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	<title>Cunningham| Merce &#8211; artcritical</title>
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		<title>In a Distant Temporal Realm: Mary Lucier at the Kitchen</title>
		<link>https://artcritical.com/2016/02/13/hearne-pardee-on-mary-lucier/</link>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Hearne Pardee]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sat, 13 Feb 2016 19:10:17 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Exhibitions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ashley|Robert]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cunningham| Merce]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lucier| Mary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Kitchen]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.artcritical.com/?p=54823</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>part of "From Minimalism into Algorithm" celebrating 45th anniversary</p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com/2016/02/13/hearne-pardee-on-mary-lucier/">In a Distant Temporal Realm: Mary Lucier at the Kitchen</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com">artcritical</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Mary Lucier at the Kitchen</strong></p>
<p>January 7 through February 27, 2016<br />
512 West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues<br />
New York City, (212) 255-5793</p>
<figure id="attachment_54824" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-54824" style="width: 550px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/lucier-phantom2.jpg" rel="attachment wp-att-54824"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-54824" src="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/lucier-phantom2.jpg" alt=" Mary Lucier, Color Phantoms with Automatic Writing, 2015. Installation, as seen in &quot;From Minimalism into Algorithm,&quot; 2016, at the Kitchen, New York. Courtesy the Kitchen, New York. Photo Jason Mandell" width="550" height="413" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2016/02/lucier-phantom2.jpg 550w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2016/02/lucier-phantom2-275x207.jpg 275w" sizes="(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-54824" class="wp-caption-text">Mary Lucier, Color Phantoms with Automatic Writing, 2015. Installation, as seen in &#8220;From Minimalism into Algorithm,&#8221; 2016, at the Kitchen, New York. Courtesy the Kitchen, New York. Photo Jason Mandell</figcaption></figure>
<p>Mary Lucier, who has long worked at the intersection of music and the visual arts, weaves together past and present for her current video installations at the Kitchen, which is marking its forty-fifth anniversary with a series of events and exhibitions. <em>Color Phantoms with Automatic Writing</em> commemorates Lucier&#8217;s friend and collaborator, composer Robert Ashley, who died in 2014 and whose production with choreographer Steve Paxton, <em>Quicksand</em>, was concurrently featured on the Kitchen&#8217;s stage earlier this month. Revisiting works going back to 1971, Lucier draws on editing techniques of layering and displacement to provide an elegant frame for the Kitchen&#8217;s celebration of multimedia research.</p>
<p>Lucier literally introduces the Kitchen&#8217;s current programs, with a four-channel work in the theater lobby and a more elaborate installation at the entrance to the second floor gallery. Richly furnished with memorabilia, the upstairs entry recreates the waiting room of a psychoanalyst, with plain wooden chairs randomly arranged in front of a projected video of Ashley in his studio. Layering past and present, Lucier inflects this footage with a sense of loss, covering the projection in a luminous scrim of pixillated snow that evokes its distance in time. An oriental rug that once belonged to Dorothea Tanning leads into the adjoining &#8220;office&#8221;. Here, where the business of analysis focuses on the recovery of the subconscious, more rugs and cushions create a sense of oriental luxury, while the furnishings, modeled on those of Freud&#8217;s office, evoke the era of surrealism: a bookcase of esoteric texts, ethnographic artifacts, and artworks by Max Ernst, Tanning&#8217;s husband, set psychoanalysis itself in a distant temporal realm.</p>
<p>As though by magic, the viewer can enter and take his or her place on a magnificent leather couch, where a monitor suspended overhead offers entry into a realm of reverie. Composed in 1971 of slides taken from a moving car and layered with slides of black and white TV programs, <em>Color Phantoms</em> uses gradual dissolves to suggest movement, a sense of immersion indebted to surrealism, which she has developed with changing technologies throughout her career. The dialogue of analysis is displaced onto the soundtrack, in which a man&#8217;s and a woman&#8217;s voices are overlaid; Ashley, who had a mild form of Tourette&#8217;s Syndrome, generated the man&#8217;s voice from his own involuntary speech &#8211; hence the title, <em>Automatic Writing</em>, which conflates his process of music composition with the surrealist technique. He&#8217;s accompanied by electronic sounds and by the voice of a woman who translates his words into French. The analyst&#8217;s chair is empty (available to the participant). We are taken out of our internal space and encouraged to project our personal histories into the room&#8217;s poetic vagueness, transporting the serious work of analysis into a realm of artistic play.</p>
<figure id="attachment_54825" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-54825" style="width: 550px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/lucier-trial.jpg" rel="attachment wp-att-54825"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-54825" src="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/lucier-trial.jpg" alt="Mary Lucier, The Trial, 1974-2016. 4 Channels, 26 mins., continuous. Courtesy of the Artist" width="550" height="121" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2016/02/lucier-trial.jpg 550w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2016/02/lucier-trial-275x61.jpg 275w" sizes="(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-54825" class="wp-caption-text">Mary Lucier, The Trial, 1974-2016. 4 Channels, 26 mins., continuous. Courtesy of the Artist</figcaption></figure>
<p>In the downstairs lobby, <em>Trial</em>, a four-channel video, revisits Lucier&#8217;s 1974 footage of Ashley in performance with Merce Cunningham and his dancers at Cunningham&#8217;s studio. With characteristic openness, Cunningham accepted Ashley&#8217;s loosely scripted theater piece, <em>The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer and Unknown Accomplices for Crimes Against Humanity</em>, as &#8220;decor&#8221; for his dancers, and welcomed Lucier and her video camera on stage. Through the lens, all is fragmentary, elusive. In a compression of space and time, Lucier directs the camera at a mirror at the end of the studio, in which Ashley and Anne Wehrer appear as reflections, seen from behind; Cunningham and his dancers also appear as reflections, but occasionally cross in front of the mirror. Sound consists of the couple&#8217;s indistinct conversation and ambient noise. The woman speaks constantly; they smoke and drink, kiss, and finally end up on the floor, as Ashley falls from his chair and his partner continues her conversation. Lucier moves back and forth from close-up to long shot, but these are projected here side by side, as though occurring simultaneously. The enigmatic austerity of the Cunningham event contrasts with the ornateness of Lucier&#8217;s upstairs installation, yet the reworking of old footage in both cases resembles the process of analysis, bringing lost materials to the surface as fodder for current investigation.</p>
