Word: weathercock
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Around this time every year, the Congregational church in my village holds a carol sing. Although mine is a secular family, we have felt a proprietary affection for our spare white church since my brother and I were small and hailed the bronze weathercock atop the steeple with “Cock-a-doodle-do, Rooster” every time we drove by. When it is lit up for the carol sing the windows glow yellow and the Rooster Church looks too perfect to be real, like a miniature church with a light bulb inside bought to accompany an electric...
...clear that Fairweather was deeply affected by Cubism as well as Chinese art. "I suppose it all began with Cazanne ... I've been rather like a weathercock," he remarked in one of his few and laconic interviews. Most of his mature paintings share a cellular structure-cubicles of form held together by a gestural calligraphy, sometimes wobbly but often very precise. The colors are muted: grays, sandy browns, black, occasionally lit by a flash of red, as in Glasshouse Mountains, 1958; forms are pressed into a flat dense surface (stamped there, you feel, as by a Chinese seal...
...that respect, the Guggenheim's show is an interesting rebuke to historical myopia. But it is also, quite simply, a visual delight; and if any one exhibition in the U.S. may be seen as a weathercock, signaling the shift of taste away from romanticism and toward the once unpopular rigors of constructivism, this...
...national life do not lead to a resurgence of the Christian religion. They are in fact the signs of God's withdrawal from our republic. In the end, as a last judgment of God, or of the author, The Tarbox Congregational Church is struck by lightning. Only the gold weathercock on the spire, the symbol of God's watchful but now indifferent eye, is spared in the ensuing fire. Eventually even this emblem is hauled down from its pinnacle. Placed in the hands of the Church's absurd minister it is found to measure only "five feet from beak...
...having been quietly usurped by a younger crowd that "held play readings, and kept sex in its place, and experimented with LSD." Toward the end, Updike provides a fortissimo blast of obvious symbolism: the Congregational Church goes up in an apocalyptic fire that leaves untouched only the old tin weathercock, riding high over the gutted house...