Word: eyeful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...style a substance. Julia Child may shop at Sage's, but that doesn't mean it's a good place to pick up a gallon of o.j. Boutiques are ripe for window-shopping, but what if you really need to buy clothes? Gentrification is usually pleasing to the eye, but less kind to the pocket. And as time wears on, even the slick interiors and brass railings lose a bit of their gleam. The process just becomes too predictable--the porcelain tile tables and ceiling fans follow the influx of young professionals with clockwork precision...
Twentieth century art has always liked the random. Chance meetings of images, the weird threat an unfocused eye hooks from the normal texture of life: these have fueled the reverie and invention of innumerable artists. From De Chirico's piazzas to Steven Spielberg's suburbs, our culture is intermittently fascinated by the noonday goblin-the sense that something is askew within the well lit, the ordinary, and that the closer you peer the odder it gets. Jennifer Bartlett, whose recent paintings are currently on view at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Manhattan, is a connoisseur of this kind...
...images. She will paint four or five versions of the same view, shifting position a little each time; the effect is not one of Warhol-like repetition, but rather of alert, frustrated scrutiny, as though the scene held the key to some forensic mystery that lies just under the eye but is too obvious...
...most the only change (apart from eyeline) from one panel to the next. In this way -paradoxically enough, in view of her constricted subject - Bartlett emerges as a master of narrative tone. There is more in her garden than could ever have met the house agent's eye...
...began his first film, Un Chien Andalou (1928), by walking onto a moon-flooded balcony and calmly slitting a young woman's eye. He began his last film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), by replacing his leading lady with two actresses who alternated scenes in the same role. For Luis Buñuel, the Spanish film maker who died this July at 83, conventions of content and form were mere pieties, best approached with a straight razor and a straight face. He had been, after all, one of the merry pranksters of surrealism, spiking café chat...