<p>Back upstairs, <em>From Minimalism into Algorithm</em> extends this process. A group exhibition created by the Kitchen&#8217;s curatorial team, it juxtaposes, among other things, a plate of steel by Donald Judd, a video of Lucinda Childs dancing to Philip Glass&#8217;s music, multi-hued mounds built by termites provided with colored sand by Agnieszka Kurant, and labor-intensive paintings of paint made by Paul Sietsema. It proposes that the chance operations of Cage and Cunningham and the repetitive iterations of minimalism can offer a bridge to art in the digital age. Lucier&#8217;s story-telling instincts supply a context for this resurgence of primal materials, as she weaves installation, video and sound into personal and collective narratives that stimulate reflection on the Kitchen&#8217;s history. At forty-five, it&#8217;s become an institution, but, with experimental ambitions intact, it cultivates awareness of the past with an eye out for new possibilities.</p>
<figure id="attachment_54826" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-54826" style="width: 550px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/lucier-phantom.jpg" rel="attachment wp-att-54826"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-54826" src="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/lucier-phantom.jpg" alt=" Mary Lucier, Color Phantoms with Automatic Writing, 2015. Installation, as seen in &quot;From Minimalism into Algorithm,&quot; 2016, at the Kitchen, New York. Courtesy the Kitchen, New York. Photo Jason Mandell" width="550" height="387" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2016/02/lucier-phantom.jpg 550w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2016/02/lucier-phantom-275x194.jpg 275w" sizes="(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-54826" class="wp-caption-text">Mary Lucier, Color Phantoms with Automatic Writing, 2015. Installation, as seen in &#8220;From Minimalism into Algorithm,&#8221; 2016, at the Kitchen, New York. Courtesy the Kitchen, New York. Photo Jason Mandell</figcaption></figure>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com/2016/02/13/hearne-pardee-on-mary-lucier/">In a Distant Temporal Realm: Mary Lucier at the Kitchen</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com">artcritical</a>.</p>
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		<title>&#8220;Paper Should Be Edible, Nutritious&#8221;: John Cage&#8217;s Diary</title>
		<link>https://artcritical.com/2015/10/28/lee-ann-norman-on-john-cage/</link>
					<comments>https://artcritical.com/2015/10/28/lee-ann-norman-on-john-cage/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lee Ann Norman]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 28 Oct 2015 13:37:15 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[book review]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cage| John]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cunningham| Merce]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[music]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norman| Lee Ann]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Siglio Press]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.artcritical.com/?p=52316</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>The radically inventive and prolific musician's ethics and curiosity are revealed in a new diary facsimile by Siglio Press. </p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com/2015/10/28/lee-ann-norman-on-john-cage/">&#8220;Paper Should Be Edible, Nutritious&#8221;: John Cage&#8217;s Diary</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com">artcritical</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Originally written for the Clark Coolidge magazine </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Joglars</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and later delivered as a series of lectures, John Cage’s </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> serves as a sketchbook of his ideas, stories, musings, rants, and views on society at a time when Americans still believed anything was possible. Siglio’s edition brings the eight completed sections together in one volume, allowing the </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Diary</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to be read as a cohesive work. (Cage was still writing two final sections at the time of his death in 1992.)</span></p>
<figure id="attachment_52383" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-52383" style="width: 275px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Cage_Diary_cover-object-shot.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-52383" src="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Cage_Diary_cover-object-shot-275x392.jpg" alt="View of &quot;Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse),&quot; 2015, by John Cage, published by Siglio Press. Courtesy of The John Cage Trust." width="275" height="392" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2015/10/Cage_Diary_cover-object-shot-275x392.jpg 275w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2015/10/Cage_Diary_cover-object-shot.jpg 351w" sizes="(max-width: 275px) 100vw, 275px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-52383" class="wp-caption-text">View of &#8220;Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse),&#8221; 2015, by John Cage, published by Siglio Press. Courtesy of The John Cage Trust.</figcaption></figure>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cage — a prolific avant-garde musician-composer, writer, and artist — created works that pushed at the confines of music and sound, thus redefining the medium. He was a pioneer of prepared piano compositions, where modifications were made to the instrument’s mechanisms, and he often created atonal musical works rather than using traditional Western melodic techniques. His interest in aleatory devices and Eastern philosophy, particularly the Chinese </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">I Ching</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, heavily influenced his creative output, as well as music indebted to him ever since. </span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Diary</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">,</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">completed between 1965 and 1982 and printed with an IBM Selectric typewriter, also uses constraints derived from chance operations. Depending on the outcome, Cage would write a fixed number of words every day, limit the number of characters and determine the margins and indentations of each line, creating what he termed mosaics. Color figures prominently in the text, too, with lines alternating between 28 different shades of blue and red. This vacillation between typeface, colors ranging from muted gray-blues to red-browns and variance in the surrounding white space gives each page a sculptural element, a welcome counterpart to Cage’s careful attention to the rhythm of the text. At times, this renders </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Diary </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">poetic and delightfully meandering. