Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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Major man, the man of the weather, "the transparence of the place in which/he is," gives us poems in whose fictions we can believe. Fictions are necessary angels who cleanse the earth, whose subtance is the gaiety of language. The supreme fiction must be abstract, must give pleasure, and must change. This changing aspect is significant, for fictions succeed each other as men become unsatisfied with their explanations of the world; the discarded visions are tossed on the dump with the bottles and mattresses of the dead...
Both directors emphasize the same abstract, other-worldly existence of buildings as independent of men, although where Antonioni absorbs himself in their bizarre, plastic intricacies, Williams presents them as simple, symbolic monoliths, usually from only one perspective. The Revolutionary attempts no overview (literal or figurative) of society, portraying it with an austere, dialectical frontality. At one point after deserting from the army. A. goes into a strange town to warn that troops are coming and ends up talking for several moments into a stark, dimly-lit building occupied by militants, a surreal scene of paranoia and alienation, in which...
...Williams objectifies the complete one-sideness and distortion of the bourgeois media by excluding them almost totally from the film, portraying a virtual knowledge-vacuum through the anaesthetic quietude, the dull-colored monotones, and the looming stillness constantly before the camera. Society he presents as a Kafkaesque, corrupt, and abstract unknown, which represses with perfect, restrained expediency and provides nothing concrete for the opposition to attack. The issues are vague and predictable for a post-industrial giant-war, imperialism, racism-but the specific atrocities are inconsequential, since it is the entire system that must be destroyed and replaced...
...painting. His was never an easy style to like or understand, and though he was often called an artist's artist, his most hostile critics were frequently his fellow artists. In fact, though he was one of the historic group of Abstract Expressionists that met at Greenwich Village's Cedar bar in the 1940s, Newman's art won real recognition only in the last decade. His first retrospective had been scheduled by the Museum of Modern Art for the fall...
...Abstract Expressionism he was indeed something of a threat, removing, as Sculptor Tony Smith has observed, "the last vestiges of pictorial approach." By the early '60s, though, a generation of younger artists was involved with massive scale, expansive color, maximizing a few minimal elements. They could look at Barney's painting and appreciate that he had already anticipated the same problems. To scores of minimal and color-field painters, he became a kind of father-confessor...