Word: eyeful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...away from the cabinet, one foot slightly ahead of the other, weight leaning on the arms with index finger on the flipper button, he pulls the shooter gently and watches the ball rebound off the top arch. "This game rewards concentration, mastery of the technique of hand-eye coordination, a positive attitude," he observes. "You have got to lose yourself in it. That is the therapy of it. When I was trying to give up cigarettes, I'd come in here and play and forget all about them...
Jasper Johns, considered by many people the greatest artist at work in America, has been in the public eye for not quite 20 years. It seems longer. No art career pupated more quickly. Johns appeared in 1958 at the Leo Castelli Gallery, a reclusive young Southerner from Augusta, Ga., who had been surviving in virtual isolation in Manhattan since 1952. With his paintings of targets and of the American flag, he landed on point, in the spot, at centerstage: the Museum of Modern Art bought three paintings from that first show, an unheard-of gesture to an unknown painter...
...constitutes a great part of his historical importance-was exploring differences between knowing and seeing. A target is a sign. Anyone who has shot on a range knows that looking at a target is an extreme case of hierarchical perception -score 10 for the bull's-eye, 9 for the inner, and so on. Once a target is seen aesthetically, as a unified design, its use is lost; it stops being a sign and becomes an image. We do not "know" it so clearly...
...essential elements of theatricality that have been too long neglected. When, for instance, has a playgoer been dazzled and dominated by a set rather than merely giving it the perfunctory opening-curtain applause? Edward Corey's set for Dracula at Manhattan's Martin Beck Theater is an eye-blinker. Broody, vaulting, magisterial, colored in shades of bleakest gray, it is a psychic tomb out of Edgar Allan Poe's haunted imagination. In perfect aesthetic juxtaposition, Gorey's costumes are funereal black, with ruby splashes in a proffered drink or a crimsoned pendant to accent the theme...
...characters who dominate A Life in the Theater are actors. John (Peter Evans) is young, zestful, ambitious, a Hamlet-to-be in his mind's eye. Robert (Ellis Rabb) is well into middle age, disenchanted, edgy about criticism, a Polonius of worldly wisdom who can carry a scene but has long since dropped any hope of ruling the stage. They play out scenes before imaginary audiences. With marvelous mimicry, Mamet conjures up parodistic echoes of past playwriting titans together with melodramatic fustian...