Word: visualizing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is always something ominous about Segal's images; no American sculptor today runs his work closer to theater. The theatricality becomes particularly intense in his painted sculptures, where the coating of figures with primary red, yellow or blue gives them a ferocious visual punch while rendering them, in Segal's words, "more like abstract shafts of color." To take the colors associated with the most rigorous abstractionists of 20th century art - Mondrian and Barnett Newman - and use them in a piece like The Costume Party, begun in 1965, has a perverse aspect...
...Linda, 'cause it was me. It ain't no girl in the 1900s." The film is a strange, dreamlike reminiscence of days when migrant harvesters followed steam-driven threshing machines through the wheatfields of the Texas Panhandle. As in a dream, a flickering story line is overwhelmed by visual images?blowing wheat, threshers outlined against a sunset, locusts darkening the sky. Linda's Second Avenue voice threads through the film, speaking a moody narration, much of which is her own improvisation: "From the time the sun went up, till it went down, theys was workin' all the time . . . Just keep...
...there is no denying the opening scene's strong visual impact. Indeed the production generally serves the eye a good deal better than it serves the ear. The play contains a lot of magic and spectacle, handled most ingeniously (and without the 140-man stage crew that Charles Kean needed in 1857). When Miranda is put to sleep, she slumbers levitated a couple of feet above ground. The instantaneous appearance and disappearance of the banquet (borrowed from Book II of Vergil's Aeneid) is truly miraculous, as are the periodic flashes of St. Elmo's fire all over the place...
...wedding day in 1929 and is defrosted in the Socialist world-state in 1979. This plot is barely intelligible in Peter Sellar's frenzied production, however. Mayakovsky's satire works mostly through verse, parody and puns--Sellars in effect obliterates all verbal content in frantic pursuit of visual pyrotechnics. Admittedly, The Bedbug demands to be staged as spectacle, but Mayakovsky also valued his words. Sellars' production reduces them to high-speed spurts of incomprehensibility...
Arikha's work, trying to stabilize a sight in an unpredictable frequency of marks, is all concentration. Supremely honest, unrhetorical painting, it breathes the air of scrupulous anxiety. He has a surer sense of tone-the visual equivalent of natural pitch-than anyone else painting today, and color is second to it; his images are not meant to soothe or win the eye but to build up a record of their action through a labyrinth of nuances. For this reason, a painting like Anne Leaning on a Table, 1977, is as bracing as it is modest. A high stamina...