Word: visualizers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Nineteenth century Americans reveled in the twin myths of "discovery" and "progress," which had been so vastly strengthened by the physical conquest of North America and the expansion of technology. Americans could make anything, solve any problem, produce a cataract of inventions. This applied everywhere but the visual arts, where taste was generally conservative. In art, people wanted visible links to the past, to established traditions that would redress the ebullient rawness of their culture. Hence the fierce objections they raised against their own more inventive artists, like Thomas Eakins. Eakins advised his students to "peer deeper into the heart...
...television incarnation of Robert Hughes' American Visions is a vivid, exuberant tour of 400 years of American visual culture, in the same vein as Hughes' 1981 series on modern art, The Shock of the New. The new series, a co-production of the BBC and Time Inc., in conjunction with New York City's Thirteen/WNET, is being aired in two-hour segments on four successive Wednesdays from May 28 to June 18 (check local listings for times). Herewith a summary of the episodes...
Hughes begins his series by examining how the brand-new United States sought a national visual style that would express its values. It found a model in the ancient republics of Greece and Rome. Classicism, says Hughes, gave the country "a language of power and authority and continuity to the past, even though it was so new." The man who adapted classical architecture to the American Arcadia was Thomas Jefferson, whose home, Monticello, Hughes visits. Standing amid the emblems of Jefferson's artistic and scientific achievements, Hughes cites him as the "one person from all the dead Americans that...
...through fraying, mutation, replacement. And one would need to be an extreme optimist--some would say, a willfully blind one as well--to think that the big energies of American Modernism are still with us. Which is not to say that there are not plenty of gifted and interesting visual artists in America, doing valuable work at the end of the 20th century. But cultures do decay and run out of steam; and the visual culture of late American Modernism, once so strong, buoyant and inventive, and now so harassed by its own sense of defeated expectations...
...Australian, Hughes enjoys a special vantage point on America's visual culture. "You need to be an alien to do this sort of semi-anthropology," he says. "You need to be both inside and outside the subject." Knowledgeable as he was when he started, Hughes still found that his years of working on American Visions taught him a few things about our art--and our country. One lesson, learned while shooting the TV series: "The rarest thing in the Great American Outdoors is a moment of silence. Every time we turned on a camera in some national park or other...