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While relying on chance operations for its form, Cage maintained a deeply personal vulnerability in the content. His ideas about a variety of global issues are punctuated with casual references to his friends, mentors, and colleagues, including Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, and Marcel Duchamp. Vignettes of domestic life — time spent with his mother or his life partner and collaborator, the choreographer Merce Cunningham — figure prominently throughout. (Cage’s father died in 1965, shortly before </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Diary</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> was published and delivered in public address. His mother would die a few years later in 1969.) In one section, Cage gives a story about trying to purchase fresh coriander in Chinatown with a friend, and in another, he shares that as he was completing benefit forms after the death of his father, his mother revealed to him that she had been married twice before. </span></p>
<figure id="attachment_52386" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-52386" style="width: 275px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Siglio_Cage_Diary_Excerpt-05.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-52386" src="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Siglio_Cage_Diary_Excerpt-05-275x220.jpg" alt="View of &quot;Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse),&quot; 2015, by John Cage, published by Siglio Press. Courtesy of Siglio." width="275" height="220" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2015/10/Siglio_Cage_Diary_Excerpt-05-275x220.jpg 275w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2015/10/Siglio_Cage_Diary_Excerpt-05.jpg 550w" sizes="(max-width: 275px) 100vw, 275px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-52386" class="wp-caption-text">View of &#8220;Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse),&#8221; 2015, by John Cage, published by Siglio Press. Courtesy of Siglio.</figcaption></figure>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Diary’s</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> philosophical meditations (“The goal is not to have a goal. The new universe city will have no limits. It will not be in any special place . . . ”) and social commentary (“Act of sharing is a community act. Think of people outside the community. What do we share with them . . . ?”) provide effective contrasts to Cage’s seemingly stream of conscious musings and rant-like observations. In one instance he speculates that, “Encouraged, instead of frightened, children could learn several languages before reaching age of four, at that age engaging in the invention of their own languages. Play’d be play instead of being, as now, release of repressed anger.” In another, he observes “ . . . People ask what the avant-garde is and whether it’s finished. It isn’t. There will always be one. The avant-garde is flexibility of mind and it follows like day the night from not falling prey to government and education. Without avant-garde nothing would get invented.”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">I Ching</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> acknowledges that life and everything in it is in a constant state of flux. </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Diary </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">reveals how Cage took that philosophy to heart in his daily life. His critical, yet hopeful musings about the cultural context on which </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Diary </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">reflects capture life’s impermanence as well as Cage’s personal comfort with ambiguity during a time when people around the world were desperately seeking certainty. Observations such as, “Edwin Schlossberg told me that while Fuller was writing a dedication in his book </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Utopia or Oblivion</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, he paused and said, ‘Those are not the only possibilities . . .’ ” or “New York’s the largest Puerto Rican city in the world . . . ” show Cage to be not only an artist, musician, and thinker, but also a compassionate, active citizen of the world.</span></p>
<p><strong>Cage, John. <em>Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)</em>. Co-edited by Joe Biel and Richard Kraft. (New York: Siglio, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-1-938221-11-01, 176 pages, $32</strong></p>
<figure id="attachment_52385" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-52385" style="width: 275px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Siglio_Cage_Diary_Excerpt-01.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-52385" src="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Siglio_Cage_Diary_Excerpt-01-275x220.jpg" alt="View of &quot;Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse),&quot; 2015, by John Cage, published by Siglio Press. Courtesy of Siglio." width="275" height="220" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2015/10/Siglio_Cage_Diary_Excerpt-01-275x220.jpg 275w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2015/10/Siglio_Cage_Diary_Excerpt-01.jpg 550w" sizes="(max-width: 275px) 100vw, 275px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-52385" class="wp-caption-text">View of &#8220;Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse),&#8221; 2015, by John Cage, published by Siglio Press. Courtesy of Siglio.</figcaption></figure>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com/2015/10/28/lee-ann-norman-on-john-cage/">&#8220;Paper Should Be Edible, Nutritious&#8221;: John Cage&#8217;s Diary</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com">artcritical</a>.</p>
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		<title>A Room With A Field: Stan VanDerBeek’s Poemfields</title>
		<link>https://artcritical.com/2015/07/04/kaitlyn-kramer-on-stan-vanderbeek/</link>
					<comments>https://artcritical.com/2015/07/04/kaitlyn-kramer-on-stan-vanderbeek/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kaitlyn A. Kramer]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sat, 04 Jul 2015 14:00:23 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Exhibitions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andrea Rosen Gallery]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Black Mountain College]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cage| John]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[computer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cunningham| Merce]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[digital art]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Knowlton| Kenneth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kramer| Kaitlyn A.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Motian| Paul]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[new media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poetry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[VanDerBeek| Stan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[video]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.artcritical.com/?p=50398</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>An exhibition by one of the most important innovators in video and computer art recently concluded at Andrea Rosen.</p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com/2015/07/04/kaitlyn-kramer-on-stan-vanderbeek/">A Room With A Field: Stan VanDerBeek’s Poemfields</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com">artcritical</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><em>Stan VanDerBeek </em>at Andrea Rosen Gallery</strong></p>
