Word: dystopia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...only 50 years ago? How touching our grandfathers' faith in the future seems, in our day of acid rain, exploding shuttles, decaying inner cities and general creeping dystopia. The mood is epitomized in objects like the male costume of the future dreamed up for Vogue -- a bearded figure in an immaculate white jumpsuit wearing a circular antenna as a halo on his head, John the Baptist among the insulators. Everything is streamlined, even objects that are screwed down and cannot move, so that America's breathless rush toward Utopia is clearly signified by things like a 1933 Raymond Loewy metal...
...muffled, submerged so far in the paint that it hardly works as allegory. Winters does not want to make his images specific: "I want them to trigger multiple readings, so that they somehow function above and below language, not exactly on the line." But some of his titles, like Dystopia (the reverse of Utopia: a failed society), 1985, leave no doubt that rumination on the human order is meant...
...publication that accompanies this show indicates, by the time the '60s rolled round, cars were no longer seen as shuttles to paradise. They had become villains responsible for turning America into a dystopia. Autos were described as gas guzzlers, road eaters, monsters that plunder the countryside. They had brought about a nation scarred with billboards, motels and drive-in restaurants, banks and even churches. When Joni Mitchell sang, "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot," millions of listeners joined in the chorus...