Unfurling a Life of Creative Exuberance 3 Geoengineering Trials Get Under Way 7 the Guggenheim Connection 10 the Unsung Sense
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Unfurling a Life of Creative Exuberance 3 Geoengineering trials get under way 7 The Guggenheim Connection 10 The unsung sense: How smell rules your life 16 Reputation and Monolith, Both Stand Tall 21 Deep impact: The bad news about banging your head 24 The Future, Retrenched 29 Swarm troopers: Mutant armies waging war in the wild 31 In a Married World, Singles Struggle for Attention 36 Brainy molluscs evolved nervous systems four times 39 A Little Deception Helps Push Athletes to the Limit 41 Attoclock turns electrons into movie stars 44 Shape memory materials ready for mass production 46 Integrated Solutions 48 Beyond the bomb 50 A Multi-Part Question 51 Aboriginal Australians: The First Explorers 53 The Myth of College as a Fairy Tale 56 Some Brain Wiring Continues to Develop Well Into Our 20s 58 Beyond the Three Percent 60 Cloaking Magnetic Fields: First Antimagnet Developed 62 Measuring Engagement 64 Scientists Use Brain Imaging to Reveal the Movies in Our Mind 66 The Challenge of Technology 69 Particles Appear to Travel Faster Than Light 74 Bioengineers Reprogram Muscles to Combat Degeneration 76 Evolutionary Tree of Life for Mammals Greatly Improved 79 Nanoscale Nonlinear Light Source Optical Device Can Be Controlled Electronically 82 Aquarium Fishes Are More Aggressive in Reduced Environments, New Study Finds 85 Carnivorous Plant Inspires Coating That Resists Just About Any Liquids 87 Monkeys Also Reason Through Analogy, Study Shows 90 Nature Offers Key Lessons On Harvesting Solar Power, Say Chemists 92 Artificially Enhanced Bacteria Capable of Producing New Kinds of Synthetic Chemicals 94 Scientists Play Ping-Pong With Single Electrons 97 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila Biologists Discover Genes That Repair Nerves After Injury 99 Smells May Help Birds Find Their Homes, Avoid Inbreeding 102 Animal Study Suggests Deep Brain Stimulation Improves Memory 105 Targeting HIV's Sugar Coating: New Microbicide May Block AIDS Virus from Infecting 107 DNA Study Suggests Asia Was Settled in Multiple Waves of Migration 110 Nitrate Levels Rising in Northwestern Pacific Ocean 113 Using Human Genomes to Illuminate the Mysteries of Early Human History 115 Scientists Discover Rare Theropod Dinosaur Wounded in Action in Southern Utah 117 Proton-Based Transistor Could Let Machines Communicate With Living Things 121 Goodness has nothing to do with it, Utilitarians are not nice people 123 The Tyranny Of Modern Time 125 Bobby McFerrin‘s ―Don‘t Worry, Be Happy‖: A Neuropsychology Reading 128 Why you are identifiable after just a few steps 130 520 days: Surviving everyday life on a mission to Mars 131 Second big satellite set to resist re-entry burn-up 136 Will the universe end in a big snap? 138 Missing planet explains solar system's structure 141 Frying pan forms map of dead star's past 143 New doubts about 'poster child' of exoplanets 145 Engineers can build a low-carbon world if we let them 147 Maker of cognitive training game seeks FDA approval 149 Why put your personal info online? 151 Carnivorous plant inspires super-slippery material 152 Groundwater greed driving sea level rises 154 Five easy mutations to make bird flu a lethal pandemic 155 The risk of an influenza pandemic is fact, not fiction 157 Habits form when brainwaves slow down 158 A brief history of the brain 159 'Gloomy' gene may make you more positive 165 Resurrected ancient protein is a potent antibiotic 166 Bubble Trouble 168 Invasion of Genomic Parasites Triggered Modern Mammalian Pregnancy, Study Finds 171 Why the warming climate makes animals smaller 173 Climatic Fluctuations Drove Key Events in Human Evolution, Researchers Find 174 Dimension-hop may allow neutrinos to cheat light speed 176 Scientists Discover an Organizing Principle for Our Sense of Smell Based On Pleasantness 179 Why Metaphysics Is Always Bizarre 181 'Superfast' Muscles Responsible for Bat Echolocation 182 History That‘s Written in Beads as Well as in Words 185 Neuroscientists Record Novel Responses to Faces from Single Neurons in Humans 188 Revealing the Layers of Cuba‘s Architecture 190 Scientists Release Most Accurate Simulation of the Universe to Date 192 Putting Names to the Greats of Indian Art 195 Engineers 'Cook' Promising New Heat-Harvesting Nanomaterials in Microwave Oven 198 2 Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 172 october 2011 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila Unfurling a Life of Creative Exuberance By HOLLAND COTTER Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Among the 200 or so works on view in the de Kooning show at MoMA are his late works, including, from left, ―The Cat's Meow‖ (1987), ―Untitled VI‖ (1986) and ―Conversation‖ (1987). The Museum of Modern Art has never