<p>May 1 to June 20, 2015<br />
525 W 24<sup>th</sup> Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)<br />
New York, 212 627 6000</p>
<figure id="attachment_50403" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-50403" style="width: 550px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/01_VANDERBEEK_2015_ARG_G2_LB0.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-50403" src="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/01_VANDERBEEK_2015_ARG_G2_LB0.jpg" alt="Installation view of &quot;Stan VanDerBeek&quot; at Andrea Rosen, 2015. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery." width="550" height="278" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2015/07/01_VANDERBEEK_2015_ARG_G2_LB0.jpg 550w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2015/07/01_VANDERBEEK_2015_ARG_G2_LB0-275x139.jpg 275w" sizes="(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-50403" class="wp-caption-text">Installation view of &#8220;Stan VanDerBeek&#8221; at Andrea Rosen, 2015. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery.</figcaption></figure>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 <em>Poemfield </em>series, made between 1966 and 1971 and currently on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery, his effort is achieved with subtle intensity.</p>
<figure id="attachment_50404" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-50404" style="width: 275px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/02_VANDERBEEK_2015_ARG_G2_LB0.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-50404" src="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/02_VANDERBEEK_2015_ARG_G2_LB0-275x183.jpg" alt="Installation view of &quot;Stan VanDerBeek&quot; at Andrea Rosen, 2015. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery." width="275" height="183" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2015/07/02_VANDERBEEK_2015_ARG_G2_LB0-275x183.jpg 275w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2015/07/02_VANDERBEEK_2015_ARG_G2_LB0.jpg 550w" sizes="(max-width: 275px) 100vw, 275px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-50404" class="wp-caption-text">Installation view of &#8220;Stan VanDerBeek&#8221; at Andrea Rosen, 2015. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery.</figcaption></figure>
<p>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 <em>Poemfield No. 1 </em>— 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.</p>
<p>Each <em>Poemfield</em> 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.”<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref">[1]</a> 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 <em>Poemfield No. 1, </em>the color is removed and substituted with cerulean blue to emphasize the result of the initial BELFLIX programming.) Then sound is added.</p>
<p>Just as each <em>Poemfield</em> 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.</p>
<figure id="attachment_50406" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-50406" style="width: 275px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/VS1975_001_Black_Micro_Kosmosv1_LB0.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-50406" src="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/VS1975_001_Black_Micro_Kosmosv1_LB0-275x369.jpg" alt="Stan VanDerBeek, Black Micro Kosmos, 1975. Embossed print on paper, 20 1/2 x 20 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Andrea Rosen." width="275" height="369" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2015/07/VS1975_001_Black_Micro_Kosmosv1_LB0-275x369.jpg 275w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2015/07/VS1975_001_Black_Micro_Kosmosv1_LB0.jpg 373w" sizes="(max-width: 275px) 100vw, 275px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-50406" class="wp-caption-text">Stan VanDerBeek, Black Micro Kosmos, 1975. Embossed print on paper, 20 1/2 x 20 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Andrea Rosen.</figcaption></figure>
<p>The <em>Poemfield</em> 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 <em>Movie-Drome </em>— 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 <em>Poemfields</em>, where a systematic form is filled with playful content and ultimately relies on the viewer’s individual experience.</p>
<p>Exhibited in simultaneous loop, the <em>Poemfields</em> 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 <em>Poemfields</em> 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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Poemfield No. 5</em> 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.</p>
<p><a href="#_ftnref" name="_ftn1">[1]</a> VanDerBeek, Stan. “New Talent: The Computer,” <em>Art in America</em> (January 1970): 86.</p>
<figure id="attachment_50405" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-50405" style="width: 275px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/05_VANDERBEEK_2015_ARG_G2_LB0.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-50405" src="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/05_VANDERBEEK_2015_ARG_G2_LB0-275x183.jpg" alt="Installation view of &quot;Stan VanDerBeek&quot; at Andrea Rosen, 2015. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery." width="275" height="183" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2015/07/05_VANDERBEEK_2015_ARG_G2_LB0-275x183.jpg 275w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2015/07/05_VANDERBEEK_2015_ARG_G2_LB0.jpg 550w" sizes="(max-width: 275px) 100vw, 275px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-50405" class="wp-caption-text">Installation view of &#8220;Stan VanDerBeek&#8221; at Andrea Rosen, 2015. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery.</figcaption></figure>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com/2015/07/04/kaitlyn-kramer-on-stan-vanderbeek/">A Room With A Field: Stan VanDerBeek’s Poemfields</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com">artcritical</a>.</p>
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		<title>Sun and Earth: Melanie Schiff at Kate Werble</title>
		<link>https://artcritical.com/2014/07/02/comstock-on-schiff-at-werble/</link>
					<comments>https://artcritical.com/2014/07/02/comstock-on-schiff-at-werble/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lindsay Comstock]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Jul 2014 13:00:42 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Criticism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Exhibitions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cunningham| Imogen]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cunningham| Merce]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[figuration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kate Werble Gallery]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[landscape]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[photography]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Schiff| Melanie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Welling| James]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Whitney Biennial]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.artcritical.com/?p=40668</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Melanie Schiff's work encourages viewers to stare at the sun.</p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com/2014/07/02/comstock-on-schiff-at-werble/">Sun and Earth: Melanie Schiff at Kate Werble</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com">artcritical</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>Melanie Schiff: Run, Falls</em> at Kate Werble Gallery<br />
