Word: tropes
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...says, disingenuously, that the Welk shows are legitimate as "an alternative to violence and gratuitous sex on commercial television." Local stations find it's those shows at the not-exactly-Susan-Sontag end of things that inspire subscribers to send in money. But isn't that, to use a trope PBS devotees should appreciate, destroying the village in order to save...
Even when Hesse's work seems entirely abstract, it refers to bodily functions. Hang Up, 1966, looks at first like a trope about illusion and reality -- the big rectangular frame hanging on the wall with nothing in it, but with a loop of steel tube spilling onto the gallery floor and connecting the frame's top-left to its bottom-right corner. But again, there's a fleshy metaphor -- both tube and frame are wrapped in cloth, like bandaged parts of a patient, and the tube seems to be recirculating some kind of fluid. Blood? Lymph? Fantasies? Even in absence...
...like a firework in the garden, fills the window of Interior with an Egyptian Curtain, 1948, its explosive light seeming to cast an inky black shadow under the bowl of fruit. The room is culture; the window frames nature; it is a kind of picture-within-a-picture, another trope that Matisse was partial...
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...