Word: vernacular
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...connect him back to the best strain in 19th century American art -- Audubon through Homer and Eakins to the Ashcan School -- actually counted against him. What the postwar art world liked was "spirituality" and "sublimity," the tincture of melancholy elevation. But Davis had always liked the American vernacular, the look of the street, the jostle and visual punch of signs, life imagined in jazz tempo, hard-edged, Cubist-based and infused with optimism. So that left him on the margin...
Marcel Duchamp, the French Surrealist, labeled as "art" a battered bottle rack, a defaced poster of the Mona Lisa and a mass-produced urinal. He perceived art all around in the vernacular world. The question pondered in THE MYSTERIES, a multimedia enchantment at Harvard's American Repertory Theater, is whether vernacular life itself -- the life of mating, domestic squabbles and old age -- can constitute a sort of art. At times the idea is posed literally, as when writer-director David Gordon places an ornate frame around actors engaged in a mock wedding. At other times the "mysteries" of creation...
...Miller, by contrast, brought to Europe things it was less accustomed to seeing: naked appetite, hopeless high spirits, French spoken with a Brooklyn accent. And what he brought back was something even richer: the great French passions -- of love and talk and food -- translated into a rough Anglo-Saxon vernacular. Joie de vivre made American...
...BOMBS begin to drop, as we begin, as a society, to speak in the vernacular of SCUD and F-15 and our airwaves are suddenly, more than ever, monopolized by generals and Pentagon spokesmen, by understandably trembling journalists and the satellite-dished, horrific images of mothers placing gas masks on their small children, it may, now more than ever, be a good time to ponder the role--or, rather, the nonrole--of poets and poetry in our lives, of the men and women in this country who are dismissed from the daily hurly-burly of significance with the rather glib...
...whether the Vile Body has any future in a city teetering on the brink of terminal decay. It's not a prospect that cheers the salon regulars. New York may be a city under enemy (read: tired old liberal) aegis. But it is also the center of a vernacular culture that makes the U.S., in Johnston's sardonic phrase, "the most amusing place to live in the history of the planet." And there is no doubt in the minds of Johnston and his friends what room offers the best view, if only once a month...