Word: bacchus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...circumspect and static. True, the man on the left seems to be mimicking a violin player with two clay pipes, but it would be hard to imagine a more decorous drinking party, and the glass of wine the woman raises is more like a chalice than an attribute of Bacchus, let alone Venus. Their presence is vivid, but it's subordinated to the even stronger formal matrix of the painting, sandwiched between the perspective run of the ceiling beams and the imperious grid of the tiled floor. Everything in De Hooch's paintings, including the sometimes rather wooden figures...
Then there is the subject matter that these artists selected: there seems to be an overriding emphasis on the biblical and the classical. Brutus's wife, Portia, is here, swallowing her coals. Charming nymphs and satyrs, Psyche and Cupid, and Juno and Bacchus are portrayed next to angels, the Virgin, and Adam and Eve. But there are also some peasants, shepherds, portraits of anonymous females and beautiful studies of hands and nudes. With a little chalk and ink, the artists examined everything from the silly to the sacred...
...ensuing laughter came from people gathered around him who were drinking or already drunk. The printed page is a less forgiving environment. There, gassy circumlocutions quickly grow tiresome. Liquor is never straightforwardly liquor but rather "the waters of life" or "the spirits that cheer" or "the squeezings of Bacchus." When Malachy meets an Irish actor, he does his all too customary stage-Irish routine: "Begod, Sir, you'd never think the man was from Cork, atall, atall..." And here is our thoughtful memoirist on his conduct during his first wife's first pregnancy: "There was many the night I wouldn...
Especially in the fast-moving dialogue, Williams' translation is witty--and the production benefits. Compare the literal Greek of Pentheus' sarcasm (Hos thrasus ho Bakhos, How insolent is this Bacchus!) with Williams' "Bacchic backtalk!" Again in the same scene "Deinos su deinos kapi dein' erkhei pathe (I need a macron)," "You are wonderful, wonderful" (Laurence Welk, anybody?) "And wonderful are the experiences you go to meet" becomes in Williams "You are awe-inspiring. Your outcome will inspire awe." The translation and the production share the great felicity of exaltation in the words themselves...
Cindy Sherman's "Untitled #282," originally made for an artist's project in Harper's Bazaar, provides another interesting comparison with Ritts' commercial photographs upstairs. Sherman, easily one of the most important photographers of the past fifteen years, photographs herself in various guises ranging from ingenue to Bacchus. In "Untitled #282," she lies before us in an outlandish, semi-transparent gauze dress by one of Madonna's favorite designers, Jean-Paul Gaultier. Her legs are slightly spread, but the voyeuristic gratification usually afforded us by such images is denied by our recognition of the opaque, flesh-toned tights which ascend...