Word: symbolical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...menstrual blood, and it is the source and symbol of a universal taboo. In most cultures, menstruating women are shunned as dangerous or vaguely contaminated. Throughout history, they have been isolated in menstrual huts, forced through purification rituals and sometimes beaten if they ventured into male company during their periods. Exactly why is a mystery. Some think the taboo arose from a general repugnance of having sex with a bloodily discharging woman. Others see it as caused by primitive man's sense of awe-and fear-at the sight of blood that does not clot and signifies neither illness...
...left? To be sure, he was sly behind the camera: Graham Greene wrote that he was the best propagandist since Eisentstein. Greene's proof lay in Capra's exposition of Edward Arnold in his pictures. Hardly anyone has ever done justice to the memory of Arnold, Capra's bloated symbol of all that was wrong with America in three consecutive celebrations of his defeat: You Can't Take It With You, Mr. Smith and Meet John Doe. In the first, he was an obese and lost soul, a rotten but salvagable capitalist. By the last, he had become a fascist...
...quest for links, for symbols, Oldenburg has made himself a symbol, associated himself with an image. The "geometric mouse" has come to be a metaphor for his work. First developed in 1965 from the geometry of a movie camera, the mouse is the only one of his themes to have assumed the name of an animate being. Actually it looks very little like a mouse. Oldenburg calls the geometric mouse "a symbol of analysis and intellect". He identifies with it ("I'm the Mouse"); one of the funniest drawings at the ICA is a "self-portrait as a Mystical Mouse...
...production possible. The best workers in the penal system are classified as rockets and the slower ones, progressively, as airplanes, locomotives, automobiles, bicycles and lastly, ox carts. Pasqualini recalls one worker who was demoted to the status of a turtle, which is not only slow, but the traditional Chinese symbol of a cuckold. However, pushed a little further, this preoccupation with mechanical efficiency leads to a demand for the man to emulate the machine...
...games began with the familiar splendid pageantry: athletes in the uniforms of 37 nations marched past the box occupied by Austrian President Rudolf Kirchschlager. Overhead, helicopters unfurled the Austrian, Olympic and Tyrolean flags. A three-gun howitzer salute preceded the lighting of the Olympic flame, symbol of the history and fellowship of the quadrennial games...