Word: avant
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...GREAT UTOPIA: THE Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932," the Guggenheim Museum's huge show of Russian art before, during and immediately after the 1917 Revolution, is meant to be received with extreme piety. These artists, all dead, now have a world audience they could only have dreamed of fitfully when they were alive. We gaze at their frail icons with reverence -- the replays of French Cubism with sturgeons, Cyrillic letters and Tolstoyan beards playing hide-and-seek among their facets; the posters exhorting us to "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge"; the constructions of workers' materials like...
...roots of the great Russian efflorescence go much further back than either Lenin or the 1917 Revolution. They lie in the liberal, high-bourgeois culture of Moscow and St. Petersburg, a culture that pullulated with avant- garde splinter groups and wild chiliastic claims, exquisitely attuned not only to Russian traditions of religious mysticism but also to Cubism, Futurism, Symbolism and other currents in Paris, Rome, Vienna. To imagine that the work of spiritually obsessed artists like Kandinsky or Malevich had any filial relationship to Marxism is to miss its meaning. Malevich, an egomaniacal genius who called himself "the president...
...back to driving a taxi until the zeitgeist caught up with him and collaborator Robert Wilson a few years later. Since then, Glass has scored with such operas as Satyagraha (his masterpiece) and Akhnaten. But with the Met's imprimatur on The Voyage, Glass's long journey from obscure avant- gardist to mainstream cultural icon has been culminated...
...countertrend. At least a few people will grow tired of living like pampered moles and will want to go out to see a play or a concert. "If you spend the day watching your computer, you're not going to watch your television at night," contends Philip Glass, the avant-garde composer. "You'd rather go to the park and watch someone dancing." Live drama, predicts critic and iconoclastic director Robert Brustein, "will become what Jean Genet called 'the theater of the catacombs.' It will find small enclaves with the remainder of the faithful, like Christianity in the early days...
...strong cast, headed by baritone Eugene Perry as Malcolm, brings X sharply to life, and conductor William Henry Curry leads the Orchestra of St. Luke's and Davis' own avant-garde jazz ensemble, Episteme, with verve. With the greater pictorial resources available to the cinema, no doubt Lee's film will have a stronger initial impact. But music's power to persuade, destabilize and immortalize should never be underestimated. Just ask the ancient Greeks...