Word: inert
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Water. Shapeless in itself, it can take MI multitudinous shapes. Colorless in itself, it can produce iridescences beyond any artist's palette. Soundless and inert in itself, it can in action induce a sense of rushing speed and frenetic energy; in tranquillity, a sense of meditative peace. In the most bleak of concrete jungles, water is a hope and a memory, a green thought in an ungreen shade...
Most of the 17 pices in the exhibit use some sort of glass rod filled with one of the "noble gasses" (you remember from chemistry: that's helium, argon, neon etc.). The chemistry teacher always called those the "inert" gasses, but Sina uses electronics to make the gas-filled rods move in all sorts of interesting ways...
...meditation peopled by Fellini's patented galleries of grotesques -hunchbacks, dwarfs, crazed aristocrats, a giant strong woman in a circus and a particularly loony occultist (Cicely Browne). But the presentation of most of these figures is so inert that they constitute a series of waxworks, tableaux morts. The film's only burst of real energy, a tumultuous Venetian festival at the beginning, is quickly dissipated. Its loveliest image is completely gratuitous: the candle-laden chandeliers of a theater are lowered to the floor and extinguished by footmen wielding long fans...
Greene has a way of decoding signals of despair in a man's face--the hunger to destroy or the wish to die. In Torrijo's "lines of weariness around the eyes," Greene sees what he calls a "charisma of desperation." It communicates an impatience with the inert diplomacy over the Canal issue, but also a desire to leave a mark on history. If he doesn't do so on the dotted line on the document that restores sovereignty over the waterway to Panama, Greene hints he plans to leave it in blood...
...waited on deck," reports Carruthers, the narrator, a clever, foppish young Foreign Office sprig who has just joined Davies, a sea-struck Oxford classmate, on his cruising boat, "and watched the death-throes of the suffocating sands under the relentless onset of the sea ... The Dulcibella, hitherto contemptuously inert, began to wake and tremble under the buffetings she received ... Soon her warp tightened and her nose swung slowly round; only her stern bumped now, and that with decreasing force. Suddenly she was free and drifting broadside to the wind till the anchor checked her and she brought up to leeward...