May 1 to June 20, 2015
525 W 24^th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 627 6000

During his time as artist-in-residence at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, the prolific media artist Stan VanDerBeek composed a list of reflections of human experience in relation to the developing technologies of the 1960s. This typewritten list, exhaustively titled “RE:LOOK – COMPUTERIZED GRAPHICS Light Brings Us News of the Universe,” begins with a dictum: “1. The mind is a computer — not railroad tracks.”

For VanDerBeek, who self-identified as a “technological fruit picker,” the mind is essentially dynamic. Unlike a regulated path that shuttles objects and information ever forward, it is field of experimentation, reconfiguration, process, and error that caters to an individual’s imagination. Rather than dwelling on technology’s dystopian association with war and capitalist control, VanDerBeek was committed to finding new processes for connecting human experience with images that enhance a viewer’s relationship with and perception of her environment. In a series of computer-generated films known as the Poemfield series, made between 1966 and 1971 and currently on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery, his effort is achieved with subtle intensity.

Within the gallery, VanDerBeek’s films are accessible through heavy, black curtains that give way to a darkened room where looping projections illuminate each of the four walls. The exhibition hosts five of the seven films and a remastered version of Poemfield No. 1 — transferred to digital video from their original 16mm format — that play together in staggering synchrony. Each film was created with the same meticulous process, culminating in glittering mosaics of color and light. A cacophony of digital and instrumental music accompanies the moving images, and a pile of furrowed cushions rests in the center of the gallery floor. The environment is a frenetic distraction from reality; it is difficult to leave.

Each Poemfield combines poems written by VanDerBeek with digital illustrations ranging from vibrant mandalas to geometric groupings of monochrome patterns, created with the movie program BELFLIX, which was developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories programmer Kenneth Knowlton. The films were created via an ornate process: an IBM 7094 was fed instructions for BELFLIX to translate into a programming language. The code was transferred onto punch cards to be read by a computer that assembled a picture and record it to tape. “To visualize this,” VanDerBeek writes, “imagine a mosaic-like screen with 252 x 184 points of light; each point of light can be turned on or off from instructions on the program.”[1] The nearly 50,000 triggered lights transform into silent black-and-white motion pictures. VanDerBeek sent the films to artists Robert Brown and Frank Olvey, who treated them with a special coloring process. (In the remastered version of Poemfield No. 1, the color is removed and substituted with cerulean blue to emphasize the result of the initial BELFLIX programming.) Then sound is added.

Just as each Poemfield is uniquely written, specific compositions are assigned to the seven films, ranging from computer-generated sounds to manipulated recordings by John Cage and Paul Motian. In the installation at Andrea Rosen, these soundtracks overlap in a delightful and confusing collage as the surrounding projections illuminate and conceal VanDerBeek’s words.

The Poemfield series relies on the intermingling of VanDerBeek’s accumulated visual languages to produce this overwhelming array of image and sound. These languages were gathered throughout the artist’s eclectic education, which appropriately began at the legendary Black Mountain College in the 1950s. He initially studied painting until, inspired by instructors such as John Cage and Merce Cunningham who combined disparate media in performative and immersive staging, he began conceiving physical environments to screen his experimental films. In 1965, he completed the immersive Movie-Drome — a Buckminster Fuller-like geodesic dome covered with moving-image murals — which he wrote about as encouraging an “expanded cinema.” VanDerBeek’s writings on his work and his hopes for the future of cinema are not unlike his Poemfields, where a systematic form is filled with playful content and ultimately relies on the viewer’s individual experience.

Exhibited in simultaneous loop, the Poemfields require active and solitary engagement from each viewer. I entered the gallery and found the space empty and undisturbed, as if stumbling upon a naturally occurring digital phenomenon. The walls flicker off kilter as the points of light scatter across each wall in systematic motion, shifting between bold phrases and abstract disorder. The erratic sounds cloak the spaces that the light fails to touch. My presence only adds to the gaps of the darkened space, filling it with my movement as I shift my perspective between films. VanDerBeek’s technological experiments result in a physical maze, where every component of the Poemfields requires an all all-encompassing encounter. Phrases pulse on the screens, awaiting consumption and interpretation. Patterns of light become arbitrary and subjective. Overlapping sounds momentarily combine into one deafening tone. VanDerBeek uses his technology to create physical manifestations of the imagination, forming real environments of jumbled thoughts. The experience is a walk through a manifestation of one’s own mind.

In the darkened room of the gallery, two walls momentarily return to black before the credits begin to roll. The audio is noticeably less muddled, and the words “free fall” are uttered in surprise over sounds of wind and digital sighs. The purple grid shrouding the screen of Poemfield No. 5 begins to deteriorate, replaced with fields of red. Images of falling bodies materialize behind the newly colored wall. Then the letters F R E E F A L L litter the screen in varying compositions. To free fall is to move through space, impelled by nothing but gravity. VanDerBeek’s films encourage the imaginative leap from convention and expectation (in both the act of creating and of viewing), and provide a regenerative space in which to fall.

