Word: itness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Wooden hat blocks are old hat to the millinery industry. A designer fashions a new shape, a whittler carves it in wood, and then it is mechanically mass-produced. Felt is draped over it, steamed and pressed into its contours, and voilà!-a new hat.
Discovered Figure. The resulting show, called "Blocked Metaphors," is a testament to the artists' variety and ingenuity. Saul Steinberg, for instance, discovered that his own block had been made to come apart so that a finished hat could be removed without tearing. He was so taken with the beauty...
Man Ray, the old Dadaist who is still alive and well and living in Paris, transformed his hat block into a blockhead by adding dark glasses and a scholar's mortarboard. L'Imposteur reads the caption at the bottom. Martin Carey, a fine-line draftsman of frogs, insects...
Aesthetic Cannibalism. With the extravagance of one who has hat blocks to squander, Ossorio used no fewer than five in his work titled Waste Not, Want Not. Along with four mannequin heads, plus the weathered skull of a toothy lion, they have been neatly skewered, mounted and bedecked with paint...
Today the hat-block industry relies on aluminum forms as well. But Harry Glasgall, founder of the Empire Hat Block Corp., which designed and manufactured most of the blocks in the show, confessed that he was "flabbergasted" when he saw what had been done with his product. "Everything I saw...