Word: objectional
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Perhaps the clearest lesson I drew from my visit to the show, Dependent Objects, at Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum is that one of the more humorous, if often unintentional, side effects of conceptual art has been to make the museum-going experience unprecedentedly uncomfortable. As I walked into the gallery the first thing I saw was “Wave,” a 1964 sculpture by the artist Hans Haacke. The piece consisted of a thin rectangular slab, almost five feet long and a little less than a foot high, which was suspended from the ceiling...
...Head Body Limbs,” in particular. There was something strangely satisfying about becoming part of the sculpture’s structure, gripping the cloth and standing there with arms akimbo, feeling my body share the tension of the canvas as I actively gave form to the object. Perhaps the closest I can come to describing it is to say that I felt a little like I imagine a tent pole might feel—assuming that the pole is vaguely aware that it looks ridiculous but still finds a kind of dumb self-satisfaction in holding the tent...
...must-have accessory du jour for business travelers is not a lighter laptop, a smaller carry-on or even a pair of drown-out-your-seatmate headphones. It's a crayon-length object called a jump drive, a portable hard drive that can be plugged into any computer's usb port, making it easier for workers to transport large files normally carried by laptop. Although the gadgets aren't new, they have gained a following among business travelers, who sometimes wear them around their neck on a chain or string...
...that every portrait was a performance but that the performance could be a passage to something true. His picture of an exhausted, tentative Marilyn Monroe is an essential window into the sum of her predicaments. His shot of Charlie Chaplin making devil's-horns at the camera is an object lesson in economical wit. Accusations of communist sympathies were pushing Chaplin away from America; Avedon gives us the funnyman trying on his new role, the bogeyman...
...focuses not on the semantic meaning of the whole (what the sentence actually “means” in the traditional sense) but on the structural relationships of various parts that allow the whole to mean anything in the first place (the relationship of subject, verb and object, that renders the sentence’s meaning intelligible...