Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WINGS OF DESIRE. An angel, tantalized by the pleading voices of humanity, falls in love and then to earth. A timeless fantasy in today's West Berlin...
Tucker's new sculptures are named after Greek deities, the impersonal beings who presided over the creation of the world and its gods: the earth spirit Gaia, daughter of Chaos and mother of the Titans; Ouranos, god of the skies; their son Okeanos and his wife Tethys, parents of the sea and river gods. Unlike their Olympian descendants, these were too archaic to have acquired a fixed form in classical art. There was no thousand-year lineage of marble prototypes for their shape. They could be big and indistinct. And the conjunction of monumental size with muffled form entranced Tucker...
...biggest of the pieces, and Tucker's masterpiece so far, is Okeanos, 1987-88. It packs three layers of imagery into its mass without the slightest strain or theatricality. At first it is a great bowed head and shoulders, rearing up from the earth and leaning forward. Its immense back carries memories of Matisse's bronze backs, and its pose refers, distantly, to Brancusi's Mlle. Pogany. Then, from the side, one notices how it resembles a big wave about to topple -- the ocean over which the deity ruled. And finally, from the front, closer in, the deep pits...
Even though the center of the earth is closer to New York City than New York is to Honolulu, it is as inaccessible to scientists as the stars. Until recently, the earth's core, hidden under thousands of miles of rock, was a mystery. Now all that is changing. In the past two years, thanks to a technological revolution in methods of observation, scientists have begun to paint a theoretical portrait of the planet's interior in startling detail. Says Harvard University Geophysicist Adam Dziewonski: "For the first time we can actually see the inside of the machine...
Describing the core of the earth is no mere academic exercise. Understanding earthquakes, volcanoes and other geological phenomena depends largely on fathoming the forces at work within the planet's mantle, the thick layer of rock that stretches from the core to within an average of 30 miles of the surface. The behavior of the mantle seems to be determined by the core. The molten center also acts as an electromagnetic dynamo, creating the magnetic field that shields earth from the high-energy particles that stream from...