Word: magician
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Table Volcano. A big, burly man who looks like a scholarly truck driver or an agile Bacchus, Oldenburg is shy but not modest. "I am a magician," he says. "A magician brings dead things to life." His sculptures of food, for example. Typical, terrible American cuisine fascinates him, the kinds of things dieters like Oldenburg himself try to avoid: a wedge of pecan pie, a banana sundae, racks of assorted pastry, ice cream, cheeseburgers. Made of plaster, slathered with lush enamel paint, these goodies actually seem ready for the consumer's fork and spoon. But like four-color advertisements...
...soft sculptures are, of course, the magician's most famous trick. Thfir success lies in their invitation to be touched and poked and in their quality of surprise. Where other artists in the past would change the color or shape of the objects they treated, Oldenburg keeps those qualities as they are and instead changes their context (a hamburger sits on the floor), size (small things become gigantic) and state (soft instead of hard). The result is a sculpture of enormous intellectual compression; it shows the stress of gravity, the effect of age, the possibility of sensuality...
Nabokov's literary province is a bizarre, aristocratic, occasionally maddening amusement park in part devoted to literary instruction. It has many sideshows but only one magician. The general public, which chose to read Lolita as a prurient tale of pedophilia, enters through the main gate, hoping to meet the creator of that doomed and delectable child. A more sophisticated clientele moves beyond the midway to seek out and applaud Dr. Nabokov, the butterfly chaser, dealer in anagrammatical gimcracks, triple-tongued punster, animator of Doppelgänger, shuffler of similes. Prolonged exposure to Nabokov reveals much more. What he calls his "ever...
...premiere of Dreams, the audience demanded 31 curtain calls. Critics raved about Yun's prodigious orchestral and vocal writing and his intuitive knack for fantasy. The first work, Dreams of Liu-tung, depicts the adventures of a frivolous student who is converted to Taoism when a magician conjures up four dreams that chillingly depict his fate. Butterfly Widow is a comedy about a high-court functionary, Chan-tse, who dreams each night that he is a beautiful giant butterfly. A philosopher tells Chan-tse that he was actually a butterfly in his former life and was probably...
Outrageous Demands. The two first meet in a magician's tent in 1925 as ten-year-old boys. Wirthof, a rich, aristocratic Aryan and the son of a crippled World War I general, is already arrogant and glib despite his pale blond fragility. Kazakh, son of an Aryan mother and a Jewish father who is killed as a heroic leader of the Social Democrat uprising in 1934, is a shy, sensitive boy, but stronger and taller than Wirthof. Kazakh easily wins the foot race that follows their initial encounter; yet he is able to realize even then that Wirthof...