Word: primal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...critics take their main inspiration from a recently formed cadre of zealous upper-case runners. True Runners, these. They imagine that their activity sets them apart from and generally above the rest of humanity. Many come forth sounding as though they have been Zenned and Esalened and Rolfed and Primal Screamed into a state of exaltation hitherto achieved only by beings who talk to birds or turn miscreant wives into salt...
...Last of Sheila was almost the last of Cannon-for a while, anyway. Her private life was on the skids. After a grim 1969 divorce from Cary Grant and experiments with acid and mescaline, she tried all sorts of trendy emotional cures, including Esalen and primal-scream therapy. Cannon even installed a padded howling room in her Spanish-style home in Malibu. Eventually she decided to drop out of movies for a spell. "It used to be devastating for me to finish anything-the last five pages of a book, an affair or a film," she recalls...
...there is something more to her use of clay than the immediacy and malleability of the raw material. As the show's guest curator, Hayden Herrera, points out in her warmly sympathetic catalogue essay, clay is "the oldest material for art and an emphatically primitive, even primal substance." (The first sculpture of a man, as every reader of Genesis knows, was made from clay when God modeled Adam.) Clay is earth, and Frank's figures of sprawling nudes and entwined lovers, tenderly dislocated, are clearly meant to be seen as emanations of the earth, concretions of place and appetite...
...flatulating cars and trucks, inside of and on top of which roosted thousands of happy Argentines, waving their white-and-blue flags and shouting. From apartment houses on the side streets others surged to join the mob; hands reached down from trucks to pull them aboard. The primal baying rose in volume: "Ar-gen-ti-na!" The noise stopped some time on the decent side...
...wears especially formidable garments, a black robe in the first act, a red robe in the second, and in the death scene a combination of colors contrasting the themes of Eros and Thanatos. The multi-level set mixes Roman with primitive, cleverly suggesting the conflict between civilization and repressed primal instincts. A pool in the center of the stage allows the actors to stare into the water and look miserable, as though it were an inimicable existential void, and it contains real goldfish--a nice touch. The various platforms and stairs permit some interesting blocking, as well as dramatically effective...