Word: jasper
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Which is not to say that Thiebaud, earlier in his career, did not seem to have his own brand of vulgarity. The time was distant--20 years ago, in fact --and the "vulgarity" had to do with food. Jasper Johns had his ale cans, Claes Oldenburg his Brobdingnagian hamburgers. Thiebaud in the mid-'60s was the laureate of pies: spongy peaks, white with coconut frosting and Reddi Wip, dark buttes sliced open to reveal caves of chocolate, pastry craters cupping their unruffled lakes of Key lime gelatin. Since mass food was one of the motifs of pop art, Thiebaud...
Women and politics, not to mention men, take a thorough drubbing in The Good Terrorist. The heroine, Alice Mellings, 36, is thick-witted, tubby and held in thrall by her "admiration and wistful love" for Jasper Willis, a loutish layabout who also happens to be a homosexual. Alice's adult life has been spent caring for this creep and setting up a succession of "squats," or communes, where they can live until Jasper wears out his welcome, which seldom takes long. After four years of staying with and sponging off Alice's divorced mother (whose class Jasper winningly calls "bourgeois...
...later from his place of business. Before long, the new lodging is neat and shipshape. Her comrades, busy using their dole allowances to take taxis to picket lines and protest demonstrations, seem to appreciate the availability of hot food and the absence of stench, but not without some dissension. Jasper, demanding cash that Alice does not have, lashes out: "While you play house and gardens, pouring money away on rubbish, the Cause has to suffer, do without...
Lessing extracts a good dose of macabre humor from the dreariness of this household and the deluded egotism of its inhabitants. Jasper's manner as a public speaker, seen through the clammy mist of Alice's adoration, yields an acid portrait: "His style was to use the familiar phrases of the socialist ) lexicon, but as though he had only just that moment discovered them, so that when he began, there was often a moment when people showed a tendency to laugh." But it becomes increasingly difficult to care about Alice and her confederates. They are looking for trouble...
...senses with a megalomaniac collage of real things onstage is the middle term between Wagner and the plotless, junk-crammed happenings that were the talk of the New York art world in the early '60s. The more one sees of Schwitters, the more Robert Rauschenberg's and Jasper Johns' work in the '50s seems to owe to him: the stuffed goat, the paint-soaked bed, the light bulb, the pathetic coat hanger were all predicted in Germany 30 years before...