Displays of love and devotion in America

Result #1

Displays of love and devotion in America are a familiar theme in art, but few are as intensely personal as John Cages from the period when he was still an undergrad student of Cézanne. Cages early images of a dying boy, a beautiful young woman, a naked man, and a white-faced creature, among other elements, are a bit difficult to place. However, these images do show a certain admiration for Cézannes art, a quality which brings to mind Cézannes own interest in the expressive power of the nude, especially his work with the aid of a camera. Cages use of the camera, however, does not represent a direct confrontation with the sources of the images but rather a display of his admiration for Cézannes work.Cage also has a penchant for getting into the act of making images, and he shows that he is adept at this task. In these works, he uses both film and photography to get his images. The photographers are the best; they are able to capture the moment in which the scene is being captured and to display the creation of the image, the passage of time and the activity of the camera. Cages technique is also apparent in the black-and-white photograph of a young girl, which shows a group of people around a table, which is captured in close up. The girl is seen from behind, and as a result, the camera is placed as if by an invisible power line, so that the scene is almost completely obscured. The nude photographs are the most successful works in this exhibition; the others, however, are quite derivative. It is a shame that these images cannot be used as photographic documentation, for the girls taken in a sitting position in this way gives the viewer the feeling that he or she is looking into a mirror.The best images are those which show Cages confidence in his abilities as a photographer, and his commitment to the pursuit of a photographic vision.

Result #2

Displays of love and devotion in America. The art, however, is usually only a footnote to the reality of America. This is why, in her New York debut, Ginger Rogers announced that she was joining the chorus of painters and sculptors who hail from the 20th century.The similarities between the art styles of 20th-century Americans and those of 20th-century Europeans are obvious. Both share a fond for the figure, both love to paint and adore to behold. Both adored nature, and both revered the realm of man. Both were drawn to the sublime, to the mechanical as well as the natural. Both valued the individual and the group, and both believed that the individual was subordinate to the collective. Both believed that they were above society, and both were committed to an ideal of the individual in the face of society. Both hoped that the individual would attain mastery over society.Both loved the surface, the self-conscious beauty of the picture surface. Both loved to paint and loved to be painted. Both valued the power of paint over the arm or leg. Both believed that painting, and the world of art, could teach men and women the meaning of virtue. Both believed that art was a source of truth, a revelation of the true; and both praised the immensity of the world, and believed that art was a means of communication between man and woman. Both believed that art was an escape to a higher dimension of being.Both embraced the intimate, the tender intimacy of the brush. Both revered the sacred, the erotic intimacy of the hand. Both loved the mysterious, the erotic intimacy of the object. Both loved the erotic intimacy of the mouth. Both believed in the eternal power of the word. Both loved the erotic intimacy of the hand, the hand of nature. Both admired the erotic intimacy of the body. Both venerated the erotic intimacy of the body, the body of the individual. Both believed that the body was the most beautiful thing in the world.

Result #3

Displays of love and devotion in America are almost exclusively in the form of sculptures, and one can only marvel at their beauty. On the other hand, the relation between love and architecture is clearly more than the merely romantic: It is a political issue, and we should all take action to correct the injustices that still occur. The three large paintings in this show depict men in their sleep, but they are not the same man; they are also not in love. There is no awareness of sexual preference, and no penis in the pussy, but there is no penis in the house. Just as the artist tries to prevent the visual identification of the men in these works, she also tries to avoid any identification of the man in the house with the woman. So, too, with the women. His absence is suggested by a self-portrait; and if we think of the artist as a woman, we can only assume that she is the woman in the portrait.The work of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh also focuses on interpersonal relations. It concerns the relationship between two men, but in Buchlohs case, the problem is not so much with a group of people as with a single man. Buchlohs works are rarely clear; they are, in one sense or another, real; there is nothing to be found in them except a light that is supposed to bring us closer to the artist. It is as if we were in a situation where the artist, because of her enormous body, was the only one in the room, and a group of people were her guests. Buchlohs work is a study of the relationship between art and architecture, but it does not proceed from any analysis of the relationship between the art and architecture, and it does not address any knowledge of the sexual preference of the women in Buchlohs paintings. Buchlohs work deals only with the representation of two men, and in that connection she leaves herself the same question.

Result #4

Displays of love and devotion in America are an abundant theme in the work of many artists and architects. In a recent exhibition at the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York, for example, twenty-four contemporary artists collaborated with the architects of the World Trade Center to reimagine, in the form of models, the collapse of the Twin Towers. The models were inspired by photographs taken by the architect, Larry Goldwyn, that show the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City at the end of the cold war. While the official version of events is depicted as an aerial view of a fire that burns out of control in the skies over New York, Goldwyns graphic simulation of the event is an evocation of the chaos and violence that the collapse of the Twin Towers brought into public view.The response to Goldwyns project was overwhelming, and the artists, with the exception of Thomas Demands contribution, were on different sides of the debate. Demands work, for example, was an installation of 150,000 postcards, each depicting a photograph of the Twin Towers, suspended in midair by a series of pulleys that had been modified to rotate them 180 degrees. Demands most effective piece was a three-dimensional model of the World Trade Center, which he fabricated from found materials such as sandpaper and tin. The work is an exact replica of a model of the building from which Demands work borrows its title. Like Goldwyns realistic models of the collapse of the Twin Towers, Demands model depicts the event in a new light, but one that is much less flattering to the public. Demands work presents an alternative reality that, while not as accurate as Goldwyns simulation, does evoke the presence of a world in which we can all look and think as we do. Demands work is an attempt to change the world through architecture, but it does not succeed. The only way to bring real change to the world is to change architecture.

Result #5

Displays of love and devotion in America—including American Idol, Angel in the Mirror, and the famous moment when an angel holds up a bright-red crucifix and a box of chocolates to an angelic waitress—are in some sense no longer in evidence in the self-portrait, so that we are left with a small selection of the icons of our time, seen with an idealizing eye, a predilection for iconographic repetition and symbolism, and a taste for the trappings of power and the glamour of celebrity. In her previous work, Chens has pursued the way in which these icons are typically assumed to be worn and the way in which they often assume the symbolic or symbolic status of the body and its surroundings, and also the way in which they communicate messages about masculinity, as embodied by the car in a gas station. In the same way that beauty is made up of the perfect—and in many cases the only—equals-against-the-other, Chens title, In Love, appropriates the corporate decor of the beauty industry to question the very notion of beauty, or rather the notion of beauty itself.In the works on display, Chens post-Modernist strategy of appropriating familiar symbols of femininity—the car, the car window, the window of the car—has been employed to make a few salient points about the concept of femininity in contemporary culture. The car is a symbol of the pursuit of pleasure and mobility; it is a fetish, a fetish, a luxury good. The window is a device through which the desire for pleasure and the desire for mobility are expressed and embodied, and thus the body itself is framed by it. In this way, the car is the work of an automatist who has, through a kind of carpe nde, replaced the window as the emblem of the true self. This is why we find ourselves drawn to the car, in the guise of a mirror image.