Word: inertly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...largely about landscape as body, De Kooning's bronzes are body as landscape. There is no question of exploiting the material, either through the subtleties of patina or its inherent sense of mass; few bronzes, indeed, recall so insistently their origins as clay. They are cindery lumps of inert matter, pummeled and squashed with what appears at first to be a paroxysm of gratuitous violence. In the largest piece, Clam Digger (1972), De Kooning's love of direct action reaches the outer limits of credibility: this mud-footed golem, clumping along inside his ridged, tormented epidermis...
...Youngmans, and use this to put Sophie at a disadvantage. She can only spout whatever middle-Americanisms that the New York Jewish quipster-author felt right for the moment. I would for the life of me like to recount some dialogue for the record, but it is all so inert, so clearly the work of a hack intent on a string of easy laughs without sustained character, that it slips through the memory as swiftly as my last trip to the supermarket. (There is one joke about cherry pie or apple pie or something being as American as blueberry...
Boudu Saved from Drowning, A charming comedy from 1935 about a shaggy-dog man who disrupts the life of inert bourgeoisie is billed with a Renoir bore and a Renoir dud, Picnic on the Grass and A Day in the Country. BRATTLE THEATER. Boudu: 6, 9:35 Picnic...
Anti-taste is still an attitude; one can sustain it well or badly. A lot of the work shown here, from Seymour Rosofsky's clumsy paintings to more overtly "aesthetic" objects like Don Baum's lumpen-surrealist assemblages of dolls' limbs or Cosmo Campoli's inert tributes to Brancusi, is a wretched thesaurus of cliches. But subtract them and a deposit of vitality remains...
...sentient presences. Some of this comes through in paintings like Star-Weaver, with their panoramic veils and zigzags of light, their flecks of paint that suggest flowers, mica deposits or dust: a soft immanence, vulnerable and pantheistic. Unfortunately, Wofford overworks his paintings. The light stiffens into crusts of inert pigment. But if the picture surface is sometimes cluttered, the effort to complicate it remains salutary and even brave...