Word: tropes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This, to put it mildly, is not an unfamiliar trope. It is almost as old as Los Angeles itself -- the other side of its perennial cultural struggle between civic boosterism and social derangement. It has been implanted in the city's self-image for at least 60 years, reflected in innumerable films, novels, detective stories, photography. It begins long before Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, 1939, with its Ensor-like cast of pathological misfits and its painter, Tod Hackett, dreaming of his apocalyptic canvas of the burning of the city -- a vision that would be made real...
...reproduction conveys the effect of a picture like Black Circle, Time, 1979-80. Painted every inch of the way with a Seurat-like determination to leave nothing accidental on the surface, it is Pousette-Dart's version of the circle that has been used, as a mandatory trope, by every Zen roshi for the past 300 years. It is the circle of black ink on white rice paper that says "emptiness" but also says "fullness," the abstract figure in which one can reflect on the presence of complete being...