Word: totem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Dennis Muren, senior visual-effects supervisor at ILM, has become a familiar figure on Oscar night, both because this was his seventh Academy Award and because he is a towering gent with lank white hair and a serene face. That picture -- of a modern Merlin holding a gold totem -- is appropriate, for Muren, 45, is a wizard in the movie craft of computer graphics. In the bland ILM barracks in San Rafael, Calif., he and his merry alchemists wave a little wand over their Silicon Graphics VGX 340 terminals, and out comes the magic...
They're beautiful, that's obvious. But they have something else: presence, or maybe allure, fascination or magic. Whatever it is, it hits the instant one sees Naomi Campbell in a yellow totem gown, a Nefertiti of the '90s. Or Linda Evangelista looking like a Scottish schoolgirl on the cover of Vogue. Or Christy Turlington gazing serenely from an ad for Calvin Klein's Eternity perfume. Naomi. Linda. Christy. They're everywhere. Vogue, Elle, feature pages, ad pages, gossip pages. Selling couture and catalogs, soap and sportswear. And during the fall fashion shows these three have sashayed their impossibly sleek...
...Omaha artifacts were acquired between 1884 and 1889 by anthropologist Alice Fletcher, who later donated them to the Peabody Museum. The collection consisted of animal skins, bottles, shells, and boxes associated with bison hunt rituals and the Sacred Pole, a revered totem that according to the Gazette "embodied the spirit of the tribe." When Fletcher was in Nebraska, the "ritual objects were no longer being used" and would probably have been destroyed had she not saved them...
...work underscores the central oddity, and the source of originality, in Shapiro's art: his desire to use a style derived from "radical" modernism to make credible images of the body. Minimalism didn't want the figure. It hated the idea of the totem. It despised any kind of liveliness. It wanted to be its chilled, nonreferential self: a box, a row of bricks on the floor...
This group of women owes a stepsisterly debt to Madonna. They are singers who have molded a slick look, cool moves and a crafty urban sound into a commanding cultural presence. One crucial difference is that Madonna now dwells in the realms of rarefied pop; she is a totem of high fashion. Jackson, Abdul, Watley and Estefan have a more vigorous immediacy. They seem, whatever their success, cozier with the kids, closer to the street corner...