Word: graffiti
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...obligatory sideshow. Flannery O'Connor has said that she doubted "whether the texture of Southern life" is more inclined to the grotesque. After reading about some of the people Cohen, a Dallas native, meets, I began to doubt O'Connor's wisdom. We get a sample of graffiti "art" from a bad poet named Dirk. We get a someone named Dale's take on the AIDS epidemic, "Basically, its a combination of a virus from a goat and a cow that creates the HIV virus." We get Suzanne, a Vaiden, Mississippi native, speaking on impending apocalypse: "I haven't seen...
Twombly was one of the first American artists to interest himself in graffiti. Forty years ago, the term didn't suggest city kids' spraying their aggressive colored tags all over subway cars and buildings. It wasn't bound up with the seizure and degradation of public space. It was, so to speak, more muted and pastoral: harmless scratches, small obscenities, chalk on Roman distemper. To adopt graffiti to the painted canvas was to pay homage to European art informel -- Fautrier, Wols and especially Jean Dubuffet. Their influence plays on Twombly's earliest paintings of the 1950s, with their lumpish glandular...
...American artist. But his solution was cunning: he created an irritably stylish version of Ab-Ex gesture, in which the all-over squiggles of Pollock got absorbed into the loopier, body-based rhythms of '40s De Kooning. In effect, he turned Pollock's rococo lacework into its cruder cousin, graffiti. Did this imply a degree of loss? Certainly; but loss (and a barely suppressed anger at it) is one of the chief themes of Twombly's art. Its model is the palimpsest, the document in which a later text effaces the earlier...
...double nostalgia -- on the one hand, for the closed-off "heroic" possibilities of Modernism and, on the other, for the ancient Mediterranean world, experienced at a remove by living in modern Italy. Love (or its facsimile) among the ruins. Twombly will insert "dirty" bits in a painting -- a little graffiti-style penis, odd smears of paint with the look of dried sperm -- in the hope they will enhance some sense of a Baroque cityscape -- but much of the time, they...
...that has allowed in more than 1 million illegal immigrants, the 'seasonal worker' program." Proposition 187, she claims, will only make a bad situation worse, by throwing tens of thousands of children out of school and onto the streets where they will be trapped by "gangs, guns, drugs and graffiti...