Word: totems
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Totem from Taboo. Johns's most known work is his 1960 Painted Bronze, apparently just two Ballantine ale cans on a pedestal. But look again, since, through the looking glass of pop, nothing is quite what it seems. They are, in fact, cast-bronze facsimiles of ale cans, one slightly smaller than the other. One is punched open and empty; the other is closed and solid bronze. Their labels are handpainted, and when lifted off their base, they provide a hefty gravitational surprise. They delight Johns pre cisely because they are false twins, an unequal equation, in short...
...walk about Cambridge contentedly bearing the secret of their own grandeur. Perhaps their judgment is accurate, perhaps a vast ironic joke undermines the very core of existence of the University--but for some reason or other nearly every Harvard man considers himself the top man of his private totem pole...
...entrance into Harvard (in the eyes of his hometown admirers an increase in stature) is to him a diminishment, in the most immediate sense. He is anonymous, low man on the totem pole. Like Jacob, he must win the birthright through ploys. As Jacob tricked Isaac into bestowing his blessing by putting on the godly rainments of his brother, and the skins of the kids of goats upon his hands, so does many a freshman, with the voice of Jacob, display to the world the hands of Esau...
...Totem. Sir Herbert Read, the British art historian, contends that Paolozzi's "new images, functionless machine-tools or sterile computers, derive not, like his previous work, from the debris of industrialism, but from the rational order of technology." They go beyond dada, surrealism or assemblage in accepting and celebrating the machine, yet dominating it by giving it a soul...
West Virginia puts on a demonstration of glass blowing; Montana has a trainload of Western collector's items, including an invitation to a hanging, Calamity Jane's thundermug, and Buffalo Bill's silver-handled toothbrush. Alaska has brought in Chilkat Indians to custom-carve totem poles (at $100 a running foot). General Cigar offers a magic show. Indonesia demonstrates shadow puppets, Oregon runs a lumberjack carnival, Polynesia sells chunks of fresh sugar cane. Socony Mobil tests your reflexes in a simulated driving-hazard test. Sinclair Oil has a forest of dinosaurs, and the Scott pavilion boasts...