Word: visual
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Harvard University buildings are designed by some of the most renowned and idiosyncratic individuals of our time. That is their trouble. An assembly of soloists has produced what British Architect James Stirling calls "an architectural zoo." Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts bullies its neighbors with masses of streaked concrete. The nearby Gund Hall by Australian John Andrews is a glass ziggurat housing the Graduate School of Design. It, in turn, clashes with Memorial Hall, a colorful Victorian Gothic fantasy across the street...
...cheery, or woozily pseudoromantic; or, if neither of these, then vacantly tough. Their work is all pose and no position. Thus, from Kenny Scharf's mural of Silly Putty aliens in a galactic landscape of squiggles and David Wojnarowicz's repulsive Attack of the Alien Minds, through the visual fatuities of Rodney Alan Greenblat and Jedd Garet, the biennial celebrated what its curators evidently took to be the mood of the moment: glitz, camp, childishness and art as fashion, served up with the usual parsley about "renewals" and "advances." This gunk is not even kitsch. And behind it lie untapped...
...discos and nightclubs, neon is now the fashionable accompaniment to monkfish and Moussy. A welter of tubes puts the zing in San Diego's Fat City restaurant, highlighting 1950s artifacts for the young crowd. At Ichabod's, a trendy West Side Manhattan eatery that opened in March, the visual draw is an imposing Ionic column swathed in blue neon. "Neon is big with the more hip," says Chicago Interior Designer Laura L. Pedian, who did the Wells Street Journal, a local restaurant, in restful blue and gold. "It's part of what's happening today...
...long-life electrode. One early practical application: a giant white Cinzano sign over the chimneys of Paris. After being introduced into the U.S. in 1923, neon flourished for nearly two decades, especially as an accent for fantasies: movie houses, cocktail lounges, casinos. In the 1950s, when television took visual advertising from rooftops to the living room, neon began blinking out. It was left to a few dedicated preservationists around the country to salvage classic signs. A San Diego group rescued endangered examples like a 6,000- sq.-ft. marquee from a local drive-in theater. "They are cultural icons," says...
Lonesome Dove is not the place to ask it. McMurtry's lip service to psychological conflict is lost to his outsize talent for descriptive narrative. Filmmakers should have no trouble finding visual thrills. The standard stream crossing is perked up by an attack of water moccasins; there is a choice between a dandy sandstorm and a typhoon of grasshoppers; Blue Duck is a menacing piece of work with his necklace of amputated fingers; a bear fights a bull to a draw; and a dead hero is packed in salt and carted more than a thousand ceremonious miles to his grave...