Word: modernizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...friend of mine"), an ironic twist worthy of O. Henry and a lack of factual foundation combined with a seductive plausibility. The hardiest perennials include "The Choking Doberman," a gruesome tale synthesized from two old legends: "The Witch and the Telltale Wound" and "The Misunderstood Pet." In the modern version, a woman returns home to find her Doberman choking. After two severed fingers are discovered in the dog's throat, the police are summoned. In a closet they find a cowering burglar trying to stanch the flow of blood from his mutilated hand...
...very title of this summer's big show at the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, which fills a floor of the cavernous Centre Georges Pompidou with 263 works by 95 artists (through Oct. 13), gives one pause: "Qu'est-ce que la Sculpture Moderne?" (What is modern sculpture?). A tendentious question, perhaps, but not without its point. Most museumgoers feel they know what modern painting is. About sculpture they care less and are less sure...
...20th century, which, in cultural matters, really began around 1880, this changed. After 1910 the momentum of change was plain to all. Why do we always speak of "modern sculpture" but never of "modern statues"? Because one of the criteria of modernity itself was the degree to which sculptors angled their work away from the accepted forms of social communication via the human figure. Not because they lost interest in the figure -- on the contrary, the years 1900-1950 were rich in figure sculpture and body-haunted objects by Matisse, Picasso, Archipenko, Brancusi, Miro, Calder, Giacometti and others -- but because...
...Modern sculpture after 1910 wanted the liberty that painting had already . claimed -- the unobliged liberty of thought itself. It extracted new models from the changing culture around it, from painting and music, anthropology and psychoanalysis, from the idea of the "primitive" (that escape route of a culture stuck in the gridlock of its own sophistication) and the dream of a utopian machine future. One could have a sculpture that was also a little building, like Alberto Giacometti's The Palace at 4 A.M., 1933, or a still life, like Henri Laurens's Dish with Grapes, 1918; an image of landscape...
...celluloid favored by constructivists, the steel plates and boiler ends forged by Smith, and so on down to rocks, twigs, burlap, twine or even the artist's own dung, which, canned and labeled by the Italian Piero Manzoni in 1961, provided a nastily prophetic comment on fetishism in late modern art. On its road away from statuary, sculpture gained a new depth of cultural resonance, a flexibility of invention, an access to the inner self, a power of aggression and a weird, self-reflexive playfulness. All it lost was its audience...