Word: viewer
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...Hodgkin's type of abstract flatness admits the eye some way into the picture and identifies the surface as an imaginary opening, it has nothing to do with the idealized flatness of '60s American color-field painting. It hovers on the edge of scenic recognition, tricking the viewer into the thought that just one more clue might disclose a particular room or restaurant, a familiar scene. Sometimes it will. The most spectacular painting in the current show, In the Bay of Naples, 1980-82, presents itself as a soft hive of colored blobs, blooming and twinkling in rows...
...presents her mysterious case. As the movie proceeds, one finds oneself examining its references (Vertigo, North by Northwest, Rear Window, Psycho, Spellbound) rather than getting truly involved with the story. Soon a longing for the rat-tat-tattiness of sleazier Hitchcock knockoffs like Dressed to Kill steals over the viewer...
...same imagery recurs, in a slightly more distanced way, in her big room environment, Confrontation, 1978. Here the viewer is excluded from the central table, which is strewn with breasts, remnants of latex-covered food and other morsels, by a ring of white wooden boxes. These taper toward the top and, like versions of the dolmens in archaic ritual sites, press to be read as abstracted effigies of the human figure: a ring of watchers, backs shutting out the audience, absorbed in an obscure ritual...
...massive but vitally exciting production, a weird semi-suburban epic that often lumbers but almost never drags. Rauch's main talent lies in evoking an intricate, extensive, wholly believable world from a few strategically placed details. He does it so surely and imaginatively that, in this instance, the viewer occasionally becomes a trifle dizzy at the overlapping vistas. More to the point. Rauch stumbles on his own inventiveness when a device or a setting draws too much attention to itself, rupturing the smooth unity imposed by the over layer of Shakespeare...
...telephone operator, predictably enough, via the former's casual phone call; the plaintive 30-years' teacher unable to cope with modernity (Jeannie Affelder) announces a supermarket checkers' number by nostalgically recalling a favorite student ("She works down at the Star Market now.") Then again, a few juxtapositions make a viewer catch his breath. After Nina Bernstein's lonesome ballad "Just a Housewife," the sarcastic opening line of the prostitute (Martha Hackett)--"Well, I didn't want to be just a housewife--comes like a slap in the face. Each speech and song brings a new twist--a corporate executive...