Word: whitneys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Every two years, the Whitney Biennial sails round and is promptly declared by its critics to be sinking. Look, the mast has gone! The hull has sprung, the captain is drunk, and the ship's macaw has taken over the chartroom! The pumps cannot keep up with the gurgling inflow of banality! Heavens, the parallels with Western civilization itself are too evident to resist! Not only are things not what they used to be, but it is so long since they were what they were that few can remember what they might have been. Indeed, one of the main...
...also due to the cautionary voice of citizens, a voice grown stronger in the past several years as the ramifications of what science can achieve have become clearer and more frightening. Harvard's Daniel Bell has pointed out that most of America's early inventors-Eli Whitney, Edison, the Wright brothers- were tinkerers with tunnel vision. They could afford to be; life was not seen as a continuum in those days. Today's inventors must be true scientists, responsible to the public health as well as to the private muse. The country has grown wary of innovation...
...constructions and collages at Wildenstein last spring, and throughout the summer a selection of her major "environmental" sculptures from the '50s and '60s-arrays and assemblies of separate pieces, meant to confront the viewer with whole surrounding families of shape and texture-went on view at the Whitney Museum in New York. This year, according to her dealer, Nevelson is "resting." Rest, in terms of a career like hers, is an extremely relative term...
...over form, shadow vanishing into deeper shadow, leading the eye inward to a profusion of veiled detail that demanded the most strenuous attention. In an environment she showed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959, Dawn's Wedding Feast (reassembled in her 1980 show at the Whitney), Nevelson turned this effect inside out by painting the whole array white, not black. The chalky surface now produced an effect of mummification, not atmospheric distance; the calcined forms, visually explicit, retreated from the eye in a startling way. She also made a number of gold-painted sculptures that were...
Perhaps the most interesting museum show by a living artist to be seen in New York at present is at the Whitney: "Light and Space," by a 37-year-old Californian named James Turrell. A spare-time pilot and full-time sculptor, Turrell has filled an entire floor of the Whitney with almost nothing: some walls, some tungsten and fluorescent lamps, and the reactions between them. To say that he has posed some ingenious visual conundrums on an ambitious scale is true, but insufficient. Turrell has also contrived an exquisite poetry out of near emptiness...