Word: constructivist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There are times when you feel that if you hear the words elitist or subvert just once more, you'll barf. So when MOMA's Margit Rowell, who in the past has curated some intelligent shows on Constructivist sculpture, Brancusi, Antonin Artaud's drawings and other topics, affirms that Polke's vernacular has "regenerate[d] the language and meaning of Western artistic experience," and suggests that he is the Hieronymus Bosch of our day, you sigh. Polke has never shown a smidgen of the aesthetic intensity, the absorption in religious and moral experience or the staggering completeness of Bosch...
...then it hits you!'' In the end, adds Thompson, ``they have knowledge that they can deploy, as opposed to just passing a test.'' It is no coincidence that Dalton began its plunge into technology with the Archaeotype program. Excavation is an apt metaphor for the kind of ``constructivist learning'' promoted at the school: students must actively dig up information, then construct their own understanding from raw, observable facts. What the technology does is extend experience so that many more observations are possible. ``It shifts education from adults giving answers to students seeking answers,'' says headmaster Gardner Dunnan. The underlying premise...
...carry their political messages, but luckily for art history they hardly even had electricity. Hence the Russian artists satisfy our nostalgia for that lost phoenix of Modernist desire, an art that was both experimental and politically effective. To this day, one can't look at the Constructivist designs for agitprop events -- the red panels of Natan Altman's bold transformation of the huge Palace Square in Leningrad for the first birthday of the October Revolution, or the steel-truss tribune designed by Lissitzky to carry Lenin forward like a high diver over the heads of a crowd -- without a feeling...
...Chilean pavilion has a 60-ton iceberg in an indoor pond. But it's the well-conceived, meticulously wrought Norwegian pavilion that triumphs in the ice-water category. In fact, Norway's building, a witty, sublime little Constructivist jewel box designed by Oslo architect Pal Henry Engh, is among the best at Expo...
...color. Sometimes, as in Gaudi Cup, 1972, the intensity of the glazes seems to have literally broken down the form of the ceramic into tiny glowing shards. This sense of color as a veneer on a flat surface gets turned into a form of Cubism, rather as the Dutch Constructivist Gerrit Rietveld in the 1920s abstracted the shape of a chair into a penitential parody of itself. Not only Cubism gets its share of parody, but other styles as well -- Frank Stella's paintings or, in a tiny architectural piece with a tower and a tilted ramp called De Chirico...