Word: idealize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sitting in her Manhattan office, comparing the race among the three network morning shows to a pitched battle worthy of the Iliad. "The competition is ferocious," McGrady says. "It's war games, the combat zone." Several blocks away, Steve Friedman, executive producer of NBC's Today show, seems like ideal fishing-trip company: funny, good-hearted, gregarious. But turn to the subject of Good Morning America and Friedman climbs the ramparts. "They want us to die," he says, voice rising. "I'm telling you, it's war, and we're out there to kill them...
...from the picture itself -- one catches a glimpse of, say, a broad horizon, a band of achingly pure and silent sky, the trunk of a pine. The frame becomes a prison for a sign of traditional vastness, the 19th century view of limitless America. But look closer and the ideal landscape is fatally cankered, the America of Natty Bumppo is no more: acid rain has stripped the needles off the pine, or a sinister cloud spreads upward from a distant ground zero. Technical perfection evokes a compromised world...
...light. The extreme subtlety of Marden's color speaks of nature. It is mixed and layered, skin upon slow skin of pigment and oil, bearing a history of growth, submergence and mellowing, containing light the way a sheet of marble stores the heat of afternoon. Paintings like this are ideal landscapes, and their august stasis recalls Byron's line: "When elements to elements conform,/ And dust is as it should...
...more ostensibly rigorous in its aims, like that of Gary Stephan, 42. His paintings are like massive and vivid reflections on late cubism, especially the utopian "cubifying" abstraction of the 1920s, as practiced by such artists as Moholy-Nagy, Lissitzky and Prampolini. They have the visionary character of ideal forms -- ovals, cones, circles, cubes -- moving in deep space, its depth contradicted by puzzling abutment and reflections that block the view, break the recession and direct the eye back to the richly painted surface. Another highly gifted artist in the area where abstraction hovers on the edge of figuration is Chicago...
...muscles, then, are a form of decoration, and not always a very pretty one. The body is the raw material. The body builder labors to release the Platonic ideal of the hunk within. Most Westerners like motion and action in their athletics. Muscle building tends toward stasis, toward posing the body in tableaux, a series of Grecian urns...