Word: ornamentally
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...compressed and flattened into a long triangular wedge of gold, or the magnificent Tairona pectoral with its three fierce birds' heads stabbing outward, the forms are so energetic in their stylization and so terse in their modeling that, even on this tiny scale, the pieces cease to be ornament and become sculpture...
...come to the town and taken up the carpenter's trade and produced all this strange variety of ornament: the rising (or setting?) sun shape, the cart-wheel, the star pattern, the pagoda like shapes or one we just called the Spruce St. Variety. There's probably a folk-art monograph and foundation grant in it: "Varieties of the Eave Ornament in the Southeastern U.S. 1880-1920." With color pictures. Out of boredom we began classifying types and snapping a few pictures--to the disbelief and irritation of women on porches who thought we were photographing something going on behind...
...follows, "Liberation fighter, spring in Vietnam is ineffably beautiful. Tet is unbelievably epic. Apricot blossoms vie with each other to cheer your feats. Swallows take wing, telling our countrymen north and south of your deeds. Liberation fighter, let off your gun this spring instead of the usual firecrackers. And ornament Vietnam's spring with everlasting beauty." And the American bomber pilots, peering at the tiny figures marching below, may have wondered why these people never surrendered...
...interiors of 16th century Japan: the main form of large-scale decoration. Moreover, it had two advantages that fresco did not possess: a duke could change his hangings, and they warmed his drafty abode in winter. And yet the appetite for tapestries went beyond all questions of use and ornament. They were collected with manic extravagance. As the Cluny Museum's chief curator Francis Salet points out in his catalogue introduction, Philip the Good of Burgundy was such an impassioned buyer that his collection required a staff of 18 guards and varlets. In 1461, at the coronation of Louis...
They were produced at almost every social level of the young democracy, largely because ornament and design had not yet been wholly surrendered to either industry or "professionals." If, living in rural Maine or Pennsylvania in 1850, you wanted a chair, a yarn winder or a painted fire screen, there was a probability that you would have to make it yourself; the only other choice was a local or traveling craftsman. (By 1880 the mail-order and catalogue business was to change all that.) So folk art includes the minutely stitched embroideries over which the dutiful daughters of urban merchants...