May 10 to June 20, 2014<br />
83 Vandam Street (at Spring Street)<br />
New York City, 212 352 9700</p>
<figure id="attachment_40672" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-40672" style="width: 550px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Exhibition-view-2014-v2.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-40672" src="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Exhibition-view-2014-v2.jpg" alt="Installation view, &quot;Melanie Schiff: Run, Falls,&quot; 2014, Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY. Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York. Photograph by Elisabeth Bernstein." width="550" height="367" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Exhibition-view-2014-v2.jpg 550w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Exhibition-view-2014-v2-275x183.jpg 275w" sizes="(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-40672" class="wp-caption-text">Installation view, &#8220;Melanie Schiff: Run, Falls,&#8221; 2014, Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY. Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York. Photograph by Elisabeth Bernstein.</figcaption></figure>
<p>To place Melanie Schiff in the context of a staid photographic genre would be counterproductive to the poetic space her work inhabits. In her first solo show at Kate Werble Gallery in New York City, “Run, Falls,” she draws us into conversation with the light of Los Angeles — where she has lived since 2008 — and the way it bounces off windows, bends around form and reflects to create layered compositions.</p>
<figure id="attachment_40671" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-40671" style="width: 275px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Double-Dancer-2014.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-40671" src="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Double-Dancer-2014-275x344.jpg" alt="Melanie Schiff, Double Dancer, 2014. Inkjet on paper mounted and framed, 24 x 19 1/5 inches, edition of 3 with 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York." width="275" height="344" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Double-Dancer-2014-275x344.jpg 275w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Double-Dancer-2014.jpg 399w" sizes="(max-width: 275px) 100vw, 275px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-40671" class="wp-caption-text">Melanie Schiff, Double Dancer, 2014. Inkjet on paper mounted and framed, 24 x 19 1/5 inches, edition of 3 with 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York.</figcaption></figure>
<p>Schiff&#8217;s work began as colorful still lifes born of parenthetical youth culture and prosaic inanimate objects: moody mise-en-scène self-portraits with beer bottles in the aftermath of a party scene; half-nude women playing in wild landscapes; references to iconic musicians and albums within images; meditations on light hitting unremarkable objects. She was recognized for it with inclusion in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Her current work is a negotiation of the manmade set against the natural environment in a motif that calls for a visceral sense of place in reimagined quotidian scenes. In the aesthetic tradition of photographers like James Welling — whose work is among the canon of post-conceptual Los Angeles artists — Schiff continues to experiment with her medium, elevating the photograph beyond the frozen moment, using multiple or long exposures, unexpected juxtapositions, and as in earlier work, a play with light refraction and reflection. But whereas Welling uses tools like colored gels to alter space and create layers on top of the found environment, Schiff gently intervenes, adding texture with tangible objects (a textile, a window), or using technical processes like motion blur to further manipulate space. Sometimes Schiff doesn’t interfere at all; she allows light to trace its path and reference form. She only gives the viewer the most palpable subject of the image in her titles, freeing the mind to experiment with an underlying narrative syntax that she beckons through movement and enduring heliacal energy.</p>
<p>Throughout Schiff&#8217;s series, textiles and manmade materials commingle with textures of natural objects. Sometimes waterfalls are overlaid with pattern: a blanket becomes backdrop to weeds, and multiple exposures of a tattooed dancer are an energetic force in an otherwise rigid industrial architectural environment. Those latter pictures, <em>Double Dancer </em>and <em>Dancer and Broom</em> (all 2014) call to mind and provide a contrasting reference to Imogen Cunningham’s portraits of dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham.</p>
<figure id="attachment_40670" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-40670" style="width: 275px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Arm-2014.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-40670" src="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Arm-2014-275x341.jpg" alt="Melanie Schiff, Arm, 2014. Inkjet on paper mounted and framed, image 10 x 8 inches; matted: 20 x 16 inches, edition of 3 with 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York." width="275" height="341" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Arm-2014-275x341.jpg 275w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Arm-2014.jpg 403w" sizes="(max-width: 275px) 100vw, 275px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-40670" class="wp-caption-text">Melanie Schiff, Arm, 2014. Inkjet on paper mounted and framed, image 10 x 8 inches; matted: 20 x 16 inches, edition of 3 with 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York.</figcaption></figure>
<p>On the farthest wall of the gallery, <em>Threadbare I</em> and <em>Threadbare II </em>set the tone for Schiff&#8217;s work. The images, which are some of the only color works in the exhibit, are a foray into the artist&#8217;s muse: Southern California’s harsh, warm light, which emanates through and peeks around worn oriental rugs. And perhaps by curatorial decision, environmental light is reflected a second time into the images: by light bouncing into the glass frames from the adjacent gallery door. While other reflections abound, smaller framed black-and-white landscapes spaced throughout the exhibit act as reference points, anchoring the series back to earth. There are works like <em>Falls</em>, which fits into the genre in a traditional sense, celebrating the watery life-force as portrait, and its counterpart, <em>Triple Falls</em> which is a suggestion of the same waterfall as an abstracted form approaching Cubism. There are less traditional landscapes too, like that of an image of a limb and its darkly clothed body written with light shining through a wicker chair. Where color shows up, it is overshadowed by the sun, which illuminates the composition, turning a monotone world into a spectrum myriad of hues.</p>
