Word: deadpan
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...Deadpan Surrealist...
...painted in a perfectly deadpan style, neutral rather than "primitive" -- serviceable, in a word. It came partly from posters and partly from kitsch art. "This detached way of representing things," he remarked, "seems to me to suggest a universal style, in which the quirks and little preferences of an individual play no role." It is meat-and-potatoes figuration, with no pretensions; if there were any pretensions in this world, where flotillas of loaves sail by in the evening sky like flying saucers and an innocent eye opens in the middle of a slice of ham on your plate, they...
...Wenceslas Square, where the "velvet revolution" transpired in November 1989. The new McDonald's is in sight of the spot where Jan Palach set himself on fire for Czechoslovak freedom in 1969, the spot where Havel laid flowers in 1989 and was arrested for the deed. Now a deadpan sword swallower resembling Leonid Brezhnev draws a crowd of American children, and punkers with spiked Mohawk haircuts wander the medieval lanes...
Eyre and McKellen share credit for devising a production full of startling visual imagery. McKellen casually snuffs out clumps of candles as he enumerates, deadpan, the friends and relatives he means to kill. Richard's brother, the Duke of Clarence, hunches in custody under a single, searing overhead lamp in a scene eerily suggestive of all interrogations that turn to torture. Most striking, the King's counselors sit at a long table and talk in bureaucratic euphemisms about bloody murders to be done someplace out of sight, while simultaneously the crimes are being enacted in full view of the audience...
...best comedians. In his early days Ed Ruscha photographed parking-lot patterns from the air: a satirist's geometric abstraction. Bruce Nauman photographed himself performing visual puns, like shooting water from his mouth and calling the picture Self-Portrait as a Fountain. And Wegman started making deadpan videos of himself spraying an entire can of deodorant into his armpit. When his new Weimaraner got into the act, Wegman recognized that it was enough to tape the puppy doing something as simple as trying to extract a biscuit from a glass bottle. As a comic deflation of the doggedness of human...