[1] VanDerBeek, Stan. “New Talent: The Computer,” Art in America (January 1970): 86.

The post A Room With A Field: Stan VanDerBeek’s Poemfields appeared first on artcritical.

Xanti Schawinsky: Eclipse at Broadway 1602
September 16 through November 22, 2014
1181 Broadway, 3^rd Floor (at 28th street)
New York, 212 481 0362

Though it hardly seems possible, digging through the art historical annals seems to always unearth the work of artists unfairly overlooked. Such is the case with Alexander “Xanti” Schawinsky, one of the original Bauhaus artists. A trailblazer in commercial advertising, pioneering theater set designer, and professor at Black Mountain College, among several other institutions, Schawinsky created a prodigious output of multifarious work in his lifetime. But since his death in 1979, his importance has gone largely unrecognized. Two shows currently on view in New York, “Xanti Schawinsky: Head Drawings and Faces of War” at the Drawing Center and “Xanti Schawinsky: Eclipse” at Broadway 1602 are of critical value in reintroducing the artist’s work to contemporary audiences.

A Polish Jew born in Switzerland, Schawinsky came to the Weimar Bauhaus in 1924 to study, then was soon put in charge of its theater department. When the school was closed under duress due to Nazi threat in 1933, Schawinsky emigrated first to Italy, and then with the assistance of Hans Albers, to the United States, in 1936. He taught at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina for two years before relocating once again, to New York, in 1939. The two bodies of work on view at the Drawing Center date to the heart of Schawinsky’s years in New York during the Second World War, when he was fully involved with the city’s vibrant community of expat artists.

In the pencil-on-paper “Head Drawings” series, Schawinsky repeatedly depicted his own likeness, composed of natural and man-made objects, like a modern-day Archimbaldo. The drawings are sensitive, and very fine, and display a highly skilled hand. It would be easy to spend hours in front of a work like Jewelry Head (1941-1944) from which a face appears in an assortment of jeweled necklaces dangling from a disembodied hand. In The Lumber Room (1946), Schawinsky has drawn his face in profile. Skin sizzles with fissures and fault lines, cracked like dried mud in the sun. One side of the face has been peeled away, revealing an inner sanctum comprised only of wooden scaffolding, which retreats to a vanishing point. Whether the scaffolding is meant to support the head from the inside, or whether it is a meaningless structure, supporting nothing at all, seems to have been left deliberately ambiguous.

In the “Faces of War” series, all of which are mix media, watercolor, and black pen works on paper, Schawinsky composed human faces from military machinery and other paraphernalia used in war. They are by turns terrifying, despondent, and humorous. Unlike the “Head Drawings,” which alluded more obliquely to Schawinsky’s despair over the calamity of World War II, the “Faces of War” series addressed it bluntly. Works like The Parachutist (1942) are chilling. The artist has depicted a military parachute with a face, its eyes and nose comprised of cannons, protruding from the center and pointed squarely at the viewer. The slotted “teeth,” formulated from the strings of the parachute, resemble the mouth of a skeleton in skull-and-crossbones iconography. However, Schawinsky was not without a sense of humor. In The Admiral (1942), a heavily armored sailing vessel has two portholes making up his beady eyes. His frothy beard is formed by the churning waves beneath the boat, and punctuated by a life preserver — the confused ‘O’ of a mouth. The expression appears perplexed rather than formidable.

The anxiety and conflicting emotions Schawinsky expressed towards the war in these 1940s works on paper is instructive when examining a selection of his later paintings from the 1960s and ‘70s at Broadway 1602, for war and its threats seem to provide the link between the two bodies of work. By the time Schawinsky made these paintings, he had returned to Europe, once again settling in Italy, where he would spend the remaining years of his life. In the front room of the gallery, several paintings airbrushed on canvas render swirling, luminous clouds of paint in vivid color. In studying them, the eye sometimes begins to see in them human faces in dreamlike states — kissing, for example, or in repose. But in works like Al-di-là (Eclipse), 1965, the deep reds and oranges of the paint simultaneously suggest an alternative, and apocalyptic, proposition. The clouds come to resemble the aftermath of a bomb — perhaps the bomb — a distinct fear prevalent during the Cold War years. The canvases in the second room offer further optical illusion. The gallery is hung with Schawinsky’s stunning “Eclipses,” geometric shapes rendered on canvas. Each canvas has stretched over it a swath of gauze, separated by a support frame. The gauze has also been painted upon, but the shapes do not precisely align. Thus, as the viewer moves about the room, the forms appear to shift. The “Eclipse” paintings are more subdued than the explosive airbrushed canvases in the front room, and hearken back to the austere Bauhaus aesthetic of Schawinsky’s early career.

A small catalogue available at Broadway 1602 indicates that the work on view at the two galleries is only a small portion of Schawinsky’s varied oeuvre. Perhaps these small exhibitions will provide the spark necessary to reignite interest in this important artist’s work.

The post Revival: Xanti Schawinsky is Rediscovered appeared first on artcritical.