<p>A series orchestrated in a roving soliloquy that drifts between genres, Schiff makes work that&#8217;s an authentic representation of her social, geographic and solar environment. She plays with ubiquitous objects and asks us to consider their singular situational relevance, further eschewing boundaries set by formal elements of photography to reframe our expectations of narrative. In a time when a constant stream of imagery has the power to dilute conscious photographic practice and experimentation with process, Schiff’s work shines. Perhaps she gives us an escape, even if it’s simply in her own reflection; perhaps we just can’t avert our gaze from the sun.</p>
<figure id="attachment_40679" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-40679" style="width: 71px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Triple-Falls-2014.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="wp-image-40679 size-thumbnail" src="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Triple-Falls-2014-71x71.jpg" alt="Melanie Schiff, Triple Falls, 2014. Inkjet on paper mounted and framed, 40 x 31 3/4 inches, edition of 3 with 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York." width="71" height="71" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-40679" class="wp-caption-text">click to enlarge</figcaption></figure>
<figure id="attachment_40677" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-40677" style="width: 71px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Threadbare-I-2014.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-thumbnail wp-image-40677" src="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Threadbare-I-2014-71x71.jpg" alt="Melanie Schiff, Threadbare I, 2014. Inkjet on paper mounted and framed, 40 x 30 inches, edition of 3 with 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York." width="71" height="71" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Threadbare-I-2014-71x71.jpg 71w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Threadbare-I-2014-150x150.jpg 150w" sizes="(max-width: 71px) 100vw, 71px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-40677" class="wp-caption-text">click to enlarge</figcaption></figure>
<figure id="attachment_40678" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-40678" style="width: 71px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Threadbare-II-2014.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-thumbnail wp-image-40678" src="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_Threadbare-II-2014-71x71.jpg" alt="Melanie Schiff, Threadbare II, 2014. Inkjet on paper mounted and framed, 40 x 30 inches, edition of 3 with 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York." width="71" height="71" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-40678" class="wp-caption-text">click to enlarge</figcaption></figure>
<figure id="attachment_40676" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-40676" style="width: 71px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_exhibition-view-2014-v14.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-thumbnail wp-image-40676" src="https://www.artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/KWG-Schiff_exhibition-view-2014-v14-71x71.jpg" alt="Installation view, &quot;Melanie Schiff: Run, Falls,&quot; 2014, Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY. Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York. Photograph by Elisabeth Bernstein." width="71" height="71" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-40676" class="wp-caption-text">click to enlarge</figcaption></figure>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com/2014/07/02/comstock-on-schiff-at-werble/">Sun and Earth: Melanie Schiff at Kate Werble</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com">artcritical</a>.</p>
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		<title>An Education Over Coffee: Black Mountain College and Its Legacy</title>
		<link>https://artcritical.com/2011/09/29/black-mountain/</link>
					<comments>https://artcritical.com/2011/09/29/black-mountain/#comments</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jason Andrew]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 29 Sep 2011 21:27:29 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Commentary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[AAA 10-2011]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Albers| Anni]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cunningham| Merce]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Noland| Kenneth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rockburne| Dorothea|]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Snelson| Kenneth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tworkov| Jack]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://artcritical.com/?p=19053</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>A rich historic show at Loretta Howard Gallery, up through October 29</p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com/2011/09/29/black-mountain/">An Education Over Coffee: Black Mountain College and Its Legacy</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com">artcritical</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em> </em></p>
<p><em>Black Mountain College and Its Legacy </em>at Loretta Howard Gallery</p>
<p>September 15 to October 29, 2011<br />
525-531 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues<br />
New York City, (212) 695-0164</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<figure id="attachment_19057" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-19057" style="width: 550px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/install-jt-snelson.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-19057  " title="Installation shot of Black Mountain College and Its Legacy  exhibition, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, 2011 featuring, among other works, Kenneth Snelson's Easter Monday, 1977, foreground, and Jack Tworkov's Day Break, 1953, to left  " src="https://artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/install-jt-snelson.jpg" alt="Installation shot of Black Mountain College and Its Legacy  exhibition, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, 2011 featuring, among other works, Kenneth Snelson's Easter Monday, 1977, foreground, and Jack Tworkov's Day Break, 1953, to left  " width="550" height="366" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2011/09/install-jt-snelson.jpg 550w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2011/09/install-jt-snelson-300x199.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-19057" class="wp-caption-text">Installation shot of Black Mountain College and Its Legacy  exhibition, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, 2011 featuring, among other works, Kenneth Snelson&#39;s Easter Monday, 1977, foreground, and Jack Tworkov&#39;s Day Break, 1953, to left  </figcaption></figure>
<p>Black Mountain College and Its Legacy, co-curated by Robert Mattison and Loretta Howard, reflects the impressive roster of artists that made the institution outside of Asheville, North Carolina legendary. As expected, the exhibition features work by many of the College’s bold-faced names—Josef Albers, Willem de Kooning, Hazel Larsen, Ray Johnson, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Jack Tworkov—most of whom served as teachers at the school.  However, the show excels for including lesser-known artists like Leo Amino, Jorge Fick, Joe Fiore, and Richard Lippold. The exhibition often juxtaposes works at Black Mountain with something representative and later. Adjacent photographs of the artists facilitate the narrative.</p>
