Word: visual
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...became fashionable again, modernist doctrine loosened, and a sort of regional self-infatuation overtook the arts. Baby-boomer entrepreneurs, with their hip clothing companies, upscale shops and software firms, became prime graphic-design clients. By the early 1980s the most talented of the San Francisco designers were creating the visual equivalent of nouvelle cuisine. The result was an identifiable local style -- sunny but sophisticated, fresh, playful, elegant -- that has become widely imitated across...
...Manwaring's work is more deliberately jarring. His graphics are often intriguingly precarious collages, pages teeming with violently disparate visual elements. Ziggurat shapes and plant leaves appear obsessively ("I can't drop them"), and his posters are frequently fenced off with thick bars at the perimeter, frames within frames. His sensibility is Californian but more edgy than mellow. Surfaces are often made to look scratched and torn, and his palette has grown darker and richer over the past few years. "If I don't get a little resistance from clients," Manwaring says, "I don't like...
Manwaring was schooled in the dogmas of visual rationalism just at the moment when the crude baroque of psychedelia was popping up on posters all over San Francisco. That formative combination may explain why Manwaring still seeks to produce images on the border between the orderly and the wild, at once restrained and mannerist. A wine label for Sonoma County's small Hanna Winery, for example, is no neat, well-behaved rectangle but an asymmetrical ziggurat with type stacked in surprising ways. For a poster meant to express the idea of summer, a fragment of architectural statuary is enclosed within...
...things done for a women's magazine. Some of them, like the technically impressive watercolor In the Orchard, 1974, are as deadly in their "sensitiveness" as greeting cards. But there are some fine drawings here, moments of vision caught with attentiveness and precision, that have a lot more visual oomph than the more laboriously finished works. And two or three of the paintings are marvels of iconic condensation. Like a good second-rate novelist who can rise to first-rate episodes, Wyeth can surprise...
Though Serban's past work at the ART has been characterized by astonishing visual elegance, The Good Woman can only be described as kitsch chinoiserie. There are lots of "Ah so"s and "Honorable sirs" and wavings of fans here, which in almost any other context would look offensively cliched but here fit in perfectly with Brecht's consciously artificial evocation of China. The odd thing about Serban's kitchen sink approach is that he seems to borrow almost as many Japanese conventions as Chinese, suggesting that Serban has been dealing his Orientalism from a rather shallow supply...