Word: space
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Suddenly, the beeps stopped coming. Soviet scientists last week lost track of one of their nation's most highly touted space projects: Phobos 2, an unmanned craft launched last July to dispatch two landing probes onto the Martian moon Phobos. Repeated attempts to re-establish contact were fruitless. A companion vessel had been lost in space last August. The two spacecraft were part of the longtime Soviet push to explore Mars, an effort that Moscow has several times invited the U.S. to join. Although Phobos 2 had managed to send back information on the Martian atmosphere, magnetic field and environment...
...most radical paintings were the suprematist compositions he made between 1913 and the mid-1920s. To imagine that these were just formal exercises is to underrate them. Malevich thought of his black square and its cousins -- the white-on-white geometries, the crisp arrangements of colored planes floating in space as deep as the sky -- as icons, points of entry into a superior spiritual world. Their vividness, their power to fix one's attention, is also the vividness of the staring eyes of a pantocrator...
...Irkutsk. Many an unofficial artist finds himself in the predicament of Nikolai Filatov, whose large canvases -- a fervent compost of '50s-style abstract expressionism and broken-up cubofuturist planes -- are beginning to sell in the West, so he has hard currency but nowhere to paint. To get studio space in Moscow on an official basis, you must belong to the Artists Union and do "real" aesthetic work. Some of the best-known figures in the Soviet avant-garde, like Erik Bulatov and Oleg Vasilyev, who share working space, are still officially registered as illustrators of children's books...
...area of abstraction, Erick Stenberg. In the 1960s and '70s, Stenberg's work was a prolonged meditation on constructivism and suprematism, the chief movements of the "classical" Russian avant-garde in the years just before and after the revolution: finely tuned planar constructions in a pale, deep space. Lately, in a way that parallels Malevich's return to peasant themes in the 1920s, Stenberg has deepened his color and turned to images of a remote village where he spends part of his time: bare roads, cottages, grave markers, religious symbols like the fish and the Cross, all emblems...
...chess champion Gary Kasparov helped organize in 1987 and to which he donated two U.S.-made Atari 1040s. Although it had the blessings of Yevgeny Velikhov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the fledgling organization was beset by bureaucrats at every turn. First the housing authority said space would be granted only if the club agreed to turn over its computers. Then, when Kasparov procured 70 more machines, the state committee on sports insisted that it should have control of the computers. Only after Kasparov vehemently protested were the bureaucrats thwarted and the children able to keep their...