Word: icon
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...weird way, this show exhales as musty and involuntary a breath of vanished time as any revival of neoclassicism. Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup can, once considered an icon of intimidating cool, has become a sort of madeleine. Irrevocably, the cachet of pop has gone, and many of its artifacts now look tenuous. It cannot be long before some enterprising museum (the Metropolitan?) opens a '60s Period Room, to go with its transplanted Louis Quinze paneling and reassembled colonial parlor: a Wesselmann and a Warhol Marilyn on the stainless-steel walls, a coffee table strewn with...
...stays in my mind after looking at this show of work by one of the best photographers around Harvard right now. Its a cylindrical ash container outside some office elevator, door. The shape is lit-clean, and glows there in the middle of the picture like some future's icon to insignificance...
Chryssa responds, she explains, to "ancient presences in contemporary commercial and industrial symbols. Times Square, I relate to Byzantine art; the background of the sky against the neon signs resembles the gold in the background of an icon." But Times Square is already a work of art which, like the Vegas Strip, cannot be mimicked in a gallery. No painting can be as immediate as a billboard. No artist, with a limited budget and space, can equal the circuitry and programming of a full-dress neon display. Knowing this, Chryssa prudently went into neon as fictive archaeology...
Arikha, who was born 44 years ago in Rumania, survived the Nazi labor camps in Central Europe and was repatriated as an orphan to an Israeli kibbutz in 1944. He studied art and philosophy in Paris-where he still lives with his wife and two children in an icon-cluttered apartment-and until 1965 was an abstract painter. Then came a volte-face; since that year, he has concentrated entirely on life drawing, thus reversing the usual modernist's development. "I was born into modern art," he says, "and it was my start. I think that period is closed...
Manic as Samaras' "transformations" are, they still possess a system and a history; his subverted objects have a common ancestor in Meret Oppenheim's surrealist icon of 1936, the fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon. Yet they are not mere footnotes to Surrealism. Samaras has a way of undercutting, or predicting, his more "mainstream" contemporaries; in 1961, for instance, he laid 16 square textured tiles flat on the ground, four by four, as a sculpture. In the Whitney, it looks like a waggish parody of Carl Andre's floor pieces-until you remember Andre's sculptures...