<p>For nearly two decades Black Mountain College (1933-1956) puttered and spurted along offering an improvised curriculum and a revolving door to artists, poets, composers, scientists, and anyone else who wanted to participate in its program known for placing individual creative discovery at the top of an alternative agenda. The founders hoped to intertwine living and learning, believing, as quoted by Martin Duberman in his 1972 study on the College, that “as much real education took place over the coffee cups as in the classrooms.” The college was notorious for it’s spontaneous discussions in its dining hall overlooking Lake Eden.</p>
<p>Anni Albers wrote in an early issue of the <em>Black Mountain College Bulletin</em>, “Most important to one’s own growth is to see oneself leave the safe ground of accepted conventions and to find oneself alone and self-dependent. It is an adventure which can permeate one’s whole being.” This statement captures the essence of Black Mountain College making it fitting that an exquisite <em>t</em>apestry by the artist is one of the first works visitors encounter.</p>
<p>Josef Albers features prominently in the exhibition. Despite my personal aversion to his stringent methodologies there can be no doubting his influence upon the young itinerants who stumbled into his classroom. Both his 1937 monochrome, <em>Composure</em> and his <em>Homage to the Square</em> (1960) hanging opposite are fine examples of his strict color code, but boring in their overtly calculated way.</p>
<figure id="attachment_19058" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-19058" style="width: 550px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Nolands.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-19058 " title="Installation shot of Black Mountain College and Its Legacy  exhibition, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, 2011 showing two works by Kenneth Noland: V. V., 1949. Oil on canvas, 15 x 18 inches and (right) Soft Touch, 1963. Magna on canvas, 69 x 69 inches.  " src="https://artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Nolands.jpg" alt="Installation shot of Black Mountain College and Its Legacy  exhibition, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, 2011 showing two works by Kenneth Noland: V. V., 1949. Oil on canvas, 15 x 18 inches and (right) Soft Touch, 1963. Magna on canvas, 69 x 69 inches.  " width="550" height="509" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2011/09/Nolands.jpg 550w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2011/09/Nolands-300x277.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-19058" class="wp-caption-text">Installation shot of Black Mountain College and Its Legacy  exhibition, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, 2011 showing two works by Kenneth Noland: V. V., 1949. Oil on canvas, 15 x 18 inches and (right) Soft Touch, 1963. Magna on canvas, 69 x 69 inches.  </figcaption></figure>
<p>Most impressive of the exhibition’s early against mid-career comparisons is Kenneth Noland’s small painting <em>V.V. </em>(1949), and <em>Soft Touch </em>(1963). One can feel the presence of Albers’ teachings in the colorful quadrilateral symmetry of the earlier work. Noland’s short geometric gesture stretches out in the later work to become one of his celebrated V-shaped Chevrons.  In another comparison, an early photograph by Kenneth Snelson of dewdrops suspended on a spider web from 1948, offers a remarkable insight into the artist’s use of line and tension that can be found in sculptural works in the years that followed.</p>
<p>Certain pairings are more referential: Pat Passlof’s early example borrows gesture from de Kooning, with whom she traveled to Black Mountain to study in 1948, while the later piece builds up color from Milton Resnick, who she married in 1961. Passlof tells the story that after Albers tore up Elaine de Kooning’s homework in front of class, Passlof promptly gathered her things and left his classroom never to return. Elaine is represented by a fabulous enamel on paper titled <em>Black Mountain Number 6 </em>(1948).</p>
<p>The exhibition could have benefited from stricter curatorial selection, most notably in the case of Franz Kline from whom there are six works from various periods, but no masterpieces. Robert Motherwell also fares poorly, although there is an interesting photograph and preliminary sketch from 1951 proof that Motherwell was working on the Millburn Mural commission at the time. The exhibition hits a home run, however, with its timely selection of works by de Kooning that includes a preliminary drawing for the painting <em>Asheville</em>.</p>
<p>Dorothea Rockbourne was one of the few students at Black Mountain with prior  training, as she had attended her native Montreal’s Ecole des beaux-arts. She arrived in search of a more diverse education and latched on to the only mathematics professor there, Max Dehn, whose basic lessons in geometry and topology had a lasting influence on her career. Her <em>Gradient and Field</em><em> </em>(1977) –reconstructed for this exhibition-is a sophisticated installation of vellum sheets placed at prescribed levels above and below a vectored horizontal line in such a way as to amplify the divergent fields.</p>
<p>There are some sore omissions and unnecessary inclusions in this exhibition.  It’s hard to justify the absence of Jerry Van de Wiele, for instance, especially when Helen Frankenthaler, who was at Black Mountain for just a week visiting Clement Greenberg and hardly a part of the community, is represented.  Enticed by a letter from his friend the painter Jorge Fick (represented in the show by a selection of late works), Van de Wiele enrolled as a student in September 1954. When classes were suspended during the winter of 1955 he returned to The Art Institute in Chicago where he convinced two friends, Richard Bogart and John Chamberlain (the latter represented by later sculptures) to follow him back in the spring.</p>
<figure id="attachment_19059" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-19059" style="width: 550px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Vitrine_email.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-19059 " title="Black Mountain poets in a vitrine in the exhibition, Black Mountain College and Its Legacy  exhibition, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, 2011" src="https://artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Vitrine_email.jpg" alt="Black Mountain poets in a vitrine in the exhibition, Black Mountain College and Its Legacy  exhibition, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, 2011" width="550" height="383" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2011/09/Vitrine_email.jpg 550w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2011/09/Vitrine_email-300x208.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-19059" class="wp-caption-text">Black Mountain poets in a vitrine in the exhibition, Black Mountain College and Its Legacy  exhibition, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, 2011</figcaption></figure>
