Word: serpents
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...Thereafter, the graceful and the grotesque prance the stage in some of the longest, slowest processionals since Catherine de Medici introduced ballet spectacle to the court of France in the late 16th century. Nymphs, whores and clowns flutter merrily about. Morality figures of death and madness strut menacingly. The serpent, dressed in a red flapperesque wig and pelvis-pinching tights, snakes sneakily around her victims. Nijinsky ascends the cross for several minutes of agony, then descends to triumph over Diaghilev in the name of love and artistic freedom...
...simple categories are being questioned today, but the questioners are working against some 3,000 years of Judaeo-Christian thought. The trouble began, appropriately, with the creation narrative in Genesis, particularly when the first woman was molded from Adam's rib. Eve succumbed to the temptation of the serpent, and Adam in turn capitulated to her. "The woman you gave me," he was soon grousing to God. "She gave me the fruit." Ever after, Scripture notes with a certain masculine piety, women would bear children in sorrow and pain, and their husbands would be their masters...
...quantum leap in man's abilities to reshape himself evokes a sense of uneasiness, a memory of Eden. Eat of the forbidden fruit, God warns, and "you shall surely die." Eat, promises the serpent, and "you shall be like...
...moments, complex images, not pretty, but reflecting something in each case which shouts with mysterious intensity, in another language altogether, "There are no words!" In one of his pictures, a woman in an Elko, Nevada, casino reaches for the dice so intently her arm becomes, with slight blur, a serpent's tongue. Frank understood best the absolute respect the still image must have for reality, and the duty the photographer has to confront people in the reality of their daily lives...
...water, fire, etc.) to his new signs or enhance them "for esoteric value" with much mythology. Actually, Schmidt borrows some myths from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, both on Cetus (a monster sent by Neptune to devour Andromeda) and on Ophiuchus (either a king killing a dragon, Heracles killing a serpent, or a physician curing snakebites). "Anyway," Stillman insists, "according to Schmidt, I'm an Aquarius. But I don't feel it or act it. Therefore...