Word: fetish
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...struggle to distill the building process to its essentials--vertical and horizontal structure, bare but lustrous materials--Mies produced his poetry through painstaking details. He made a fetish of the proper way to expose the steel I beams at the corners of his buildings. As Frank Lloyd Wright also did, Mies exploded the confined rooms of 19th century interior space, producing the open-plan homes and work spaces--"universal space" he called it--that are now pretty much universal...
...exhibition's auto-eroticism sector does, however, include one triumphal fetish - Larry Fuente's "Derby Racer, 1975." Like some pious Latino decorating a shrine, Fuente glorified a convertible jalopy with an undulating crust of shards, beads, mirror fragments and pearly gewgaws. It is still a convincing, near folk object - an automotive equivalent, perhaps, to Simon Rodia's towers in the Watts neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles...
French has been producing comix for nearly ten years, including the series "Grit Bath," "Corny's Fetish," and "The Ninth Gland," all of which are included in this thick black and white collection. Nearly every one of the twenty-odd, short and long stories contain grotesqueries, mutilation, death or all three. What makes her work different from the boring, violent books that crowd the shelves is that she actually gets to the emotional center of what repulses...
...defend one's dignity, even as one copies the ways of other civilizations, is to make a fetish of national uniqueness. It might seem from the outside that Japanese had remade themselves in the Western mold, wearing Western clothes, adopting Western ideas, imitating Western institutions, but somewhere deep down in the core of every true-born Japanese lay a purely Japanese soul, unsullied by anything alien. The phrase for this was wakon yosai, "Japanese spirit, Western knowledge." Western culture and learning, it was implied, was only for the head; the heart remained resolutely native...
...prices of the rarest robots - the $500-range machines intact in original box and Styrofoam - quadrupled, so Nakamura took a deep breath and hopped on a plane to Japan to hunt out the best deals. "It was the first time I'd traveled somewhere just to fulfill my toy fetish," he says of his trips down narrow Tokyo alleyways to check out tiny toy-shops. "But Japan is a mecca for robot collectors, so I knew...