Word: tragic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...practically every hour of 1968," says Senior Writer Lance Morrow, who wrote this week's cover story. "I was 28 years old then, and writing in TIME's Nation section, doing pieces about Bobby Kennedy's coming into the race, and Johnson's withdrawing, and the assassinations. It was tragic history, but it also had a quality of hallucination...
More than any other force, the war in Viet Nam alienated the American young from their elders -- and, in equally tragic ways, from one another. The war was the dark hallucination, the black magic that would come and take the young and bear them off to the other side of the world and destroy them, for reasons progressively more obscure. Lyndon Johnson had campaigned for the White House in 1964 by promising that "we are not about to send American boys 10,000 miles away to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves," but he ! ended...
...convoy attacks are all the more tragic because the international agencies were well prepared to cope with the famine this time around. The U.N. and the Ethiopian government kept abreast of agricultural conditions through an "early warning system" that included satellite surveillance of farming areas. Months ago, at the first sign that the rains might fail, the agencies acted. One of the first nations to dispatch aid was the U.S., whose Agency for International Development is still bitter over charges that it did not do enough during the last crisis...
...myth and history, they cover an immense terrain of cultural reference and pictorial techniques, and on the whole they do it without the megalomaniac narcissism that fatally trivializes the work of other artists to whom Kiefer is sometimes compared -- Julian Schnabel, for instance. Kiefer bears, in full measure, the tragic sense and redemptive hope against which most of the art of our fin de siecle has insulated itself, and his stature can only grow with time. Which is not to say, of course, that all his work is of equal value...
...also the archetypal Beloved of the Song of Solomon, interweave in Kiefer's work in a haunting and oblique way. Margarete's presence is signaled, like a motif in music, by long wisps of golden straw, while Shulamite's emblem is charred substance and black shadow. Hence Kiefer's tragic image of Shulamite, 1983: a Piranesian perspective of a squat, fire-blackened crypt, the paint laid thick in an effort to convey the ruggedness of the masonry, whose architectural source (as Mark Rosenthal points out in his astute introduction to the difficulties of Kiefer's work) was a Nazi "Funeral...