Word: mite
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...architectural spectrum. One is a sprawling apartment complex in a suburban resort town by Charles Moore (with his partner John Ruble), the other a cramped commercial and residential building overlooking the Wall by Peter Eisenman. The Moore buildings at Tegel are, as his critics have charged, Disney-like, a mite overeager to please. But Tegel is a resort town; the complex was meant to be a playful place, and it is easy to play along with Moore's California-cum-German-romantic palette (pastel peach and blue), the dormers and gables that crop up without warning, the classicized little plazas...
...carnival to visit a medieval crypt. You are pulled out of time and into a sacred stillness. The images, handsomely sculpted, address themes of life and death and life after death. Gods and gargoyles hover in the cramped air, dwarfing all human anxieties. Man is a mite here, pitiable in his ignorance of what matters, or else vainglorious in his quest to find the answers to riddles beyond his solving...
Amid the furor over Ronald Pelton's betrayal, the OSS veterans gathered for a festive 25th annual banquet that provided a mite of moral support to Administration efforts to bolster the nation's intelligence apparatus. The banqueters warmly applauded when Reagan pledged to do just that, and nobody there had any trouble seconding the President's praise of CIA Director William Casey as "one of the heroes of America's fight for freedom." After all, Bill Casey was one of them; from the OSS office in London, he had helped direct the deployment of agents behind enemy lines. Still...
...utterly stupid are the gags? The Cascara national anthem is accompanied by swimstrokes since most of the inhabitants are descended from shipwreck victims. Jimmy Walker (trivial persuit: remember J.J. of "Dyno-mite" fame?) does weather report on a tropical island. "It's hot!" he cries. The lead revolutionary sings all his lines to a reggae beat. Valerie Perrine reaches in Michael Caine's pocket for his lighter and instead grabs...Well, you get the idea...
...because the system was full of quirks, and especially because it depicted something--landscape, which is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel--other viewers, tired of the dry oats of conceptual art, could gratefully latch on to Bartlett. If Rhapsody today seems a mite too garrulous and fiddly to be the masterpiece many critics take it for, it remains an essential key to the shift of taste that took New York art into the '80s. In a catalog essay to this show, Art Critic Roberta Smith puts her finger on the peculiar character...