Word: homunculi
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National politicians usually have years to build these homunculi of themselves. The race to sculpt Public Palin was instant, and Fey had the sharpest chisel. Where Palin's campaign projected a smart, tough, folksy reformer, Fey showed a posing, in-over-her-head maverick...
Could you think of a dottier notion for an exhibition than the one now in the lower rooms of the Frick Collection in New York City: "Victorian Fairy Painting"? All those little homunculi and chaste, pocket-size cuties with gauzy wings, flittering about the mossy dells and twiggy bowers of the sentimental English imagination--aargh, spare us. We are so much smarter now, anyway: instead of fairies we believe in close encounters of the third kind, with aliens sticking shiny probes into overweight housewives whisked from the parking lot of the 7-Eleven. And yet, even granting that the show...
...story as old as Olympus, and it provides Harryhausen with the opportunity to work his stop-motion magic. The creatures he animates are wonders of laborious craft and individual character. They move like demons and dragons and homunculi out of the dark sleep of the past...
...nude becomes a lump of hairy pink clay with a pinhead, swagging numbles and a skin so gouged by fissures, cracks and graffiti that it is on the verge of turning into a landscape. The hierarchy of human to animal to vegetable to mineral is abolished; the popeyed homunculi who scurry like moles through his landscapes or rear up, delicately rainbow-tinted like decaying fungi, in paintings such as Extravagant Lady, 1954 (opposite), are mere coalescences in human form. They are not people but slices of life, and in this perversely microscopic sense Dubuffet is a realist painter. The flat...
...homunculi, however awesomely mechanized, remain in the infantile category. In a Minute Thumbelina, seated in a high chair, bangs its cup on the tray and demands to be fed. When Baby Tweak's tummy is squeezed, it coos, and when Drowsy's pullout cord is yanked, it whines things like "Mommy, I want another drink of water" or "Mommy, I want to stay up." Slightly more sophisticated but equally maddening to adults is Timey Tell, which has twelve different messages matched to the hour of the day. Set its wristwatch at 12 and pull its cord...