Word: ziggurats
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...century B.C. who boasted in cuneiform inscriptions of having rebellious chieftains impaled on stakes, dismembered and skinned alive. Ashurnasirpal made Nimrud, known in the Bible as Calah, his capital. The fortress city on the banks of the Tigris was dominated by an elaborate palace and a towering ziggurat and was populated in part by peoples subjugated during military campaigns...
Nimrud's glory ended abruptly in 612 B.C., when the Assyrians, badly overextended, were taken by surprise by the combined armies of the Medes, the Babylonians and the Scythians. Nimrud was overrun. The palace caught fire, and its ceilings collapsed. Over time, the Tigris changed course, and the glorious ziggurat was reduced to a formless mound...
...statelier business. It was a transaction that occurred between emperors and the absolute. The pageants of the zodiac projected themselves upon the lives of kings. The earth was at the center of the universe. Berosus, the high priest of Babylon, would climb the spiral ramp of the great ziggurat at night and ask the stars if the time was ripe to move against the Assyrians. Frederick II would not sleep with his wife, or Lorenzo de' Medici build his country house, until their astrologers prescribed the days and times for doing...
...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...
...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 a flaming triangle, bracketed by scratched asymmetrical bars top and bottom, placed over a regular field of tiny squares and beneath an action-painting slew of paint...