Word: motifs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Whether the motif is jazz or swing, classical or ragtime, there is one constant in the films of Woody Allen: good music sets both the mood and the pace. The meticulous attention to scoring is no coincidence. Comedian Allen is deadly earnest when it comes to music, especially the New Orleans jazz style he favors most...
...facile distinctions between soft drugs (marijuana, mild hallucinogens) and hard drugs (heroin and now crack), does share responsibility for creating an environment that legitimized and even, until recently, lionized the cocaine culture. This wink-and-a-nod acceptance, this implicit endorsement of illicit thrills, has been a continuing motif in movies, late-night television and rock music. My personal life may rarely intersect with impoverished drug addicts, but the entertainment media created in the image of people like me easily transcend these barriers of class, race and geography...
Commercial exploitation of the flag is commonplace in print, on television and around business premises. Since such use (almost by definition) debases the flag, should it be outlawed? What should be done about garments featuring % a flaglike motif? When a flag is cut and sewed into a shirt, is it still a flag...
...painting being so much more than its subject, you can't pin down an artist by naming his favorite motif. From Mondrian and the Russian constructivists on, many an abstract artist has gone for the stripe in all its apparent simplicity -- the line that baldly, mysteriously becomes a form in itself. Yet their paintings are not like one another's: there is no confusing the precise black vibration of a Bridget Riley with the effect of one of Barnett Newman's "zips" or the slightly blurred, funereal pinstriping of an early Frank Stella. Today the stripe continues to linger...
...cogitation -- how the life of the mind and its tentative decisions could be embodied, not just illustrated, in pigment. And there had been a visit to Morocco in 1970; there Scully saw stripes everywhere, dyed into awnings and djellabas and bolts of cloth, not a theoretical form but a motif embedded, as it were, in the landscape. Then he moved to New York and, as he puts it in the catalog, felt driven to paint "severe, invulnerable canvases, so I could be in this environment and not feel exposed. I spent five years making my paintings fortress-like...