Word: rimers
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Last year, Danny Rimer '93, Mathew Lee '92, and Matthew Butterick '92 were agitated by what they termed the trendy, upper-East-Side art propagated by Harvard's Triptych, (a group which had been in existence for three years) and conceived of Agitprop as a means of providing an alternative approach to cultural awareness. Simply put, Agitprop aims to mobilize interest in the arts at Harvard. Rimer explains that the most effective means to this end is to "coerce a response," and indeed, their events are designed to seize attention and elicit an emotional reaction...
...Rimer explains, "We want people to realize art isn't dead, that it is part of the community in which we live...[If] you force people into seeing art, they'll enjoy it, it will speak to them and become real. Art should serve a political and cultural function for everyone--it's not just cocktail talk. Art shouldn't be aristocratic, this is a socializing and democratizing process...
...Museums, the Carpenter Center and even the steps of Widener. (Next year they plan to invade the dorm rooms). In an effort to intensify the bond between art and our daily lives, Agitprop is waging a war for cultural coolness on all fronts. The aim, according to the pithy Rimer, is "passion, not fashion...
Perhaps it was natural that Japanese artists should return the compliment; anyhow it was inevitable, once the traditional isolation of Japan was broken by the Emperor Meiji's decree, in 1868, that "knowledge shall be sought throughout the world." As J. Thomas Rimer points out in a fascinating catalog essay to this show, the teaching of Western art in Meiji Tokyo began in 1876 mainly as a "scientific" discipline. But before long the bizarre techniques of the mysterious Occident developed their own momentum for Japanese artists, and particularly the Western way of depicting forms by smearing a kind of sticky...
...little kindling is laid down for the fires that burst up. Wilson succeeds in giving his audience a jaundiced, disturbing look at the background of village life. But what might have made effective background serves as Rimer's meat and potatoes. In place of characters, the audience gets caricatures: the gossipy old women (Suzanne Vine and Ilana Hardesty) knitting the scenes together: the gushing, pouting hot-pink bobby-soxer (Alexandra Loeb); the broad Mid-western accents of a farmer (Paul Breenhalgh); the fire-and-brimstone preacher and judge (both by Paul Erickson). There are so many roles that the caricatures...