by scrawled names and a huge black cutout of a man who repeatedly swings a hammer. Whatever its meaning, this piece is visually more interesting than the "environment" that greets one on the fourth floor of the Whitney, Robert Wilson's chic '20s-style set for his short piece of dramatic gibberish from 1977, / Was Sitting...
...hang in clusters from the ceiling. They proliferate like brain coral, elkhorn, lacy underwater fans; the wall beyond them dissolves into patches and drifts of submarine color. It is the octopus' garden, and walking through it one seems to float. Such an image could become excruciatingly kitschy (one cutout angelfish would do it), but what preserves the balance and tightness of Pfaff's work is her daring, uninhibited sense of abstract form. Those squiggles and meshes, bits of screening, Mylar and Day-Glo plastic work together beautifully as aerial handwriting. In her work there is not a trace...
...that contains the ugly refrain: "Franz Josef the pig, Franz Josef the old pig, Franz Josef the lusting swine." When a local prosecutor charged that the song was insulting to Strauss, the band is said to have retorted that Franz Josef was the name of its mascot-a cardboard cutout of a pig-and that "any similarity to a living swine is purely coincidental...
...takeoff on 1930s movie musicals. Using Grauman's Chinese Theater as aspic, it captures the clichés, the formulas, the juicily idiotic emotional punch lines of the period. Singing with slyly ironic comic abandon, Jeanette MacDonald (Peggy Hewett) fondles a life-size cardboard cutout of Nelson Eddy, never the most mobile of performers...
That response is an ancient tic of the trade. At Central Casting, the tough, cynical reporter is as familiar a cardboard cutout as the prostitute with a heart of gold. This is the skeptical spirit that gave us Watergate, and though it has had no comparable success since (how could it?), the attitude persists. Without that spirit, he would insist, politicians would cheat and lie and always get away with it; government snoopery and police brutality would go undetected and unchecked; products would never be shown up for being less than advertised; wretched conditions, unreported and uncorrected, might bring...