The essence of a puppet is its impersonality.
This very essay, with its impersonality and tweediness, its claims at authority, seems dated in comparison, vulnerable.
He is not a minimalist — a label often lazily affixed to him, as to other artists of the era whose deliberate styles register the historical logic of minimalism (a debunking of pictorial rhetoric and illusion) while resisting its impersonality.
The contrast between the approaches of the two composers could scarcely have been made clearer – Stravinsky's distanced objectivity, clean and rigorous in its impersonality, set against Verdi's lavish and intensely empathetic rendering of fear in the face of mortality and final judgment.
I admire the remark's broadness, but its impersonality suggests he arrived at the position as the result of a technicality, or perhaps via the kind of acceptance one has for a family member with a disability: Mary's sexuality is "something that we've lived with for a long time".
Admirers of Bishop's early work Moore, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell praised its cool objectivity, its calm impersonality, what Moore described as its "rational considering quality" (hardly the usual praise for poetry), its "deferences and vigilances".
At first Talbot struggled to give this phenomenon a name, one that would capture its mechanical impersonality and intentional expressiveness, its peculiar strangeness and memorial fidelity.
The images suggest cosmologies, geologies, glorious turmoil, but the handling, for all its lavish virtuosity, is weirdly perfunctory, almost corporate in its decorative impersonality.
Even from its characters.
Its aesthetics remain inseparable from its function.
