Word: ironic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Radical changes in art come less often than we like to think, but some have been utterly fundamental. One of these was the arrival of iron as a material of sculpture. This happened in the 20th century -- about 75 years ago -- at the hands of Pablo Picasso and his older friend, the Catalan sculptor Julio Gonzalez. It signaled the first basic change in not only the materials but also the nature of the art since the invention of bronze casting, which occurred so long ago that it belongs to the domain of myth, not history...
...advent of iron is the subject of an extremely beautiful show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, curated by Carmen Gimenez, with excellent catalog essays by Dore Ashton and Francisco Calvo Serraller. "Picasso and the Age of Iron" involves three European artists -- Alberto Giacometti, Gonzalez and Picasso -- and two American ones, David Smith and Alexander Calder. Its time span is from 1928, when Picasso made an open frame of iron rods with a pinhead and two tiny startled hands and called it Figure, to Smith's maturity in the early 1960s. But its core...
Though the show doesn't pretend to be encyclopedic, it is chosen with fine visual intelligence and, not incidentally, is very well installed. Above all, it conveys with exhilarating clarity the sense of discovery that went with the development of iron as a medium of sculpture. We are used to it now: half the corporate plazas of America are cluttered with large and often otiose welded objects. Now and again a real masterpiece is produced in iron -- most recently, the astonishing work by Richard Serra, Intersection II, that was on view until last week at the Gagosian Gallery in SoHo...
...iron matter? Partly for symbolic reasons: it was the common material of industry, old as the smith-god Hephaistos but new as the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge -- "ignoble," vernacular material that, set up beside the "noble" marble and bronze of traditional sculpture, could not but detonate new trains of imagery...
...British government, wary of anything that might invite Serb attacks on its peacekeeping contingent in Bosnia, dismissed the Iron Lady's appeal as "emotional nonsense." By Friday, however, the emotion had apparently spread to Washington. President Bill Clinton had begun to talk tougher too, expressing his "outrage" at events in Bosnia and warning that it was time for Western nations to consider taking stronger measures, including those "that previously have been unacceptable." Clinton's advisers and the Pentagon were debating the pros and cons of arming the Muslims or even flying U.S. air strikes against Serb artillery positions and lines...