Word: icons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Americans of the Lost Generation soon came over to study at the Bauhaus, then the Bauhaus folks came over here to flee Hitler. By the 1930s, the group had a label, "International Style," and an icon, Le Corbusier, and they had taken over the art world. Their manifestos and polemics killed trees from Paris to Pasedena, and the message was clear: we are going to create workers' housing from workers' materials, and the clients be damned if they don't want it. The clients-be-damned pose had an interesting side benefit. The gods in the International Style pantheon tended...
...from the frozen island. Whereas Bisset inhabits Liz Hamilton, Bergen performs as Merry; she plays bubbly, then she looks sad, saddled all the while with a ludicrous attempt at a Southern accent. Her obvious Hollywood heritage actually starts to work in her favor, since Merry develops into a media icon; Bergen's artificiality and unbelievability become Merry's. She does slip inside Merry on occasion, when fighting with Bisset, and she pulls of some classy comic bits. But all this makes it more impossible to accept her as any kind of friend to Bisset's character...
...slick arbiter of taste. Either way, it jars. Somehow it smacks of elevating the form without changing the content. Who knows? Maybe Chekhov would have watched the Iowa State Opera's version of "Boris Gudonov" complete with introduction by a genuine Russian. Then again, our ultimate pop icon Elvis Presley probably was closer to popular sentiment when he plugged his Sony with a .38, explaining to his manager, who lay wounded by the richochet, in that wonderful Memphis drawl--"Nobody should have to put up with that shit...
...except at the SoHo level of celebrity-some being, in fact, well-known artists, like the sculptor Richard Serra or the composer Philip Glass. Thus what Close proposes is a kind of portraiture diametrically opposite to Andy Warhol's images of Marilyn or Liz, where the painting, an icon of the Star, adapts itself to the intrusive power of repetition and generalization. With Close, there is no generalization at all. None of his faces has a role. There are no costumes, props or traces of social relationships, no evidence of the sitter's work or status; in short...
...Welsh has assembled many of the best-known paintings, from the burning and writhing Sunflowers through the spiky lateen-rigged boats on the Camargue beach at Stes.-Maries; from the bedroom in the Yellow House at Aries to the tiny, dense icon of The Sower, a stubborn black lump distributing flakes of seed under the vast Apollonian wheel of the setting sun. Yet although these images have joined the noble cliches of art history, they can be seen afresh through their relationship with the work of other artists. The service this show does for Van Gogh is to place...