Word: plastic
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...subway to push through the new fair's 89 turnstiles can see at once that, first and foremost, they are expected to enjoy themselves. This is no sobersided Park of Culture and Rest, but a fantastical medley of outrageous shapes and sizes-soaring planes and flying disks, strutted plastic and fretted steel, domes, pylons, floating cubes, and color everywhere. It is a place to ride a monorail and something called a People Wall, watch a hula, listen to a steel band, eat your head off, and shoot 31 minutes of rapids in a hollow...
...didn't mean it. To him, his style of sculpturing is unalloyed joy, and all around Rube Goldberg's studio the happy evidence is beginning to pile up. There is a balloon-breasted Lady Godiva in plasteline - being leered at by her horse. Under a sign reading PLASTIC SURGERY sit three miniature patients in desperate cosmetic need: a man and wife with Jimmy Durante schnozzles and a hopeful-looking toucan. They all look very much like comic-strip characters in three dimensions. Which is just what they...
Chief visual researcher is Victor Vasarely, 56, a Hungarian who has lived in Paris since 1930. He lives as immaculately as he paints, speaks more like a physicist than a painter. Says he: "I do not like to use the word painting to describe my works; they are plastics." Then he asks: "What remains of the Muses, who inspired beautiful souls, under the hard light of biochemistry, genetics or bionics?" Answer: plastic art. Vasarely weaves zebra-ziggly patterns that actually seem to move on their white backgrounds...
Vitamin Vision. Mondrian and other constructivists were forerunners of calculated geometry. But Mondrian, explains Vasarely, "was still abstracting natural forms, the sea or a tree. My plastic abstractions are composed of pure form and pure colors with no relation to natural structures at all. By 1955 I had developed a plastic alphabet of 30 simple geometric forms and 30 basic interchangeable colors." The A of his alphabet is the square, and the rest proceeds through ovals, rhombi, etc., in a code of images down to the Z shape itself. With these pictorial tools, he broadcasts winnowing waves like those...
...wooing builders and using massive advertising campaigns to persuade the home buyers to insist on their products. Makers of aluminum, the fastest-rising among the new sidings, privately ask how long steel clapboard can resist rust. The steel-clapboard men, joined by the makers of a plywood coated with plastic, imply that aluminum snaps, crackles and pops during sharp temperature changes, and that a baseball or a hailstone can leave a permanent dent. The hottest war of all is the advertising battle between the gas and electrical utility companies for the right to provide the heat, do the cooking...