Word: towerism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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BEGINNING WITH Galileo and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and Newton and his famous apple, there has been more fiction than truth in the popular conception of how scientists discover what they discover. And the conception of what motivates them to discover anything at all is equally mythical...
Umbilical Tower, up from the elk and the butterfly up from
Pieces like Jacques Famery's Plexiglas arm chair are magic invisible furniture. They hold a body but eyes pass through them. Eiffel's tower and Paxton's Crystal Palace introduced a new kind of building where space flowed through instead of stopping at the walls. And Plexiglas furniture changes the interior from an organization of volumes in space to a mere description of space drawn with light patterns of color and reflection...
Human and Angelic. "So up we go. The tower trembles alarmingly as we ascend, and the faces of the tower crew below us look dime-sized. Now the ceiling seems to tent us in, and there is a vast rush of images, a crystalline turbulence. The clarity of colors is the first surprise. From the floor, the figures overhead look like painted sculpture. Up here you find transparency, veils of atmosphere, light-filled shadows. Perhaps Michelangelo felt that opaque colors would be out of place in a world of legend, myth and mystery...
...Throughout the vast expanse of the ceiling, Michelangelo presents mutually exclusive themes or moments or levels of meaning as simultaneous images. He deliberately interweaves human, titanic, planetary and angelic, and even divine motifs. When you lie atop the tower day after day, his figures seem to be moving and communicating in a thousand ways. At times, the mere glance of a painted eye, an unexpected highlight, or the crook of a finger clues you in to some new turning of the artist's labyrinthine mind. The bonds between his figures are abstract, of course, but no less real...