Word: showings
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...institute drew protests this summer with the Mapplethorpe show. In Cincinnati, a gallery and its director were acquitted of obscenity charges after showing the same photos...
...reflux that they have set out to describe. Abstract Expressionism, for instance, tended to set itself above popular culture -- yet one of its true icons, De Kooning's 1950 study for Woman, had a smile cut from an ad for Camel cigarettes. The work does not appear in the show. There are shallow passages: the bay devoted to Russian Constructivism, Futurism and the Bauhaus, for instance, is mingy. Yet many excellent works of art proliferate, from Cubist collages to exquisite, large-scale paintings by Cy Twombly and some of Robert Rauschenberg's early combines, like Rebus, 1955; from James Rosenquist...
Nevertheless, though the show affords plenty of opportunity for aesthetic enjoyment, it is about argument, and works of art don't "argue" in a discursive way. Meanwhile the lost environment of popular culture to which they relate can only get into the museum as emblematic snippets, without the casual encircling power it once had. To popular culture the '70s are already medieval and the century's teens virtually Pleistocene. The curators do their best with this, reprinting front pages of Parisian newspapers that Picasso, Braque and Gris cut their collage materials from, or hanging photographs of the kinds of shopwindow...
Consequently, the show reads as a set of illustrations to the book, for only in the book can the comparison of demotic source with final object be done with the necessary detail. Varnedoe and Gopnik have gone into their subject with vast scholarly elan, mining arcana from the areas where art and life, under the impulse of a modernism striving to refresh itself, are layered. If you want to know what was the catalog model of Marcel Duchamp's urinal, which nursery book Max Ernst got a particular collage element from, or which frame panels from 1962 war comics drawn...
...turning out to be a good year for the Mexican poet and critic Octavio Paz. Last spring, to celebrate his 76th birthday, Mexico City's Cultural Center of Contemporary Art staged an exhibition ranging from pre-Columbian artifacts to modern paintings and called the show "Octavio Paz: The Privileges of Sight." Last week the Swedish Academy selected him for a privilege he had reason to believe was out of sight...