Word: texts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...After a run of a hundred years or so," wrote one of America's leading architecture critics, Peter Blake, in his belligerent text Form Follows Fiasco (1977), "Modern Dogma is worn out. We are now close to the end of one epoch, and well be fore the start of a new one. During this period of transition there will be no moratorium on building ... there will just be more and more architecture without architects." To travel in American cities is to know what he meant; the townscape of the '70s is perfused with cost-accountant buildings that bear no trace...
...This text has the same importance for Post-Modernism as Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture, published in 1923, did for Modernism. It is, in other words, one of the hinges of recent architectural history. In tone, Venturi's manifesto was almost diffident: "Architects can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanically moral language of orthodox modern architecture. I like elements which are hybrid rather than 'pure,' compromising rather than 'clean,' distorted rather than 'straightforward,' ambiguous ... and equivocal rather than direct and clear. I am for messy vitality over obvious unity ... I am for richness of meaning rather...
...Corbusier's book had put a generation on the spot. Progress or reaction? Architecture or revolution? Sheep or goats? Utopia or the dark backside of history? Which do you choose? Now Venturi was arguing for the Either, the Or and the Holy Both, and his text reads rather like the litany that Claes Oldenburg, the most powerful American artist of his generation, had written five years earlier: "I am for art that coils and grunts like a wrestler. I am for art that sheds hair. I am for art you can sit on. I am for art you can pick...
Photographer Walker Evans (1903-75) is best remembered for Depression photos of Southern dirt farmers published in the celebrated Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Text for that book was written by the late James Agee, whose eager eyes peer out from a 1937 portrait that is one of the 219 remarkable photographs in this long overdue retrospective volume. No captions are needed to display the range and depth of Evans' artistry. He knew the truth that lay in the luminous surfaces of things, whether they were the grim visages of farmers, the abstracted faces of New York subway...
...Mark's Gospel. Gospel means good news, and rarely has the word more compellingly been made flesh than in Alec McCowen's incomparable rendering of the King James text. The actor will play a return engagement in 1979. Mark it well...