Word: hieroglyphics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...title out, a practice followed in the first editions: the book had a name, like Utopia or Leviathan, not a date. But the shorthand 1984 also gained wide currency. And those four neutral integers, fused so long in the public consciousness, have acquired the shimmering, brutal power of the hieroglyph...
There is, however, a strand of painting that tends to miss out at both ends. It employs the human figure neither as a cooled-out sign linked to the imagery of mass media-like Katz, Tom Wesselmann, Andy Warhol, Robert Longo-nor as a generalized hieroglyph for "expressionist" feeling, as in de Kooning or the new German painters. Such painting wants to inspect and describe the body as a real object in the world, in all its resistances, its actualities, its peculiar landscapes of pit and pore and hair. It wants to move outward from that to see its social...
...dodges the fallacy, allowing meaning to creep in with the names and painting one side of the name instead of trying to reduce an ocean of meaning to an eyedropper. In "Clarence," she follows the thread of landscape as it spins out from the names of places. A Mayan hieroglyph means "sky", but not only sky-in the Guatemalan sky there also fly-or flew-quetzal birds, the source of ancient Indian folklore and mystery. Nye brings the bird naturally into her sky. She traces the connotations of each image down through the rest of the poem, so that...
...Marie-Thérèse, curled up in Nude Asleep in a Landscape, 1934, is seen as a graffitist might see it?a lilac-toned pink blob, twisted and curled to show its openings, nipples and navel, the body recomposed in terms of its sexual signs. It is a hieroglyph for arousal, tumescence in paint. Yet it is something more. For in these images of Marie-Thérèse, Picasso demonstrated his power to materialize his sensations. The body is not merely a sign, but a direct translation of desire into plastic terms, and that is what graffitists cannot...