Word: constructivist
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...catalog, written by its curator, John Elderfield of MOMA, far surpasses in lucidity and thoroughness anything else on Schwitters and becomes the authoritative work on the artist. It evokes in brilliant detail the aggressive and sadistic side of Schwitters' lost oeuvre, which was grandiose and trashy but done with constructivist precision. One of his avant-garde friends, on first viewing the Merzbau's bizarre grottoes and columns (which included such elegancies as a "Sex-Crime Cavern" and a bottle of the artist's urine with artificial flowers in it), thought it "a kind of fecal smearing--a sick and sickening...
...funnels and other nautical paraphernalia on his buildings. A passion for high technology dominated his first well-known works: the Leicester University Engineering Building in 1959 and the Cambridge University History Faculty Building in 1964. Both ignited controversy. Both look like acrobatic feats of steel and glass that resemble constructivist factories, highlighting mechanical gadgets like window- cleaning gantries...
...cubism was not, as has naively been said in the past, "set off" by the "discovery" of tribal art; the perception of one reinforced the perception of the other. Sometimes the most striking "family" likenesses appear between works that have no possible connection. A case in point is Russian Constructivist Sculptor Vladimir Baranoff-Rossine's Symphony No. 1, 1913, a figure done in swoops and slats of painted wood that one would swear-if there were not clear evidence that he had I never seen it - was based on an openwork Baga bird headI dress from Guinea...
...does so with a degree of sober deliberation-story by story, as it were, rather than in one big rush. Dividends have been wrung from Pelli's calm style. The new MOMA does not creak with intrusive imagery. It does not look like an airport, a temple, a constructivist factory, a tomb or a fortress, to cite the five most popular types of recent museum. And it is blissfully free of the kind of capricious, name-dropping revivalism, the coy and schematic quotes, that some critics number among the joys of postmodernism...
...their basic format is constructivist, "drawing in space," their internal imagery is very much not. Her works like Zaga, 1983, or Cantileve, 1983, when one gets down to the detail, begin with a profusion of animal and botanical spare parts that Graves has cast directly in bronze. The things in her delirious lexicon of shapes include the fiddleheads of giant ferns, fragments of woven rattan, dried anchovies, pig intestines from the Chinese market below Canal Street in New York City, leaves of the Monstera deliciosa (another bow of homage, this time to Matisse, in whose late works that indoor plant...