Word: mentalism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dancing mind. For Oldenburg's works depend on the capacity of the human mind to dance; they have meaning because they stimulate the observer to perform the same intellectual acrobatics that the artist did when conceiving the piece. This art is metaphoric as well as metamorphic and it demands mental participation in all the associations made and transformations performed. Aspects of reality which would never be rationally juxtaposed are struck together--sparks fly. The typewriter eraser, for example, becomes a tornado in one series of drawings. The round rubber spins violently around the center screw (the eye of the tornado...
...finally able to tell about it. Still hesitant in speech, uncertain at times of his surroundings, the drawn, chain-smoking Ukrainian mathematician appeared at a Paris press conference to discuss both his life as a dissident in the U.S.S.R. and his three-year purgatory in Soviet prisons and mental hospitals. He had been accused of anti-Soviet activities, namely protesting the arrests and trials of other dissidents and publishing his views in samizdat (underground) publications. In what is now a classic Soviet method of punishing dissidents, Plyushch was interrogated, imprisoned and finally sent to an insane asylum administered...
Plyushch, 37, who still considers himself a "neo-Marxist," was remanded to the Dnepropetrovsk special mental hospital in July 1973 after prison doctors had diagnosed him as a schizophrenic. Once there, he recalled last week: "The horror of the psukhushka [madhouse] got to me. There were more patients than beds, and in two beds shoved together I was put in the middle place of three. Patients twisted in pain from administration of drugs. One of them had his tongue hanging out, another his eyes popping, a third walked curved in an unnatural manner...
...press conference, Moscow's Literaturnaya Gazeta printed a derisive rebuttal of his statement, which suggests that Soviet authorities knew in advance what he was about to tell. Dismissing such accounts in the West as "dirty gambling on human tragedies," the Moscow literary journal defended the Soviet system of mental care by citing the cases of other dissidents who had been locked up in mental hospitals in the Soviet Union and were found to be truly sick when released to the West. The report was misleading: most of those cited by Literary Gazette were in good health...
Beyond its commercial success, Go disciples claim it develops a far greater mental dexterity than its Western counterpart, chess. Go's applications range not onky to military tactics but to psychology, mind-training and aesthetics, as well. Some Go historians even contend that Go embraces more than a Japanese ideal of mental exercise--that it epitomizes the Japanese spirit itself...