Word: postmodernist
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Grandeur is not a word you would think you would need in discussing the art of the late '90s in America, amid its tinkle of postmodernist styles and the chitchat of a depleted conceptualism. But in the presence of these new Serras, you have no choice but to use it--and to be glad that there's someone to whose work it can honestly apply...
...this show; and although I gave up riding after totaling a Kawasaki, and nearly myself, on a highway in Southern California some 25 years ago, I still rarely see a bike I don't like and can't suppress a twinge of envy when some yuppie on a postmodernist Japanese burner splits the lanes of the Long Island Expressway and goes blasting past my sedate Volvo. Divided, I am reminded of a Japanese saying about the poisonous fugu blowfish, which, when prepared under license, becomes a gastronomic delicacy: "I want to eat fugu, but I want to live...
...guys, how's this for a twist? Let's take the end of the world seriously. Geez, how square can you get? No postmodernist, pre-apocalyptic ironies; a not-entirely-improbable cataclysmic threat--a giant comet hurtling earthward with no funny aliens anywhere in sight; special effects that serve the story plausibly; and a certain largely understated courage, as representative examples of humankind attempt to resist or try to accept the awful fate awaiting them. There's something curiously refreshing in the soberly inspirational way Deep Impact embraces the conventions of the old-fashioned disaster movie. You find yourself hoping...
...also thinks of Leger finding a typical style early and sticking to it. But this, as the show reveals, is not altogether true. He was a consistent artist but a very eclectic one as well, and one of the things that endears him to the Postmodernist temper is the way that traces of practically all the early 20th century movements, from Fauvism and Orphism to Cubism and even Surrealism, turn up in his work--not as a mishmash of quotes but as integrated elements. There's even a bow to Dada in a peculiar picture from 1930 in which...
Nothing very promising, those familiar with postmodernist literary and largely sterile ironies might guess. In this instance, they would be wrong. For one thing, it is not necessary to know a single word of Great Expectations to have a fine, suspenseful time reading Jack Maggs. Carey takes a cue from Dickens but then ad-libs an original and freestanding performance, replete with the sorts of twists and shocks and coincidences that originally gave page turners a good name. And those readers who retain a clear sense of Dickens' novel will encounter a trove of subtle allusions, not just...