Word: openable
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...years, the language of sculpture underwent the most searching revision it had had, perhaps in its whole history, and certainly since the time of Bernini and his followers in the 17th century. It moved, to put it roughly, from the lump to the web: from closed mass to open, constructed form. What happened to it then is set forth in a beautifully chosen, concise exhibition called "The Planar Dimension: Europe, 1912-1932," organized by Curator Margit Rowell, which opened last month at New York's Guggenheim Museum...
...till now, been properly explained by a museum show. Rowell has done the job with tonic intelligence, bringing together 114 sculptures done between 1912 and 1932 by 39 artists: French, Spanish, German, Hungarian, Russian, Italian and American. She has traced sculpture's passage from closed mass to open form with a precision of focus and a variety of little-known works that no earlier effort has matched. This may be the most important show of modernist sculpture in the past ten years...
...fabric. One of the key moments in this development came in 1912, when Pablo Picasso, then 31, snipped and bent some sheet metal into the semblance of a guitar. It was a guitar that might have been lifted from one of his own cubist still lifes, an open object defined by thin planes. The folding of the tin imitated the layered, overlapped look of the paintings: it was cubism made literal. This battered-looking object is Exhibit A in the Guggenheim show. In it, space was for the first time declared to be the prime subject of sculpture...
...example, in Australia's Outback, the collision with civilization has turned many aborigines into drunkards. By 10 a.m. the main street of Alice Springs is littered with squatting aborigines waiting for the bars to open, their alcoholism bankrolled by government dole. Only a few years ago, the Cinta Largas tribe in Brazil was bombed and strafed from the air, and the survivors gunned down by hunting parties, all to permit loggers to clear the tribe's lands...
...opposed it. No one has been able to prove conclusively that the death penalty deters murders, but the feeling persists that some crimes are so awful that the criminal deserves to be executed. Whether people will still feel that way once condemned men actually start to die again is open to question...