Word: hat
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Discovered Figure. The resulting show, called "Blocked Metaphors," is a testament to the artists' variety and ingenuity. Saul Steinberg, for instance, discovered that his own block had been made to come apart so that a finished hat could be removed without tearing. He was so taken with the beauty of the original that he decided merely to rearrange the parts. "The figure emerged spontaneously," he says, and it reminded him of Renaissance portraits of Italian patricians. In his antic fashion, Steinberg named his creation Il Duca di Mantova, after the playboy nobleman in Rigoletto. Bernard Pfriem, a New York...
...Dadaist who is still alive and well and living in Paris, transformed his hat block into a blockhead by adding dark glasses and a scholar's mortarboard. L'Imposteur reads the caption at the bottom. Martin Carey, a fine-line draftsman of frogs, insects and flowers, turned his block on its side, decorated it with butterflies and found, much to his surprise, that it reminded him of both an owl and a soldier's helmet. Jasper Johns coated his block with metallic plaster-and his dealer put a price of $9,000 on it. Andy Warhol stripped...
Aesthetic Cannibalism. With the extravagance of one who has hat blocks to squander, Ossorio used no fewer than five in his work titled Waste Not, Want Not. Along with four mannequin heads, plus the weathered skull of a toothy lion, they have been neatly skewered, mounted and bedecked with paint to form a chillingly gay totem pole. It stands as a kind of wry monument to Ossorio's own aesthetic cannibalism...
Today the hat-block industry relies on aluminum forms as well. But Harry Glasgall, founder of the Empire Hat Block Corp., which designed and manufactured most of the blocks in the show, confessed that he was "flabbergasted" when he saw what had been done with his product. "Everything I saw there was something I had seen, made or handled myself. It never crossed my mind that they could become art objects." He foresees no run on old hat blocks, however. Empire, in fact, has just burned a couple of thousand for lack of space...
...machinery of the story is simple. One night, drunk and excited at the sight of blood (from a razor slash on one of their wrists), four young men draw numbers from a hat and seemingly in jest agree to kill themselves in order, without revealing the pact or the motive. The four are loners, dependent upon each other in tangled psychological ways. Adler is a fat, ugly and lonely neuter from the Ozarks, who cannot reconcile his hillbilly background with his aspirations in botany and his love of dance and literature. Pless, a young psychologist whose feelings have been frozen...