Word: steel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Once Barry wowed critics with a sharp mind, penetrating questions and a phenomenal recall of names, faces and dates. Now his steel-trap mind is rusty. In a recent interview, Barry's fatigue overwhelmed him. His face sagged, his eyelids drooped. He talked haltingly, stopping often to gaze at the far wall of his cavernous office. He mixed up dates and forgot a name. At one point, a pitcher of ice water in his hand, he poised haltingly over his coffee cup as his face betrayed mounting confusion over the disappearance of his water glass, which he had earlier placed...
...constantly efface themselves in a complementary silence . . . comes close to the act of creation." Wilmarth's singular project was to create the spirit of reverie that surrounds the "negated object," but in that most object-affirming of arts, sculpture, and to seek its poetic effects in heavy industrial materials -- steel and glass. Typically, Wilmarth, a Californian who spent most of his working life in New York City, adopted as one of his heroes John Roebling, the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge...
...artist of Wilmarth's age there was nothing radical about steel. It was the bronze of modernism, the normal substance of constructed sculpture for the past 60 years and more. What was unusual was his decision to combine it with glass and thus make transparency, as much as spatial enclosure, a part of the sculptural effect. Wilmarth loved light. It was his madeleine, a trigger of memory, as a particular smell might be to others: "I associate the significant moments of my life with the character of light at the time." In fact, glass came before steel in his work...
...association of glass with steel that gives his work its peculiar evocative power. Wilmarth worked the glass, bending it discreetly and etching it with hydrofluoric acid. This frosted the panels and brought out their color, which varied from a cold ice green to a soft, almost moonstone blue, diffused on the face but sometimes concentrated with sharp energy within the edges. The dark steel, seen through this translucency, lost its declarative character; it blurred, and became a presence, or rather an immanence: something very much there yet hard to define...
...glittering glass-and-steel Bank of China, Southeast Asia's tallest building and a prominent addition to Hong Kong's spectacular skyline, was to embody the faith that both Hong Kong and China placed in a common future, a visible symbol of the "one country, two systems" promised when the British crown colony reverts to China in 1997. Last week two enormous black-and-white banners drooped across the tower's facade bearing a grim message in Chinese characters: BLOOD MUST BE PAID WITH BLOOD...