Word: postmodernist
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...invites him to move in with her--no sex, please, we're preoccupied--and the audience is invited to watch their downward spiral. We're not talking high, morally instructive tragedy here, just a hard lesson in postmodernist outlawry and its sad little anarchies. Writer-director Mike Figgis (Stormy Monday, Internal Affairs) places a few opportunities to arrest their course along this pair's path, but Ben and Sera don't notice them, and he refuses to exploit them for dramatic purposes or even for ironic effect...
Stylish, in fact, hardly begins to describe Florine Stettheimer's work. It is besotted with style as an end in itself, and its delight in quotation naturally endears it to postmodernist taste. Sometimes it's tea-party Ensor, without the bilious satire; sometimes it's Rus sian ballet. There are traces of Elie Nadelman, Odilon Redon, Watteau, Hieronymus Bosch and an over-the-top capriccio of swimmers in some celestial spa titled Natatorium Undine, 1927. Her painting of a spring sale at Henri Bendel's, with ladies squabbling over the merchandise like angry hummingbirds, resembles a Pompeian grotesque translated into...
...members of the committee got out more often, they would know that some of the most patriotic buns and bosoms on our beaches come wrapped in Old Glory or tiny fragments thereof. Are these bits of fabric also flags? Here we have come up against a deep Postmodernist puzzle. If a flag is a symbol, how can a replica of a flag be anything but another flag? The T at the start of this sentence is not a replica of the letter T, but of course the letter T itself. By the same logic, flag patches, flag bikini bras, underpants...
This is an art that thrives on uncertainty, like much work of our Postmodernist times, but it also displays confidence in the legitimacy of black experiences as artistic material. Black artists seem to have become more conscious of their cultural traditions even as they have met with unprecedented mainstream success. Discarding the anxieties of a bygone era, these artists presume the universality of the black experience...
...first place. When he riffs on detective fiction, for example, as he does in the novels that constitute his New York Trilogy -- City of Glass (1985), Ghosts and The Locked Room (both 1986) -- he sees to it that readers craving mystery, as well as or instead of Postmodernist games, will not go away hungry...