Word: shapes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Sihanouk's ability to shift with the winds of international politics. Though Cambodia's chubby "god-king" is hardly the picture of a slender reed of bamboo, he is highly pliable nonetheless. So, apparently, is his nation's rickety economy, which seems perpetually bent out of shape. Teachers, civil servants and even the 30,000-man army frequently go without pay. Air conditioners in most of the capital's sticky offices are turned on only when important visitors arrive. Roadways are falling apart, but when Sihanouk recently ordered a load limit of eight tons...
...sort out Snookie's tangled accounts. Pnompenh-once a pleasant, easygoing capital-has become increasingly rundown. This fact recently led Snookie to broadcast a wild tirade of threats that he would personally fire everyone in the capital, from street sweepers to policemen, if the city did not shape up. Typically, no one was fired and Pnompenh remains as threadbare as ever. As government corruption accelerates, justice declines: a young government clerk received a stiff sentence for stealing 25?, while rumors indicate that one of Sihanouk's pals took a $125,000 bribe for a government contract...
...surface. The importance of the surface in contemperary art is brilliantly discussed by Fried in the "nexus o formal "nexus of formal issues" contained in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition: The first of "these issues concerns the ability of line, in modernist painting . . . to be read as bounding a shape or figure, whether abstract or representational...
...shape is usually differentiated from the surface of the canvas by the line enclosing the shape. A black line or a black blotch on a white surface creates the illusion of "relief," just as surely as a seated figure seems separate from the picture plane. The painters of the exhibit tend to reject relief and explicit bounding lines in favor of a more homogeneous surface area. Paint is exploited for its own abstract properties. The colored surfaces imply nothing but colored surfaces, demanding the viewer's interest solely in the value of their interrelationship...
Noland's Mach 2 (and all of Stella's pictures) illustrates Fried's second key "formal issue," the growing dependence of the shape of the composition and the shape of the canvas in the surface unity. The edge of the canvas is one of the limits (not boundaries) of the painted chevrons. The dramatic shape of the canvas is not determined by an arbitrary circumference; it is part and parcel of the shapes of the fields of color. Each chevron marks off a parallelogram of different size but of similar proportions. The whole constantly intermingles with the parts...