Word: piranesianism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Italian pavilion in the public gardens, and sampled all the national pavilions from the U.S.'s to Yugoslavia's, and sated whatever appetite you may have for the installation pieces of Aperto 88, the section for artists under 40 that stretches like a deconstructionist via crucis through the long Piranesian gloom of the rope walk at the Arsenal, you can go back to the museums and immerse yourself in the Venetian past, an experience that tends to put some of the achievements of late or postmodernism in perspective. Moreover, it takes you away from the throng of dealers and neocollectors...
...charmless white marble skin in the mid- 1960s. The dowager has been turned into a cheap mummy, yet the disposition of Times Tower remains an architectural cause celebre. Johnson and Burgee once proposed that the building be stripped down to its steel skeleton, gaily painted and lighted -- a wry Piranesian folly absolutely perfect for the spot. What seems more likely, alas, is that the building will be demolished and replaced by a conventionally highfalutin plaza, monumental and mute...
...Song of Solomon, interweave in Kiefer's work in a haunting and oblique way. Margarete's presence is signaled, like a motif in music, by long wisps of golden straw, while Shulamite's emblem is charred substance and black shadow. Hence Kiefer's tragic image of Shulamite, 1983: a Piranesian perspective of a squat, fire-blackened crypt, the paint laid thick in an effort to convey the ruggedness of the masonry, whose architectural source (as Mark Rosenthal points out in his astute introduction to the difficulties of Kiefer's work) was a Nazi "Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers...
...downgraded it to a commuter station. In 1969 the last train left, and the place was abandoned: a rusting abode of cats and pigeons, whose damp silence was occasionally broken by film units; Orson Welles and Bernardo Bertolucci are among the directors who have sought evocative locations in its Piranesian gloom. Meanwhile developers covetously eyed it, dreaming of the slow-motion arc of the wrecker's ball. In 1971 the French government, under President Georges Pompidou, issued a demolition order...