Word: ritually
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...narrator of A Father's Story, the last and best piece in this volume, is a devout believer whose wife has left and divorced him, making it impossible for him to marry again with the church's blessing. And he will not do so without it: "For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love." Years of loneliness have strengthened his faith and given him a sense of how his marriage failed: "Twelve years later I believe ritual would have...
...before the sexual revolution of the '60s and '70s-drive-ins were "the only place to go for some privacy," recalls Manhattanite Vicki Slate, 40. "We certainly couldn't go to his house or my house. Our parents would have killed us!" According to the quaint ritual of the time, families would park in the front rows, teen-agers who were just dating would take up the middle rows, and those who were bent on serious petting would head for the darker areas in back. Most teen-agers now have other ways of finding privacy...
...simple power, even a degree of mystery. One realizes where a New York graffiti artist like the fulsomely promoted Keith Haring, 25-the Peter Max of the subways-filched his ideas, a decade later. Penck's paintings consist of stick figures and linear signs, enacting parodies of myth, ritual and archaic language. They draw on a wide range of sources, from algebra to Dipylon vases, from set theory and scribbles on the Berlin Wall to American Indian petroglyphs. Like a lot of earlier modernist art, they quote the "primitive" forms out of all cultural context, stubbornly, like someone repeating...
Penck's obsessive loquacity and mock-ritual imagery are apt to cause inflation. "He is like the North Pole," rhapsodizes Curator Cowart, "that place which attracts the navigational magnetic compass from afar but repels and disorients it when approached." The more modest truth, for those with unwiggled needles, is that Penck's imagery is often so obscure that he seems to feel no special responsibility to the system he deploys. A lot of the paintings are mumbo jumbo, and their formal attributes can be remarkably trite-cliché figure-ground reversals, careless scrawly drawing...
...also an avant-garde artist of international renown, whose abstract paintings and lithographs rest in museums around the world. These diverse talents do not seem to belong in the same epoch. Yet they have somehow converged in this diminutive woman who appears in her tiny foyer, offering slippers and ritual bows of greeting...