known quite what to do with Willem de Kooning. You can package Jackson Pollock as drips and Barnett Newman as zips, but de Kooning, who painted both opulent abstractions and big, blowsy dames, resists easy branding. So, apart from a show of late work in 1997, the museum has neglected him, until now. With the opening of ―De Kooning: A Retrospective‖ this coming Sunday decades of overdue debt are paid in full. The show, which fills MoMA‘s entire sixth floor with some 200 paintings, drawings and sculptures, is exhaustively comprehensive, exhaustingly large and predictably awe inspiring. It not only positions de Kooning far forward in a 20th-century American cavalcade of stars, it turns his career into a kind of Rose Bowl float of creative exuberance and invention. Most usefully the show lets de Kooning be complicated: it presents his art as a bifurcated yet unitary phenomenon. John Elderfield, chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at MoMA, unfurls seven decades of work through seven galleries. In each we see abstract and figurative paintings of roughly the same date not just side by side but also interacting, intertwining, merging identities; abstraction breathes, smiles and bleeds; figures shimmer and shudder apart into color and line. In its shape the show adheres to a classic cradle-to-grave survey model, beginning with a still life that de Kooning painted at the age of 12 in his Dutch hometown, Rotterdam. By his early teenage years he was already working in a commercial design firm, where he learned sign-lettering and paste-up techniques like tracing, copying and layering. 3 Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 172 october 2011 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila All of this came in handy while looking for work when he first arrived, after stowing away on a freighter, in the United States in 1926. More important in the long run, his design training, with its emphasis on creating an organic-looking whole from many pieces, ended up as the formal bedrock of his art. He was lucky in being, by temperament, chronically hungry and omnivorous. In the first two sections of the show, which take us in giant steps up to 1949, we see him devouring his way through visual history past and present, gobbling up images from Ingres, Rubens, Soutine and Picasso; from contemporaries like Arshile Gorky; and from movie ads, Sunday comics and the graphics in New York police gazettes. While some artists and thinkers of the day were promoting an art of utopian purity, one that required shutting a door between art and life, de Kooning‘s appetite took him in the opposite, though really no less utopian, direction. He wanted to open everything up, to bring — to squeeze — everything into art: high, low; old, new; savagery, grace. And so he did, in a laborious, pieced-together, piled-up, revision-intensive way. Far from being the sort of impulsive, gut-spilling artist implied by the term ―action painting,‖ he was a deliberator. Every painting was a controlled experiment. Typically he would start with a drawing, add paint, draw on top of the paint, scrape the surface down, draw more images traced and transferred from elsewhere, add paint to them, and on and on. Given this process, it seems astonishing that he was so prolific, until you remember that he was virtually never not working: trying this, tweaking that, scrapping failures, starting afresh. Whenever the enormousness of the MoMA show gets you down, stop in front of one picture, almost any one, and linger. The basic, energy-generating dynamic of de Kooning‘s art operates in microcosm in nearly every single thing he did after the mid-1940s. Experiencing the physical mechanics of his art close up, in action, is the real thrill of the show. To engage with it is to meet a person rather than just visit a monument. The late 1940s was when de Kooning first caught fire, when abstraction and figures first merged. That‘s the story of ―Pink Angels‖ from around 1945, the final painting in his first series devoted to images of women. From painting to painting, the single seated figure in the series grows less naturalistic, begins to lose its contours, to dissolve into its surroundings. By ―Pink Angels‖ the figures have lost their clothes, lost their faces, and become monstrously voluptuous, approximately human forms made from chunks of cut-up flesh. It‘s as if we‘re seeing the cleanup phase of a sloppy autopsy, but one that took place inside a chamber of gold. How such a scene can be beautiful is hard to say, but it is. De Kooning once famously observed that ―flesh was the reason why oil paint was invented.‖ It‘s important to remember that he wasn‘t thinking only of the milk-white flawless flesh of Titian courtesans but also flesh that bruised, bled, rotted away. The vanitas awareness of the 17th-century Dutch still-life painters was strong in him, the bass note to his force-of-life vigor.