Word: ironizing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Armed with red, white and blue charts detailing the Soviet military threat, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger marched up to Capitol Hill to erect a defiant rampart around his $239 billion share of the $848 billion budget. After three days of crossfire from Congressmen of both parties, the Iron Duke of Defense emerged battered but unbending. "We simply cannot reduce defense spending any further without undermining the security of the United States," he adamantly declared...
Like an American Grafitti behind the Iron Curtain, the movie examines its several characters in an Epilogue. This one, though, provides no ironic afterword on the plot. The sexual denouement between Dini and Magda is completely incomprehensible, while the Koves family sings an old national folk song in a vaguely optimistic scene so inconsonant with the rest of the movie that it may have been government-mandated...
...Iron was in his name, of course, and in his family history and his social environment. He was born in Decatur, Ind., in 1906, the descendant of a 19th century blacksmith, and his sculptural language flowed with perfect naturalness out of a childhood in the part-mechanized heart of America. "We used to play on trains and around factories," he recalled. "I played there just like I played in nature, on hills and creeks." Thousands of youngsters, no doubt, could say the same; but art grows out of other art, and what opened the sluices and let Smith...
...make a sculpture for the Spoleto Festival in Italy. On going there he found, in the nearby town of Voltri, five deserted steel mills, littered with offcuts, sheets, bars and, best of all, a mass of abandoned tools, from calipers and wrynecked tongs to the ponderous, archaic-looking iron wagons and barrows used to run hot forgings from one part of the work floor to another. From these he made 27 sculptures in one month, and then had the leftovers shipped back to the U.S. to complete the Voltri-Bolton series...
...belly made of two tank ends welded together, all balancing on a huge forged chassis), suggest a sense of the figure and accordingly evoke responses from one's own body. They convey forceful impressions of posture, gesture and attitude. Smith was not in the business of making large iron dolls, and it may be, as various critics have pointed out, that the usual verticality of his sculptures encourages one to read them too readily as effigies of the figure. The same object, horizontal, would not be seen as a recumbent personage or sentinel. But in the end, the body...