<p>There are, however, amazing moments in this show that allow you to look across rooms and down hallways to draw associations, such as when Jack Tworkov’s hefty gestural painting <em>Day Break</em><em> </em>(1953) is seen through the undulating stainless steel beams and cords of Snelson’s large <em>Easter Monday </em>(1977). Tworkov is also represented by two ink studies for <em>House of the Sun</em>, an important series of paintings the artist began at Black Mountain during the summer of 1952.</p>
<p>Upstairs hang three abstract paintings by Emerson Woelffer, invited to Black Mountain in 1949 at the request of Buckminster Fuller (represented by a large sculpture and two posthumous prints). A group of five collages by Ray Johnson hang next. Johnson was on campus from mid to late 1940s and studied with the likes of Albers, Bolotowski, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Richard Lippold, Motherwell, and Charles Olson. His collages, all done later, incorporate and at the same time upend the learning of these historic teachers.</p>
<p>While the College did offer classes in language, anthropology, and science, the arts remained the focus of the curriculum. An impressive selection of rare books by the Black Mountain Poets is assembled in a large vitrine on the second floor on loan from the collection of James Jaffe. The show provides first edition printings of Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Fielding Dawson, Charles Olson, M.C. Richards, and Jonathan Williams to name a few. Among the various publications sits the prospectus for the 1951 Summer Institute, which includes a terrific image of one of Black Mountain’s most remarkable dancers, Katherine Litz.</p>
<p>Photography was officially added to the curriculum in the fall of 1949. Hazel Larsen Archer was something of the resident photographer. Her images of a spiky-haired John Cage, a contemplative Willem de Kooning, and Merce Cunningham dancing in an open field (reprints of a few are included in the exhibition) are some of the most historic images of the school. She is credited, among other things, with giving Rauschenberg enough instruction with the camera to let him do with the instrument as he pleased. Archer, along with students in her class, decided to produce the magazine <em>5 Photographers</em>, showcased here.  Aaron Siskind, a photographer particularly admired among the Abstract Expressionists, arrived in 1951 as faculty. Works from his <em>North Carolina Series </em>(1951) are on view, accompanied by works by Arthur Siegel and Harry Callahan.</p>
<figure id="attachment_19060" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-19060" style="width: 259px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="https://artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Cunningham-Dance.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-19060 " title="Merce Cunningham dance class, Summer 1948.  Merce Cunningham (left), Elizabeth Jefferjahn (foreground).  Photo Clemens Kalischer.  " src="https://artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Cunningham-Dance.jpg" alt="Merce Cunningham dance class, Summer 1948.  Merce Cunningham (left), Elizabeth Jefferjahn (foreground).  Photo Clemens Kalischer.  " width="259" height="300" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2011/09/Cunningham-Dance.jpg 432w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2011/09/Cunningham-Dance-259x300.jpg 259w" sizes="(max-width: 259px) 100vw, 259px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-19060" class="wp-caption-text">Merce Cunningham dance class, Summer 1948.  Merce Cunningham (left), Elizabeth Jefferjahn (foreground).  Photo Clemens Kalischer.  </figcaption></figure>
<p>A highlight of the exhibition comes with the projection of footage of three early dances by Merce Cunningham:: <em>Septet</em><em> </em>(1953), <em>Antic Meet </em>(1958) and <em>Story </em>(1963). It is captivating watching Cunningham dance his own choreography and while the footage has been available to Merce Cunningham Dance Company, enabling the company to recreate these historic pieces in detail, this is the first time the footage has been publicly shown. <em>Septet </em>was created during the summer of 1953, the year of the company’s official debut, and is one of the very few dances Cunningham set to music.</p>
<p><em>Story</em> (1963)<em> </em>features sets and costumes by Rauschenberg, assembled using anything the artist could find outside the door of the theater. This work speaks to the great collaborations that took place at the College, including Cage’s<span style="text-decoration: underline;"> </span><em>Theater Piece #1 </em>(1952). Created over lunch and performed later the same day, the piece features Cage, Charles Olson, and M.C. Richard reading from ladders while Rauschenberg plays records and Cunningham dances.</p>
<p><em>Black Mountain College and Its Legacy</em> is an impressive show and a remarkable undertaking considering the many facets of this historic school.  Continuing a streak of themed shows at Loretta Howard that include last year’s <em>Artists at Max’s Kansas City, 1965-1974</em>, the exhibition strives to make connections within the period, although sometimes lacking the tight editing necessary to make such associations more visible. The mystic Ruth Asawa is represented with a single work: an untitled looped wire sculpture from early 1950s hanging overhead. It would have been insightful to see one of Asawa’s later drawings as well in this context.  The exhibition, spread out over two floors, makes for a great treasure hunt, but it’s difficult to experience the true impact of the show in its totality. The catalogue is a bit of a disappointment with some annoying historical errors. Pat Passlof’s name is misspelled. for example, and she followed de Kooning to Black Mountain with the intent of studying with him not Mark Tobey, as recounted here. Chamberlain was never on faculty and was not  present during the summer of 1955.  Bios are included only for the most prominent artists, and poets are left out completely. Even Charles Olson, whose reputation at Black Mountain outstripped his 6’8” frame, isn’t featured. These problems need not detract from the abundance of historic materials, however, that make this a show not to be missed.</p>
<figure id="attachment_19061" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-19061" style="width: 71px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/rockburne.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-thumbnail wp-image-19061 " title="Dorothea Rockburne, Gradient and Field, 1971. Paper and Charcoal lines on wall, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Loretta Howard Gallery" src="https://artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/rockburne-71x71.jpg" alt="Dorothea Rockburne, Gradient and Field, 1971. Paper and Charcoal lines on wall, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Loretta Howard Gallery" width="71" height="71" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-19061" class="wp-caption-text">click to enlarge</figcaption></figure>
<figure id="attachment_19062" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-19062" style="width: 71px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/AA-Tapestry_2.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-thumbnail wp-image-19062 " title="Anni Albers, Untitled Tapestry, based on a 1933 design. Hand knotted wool, hand twisted wool and silk, 72 x 116 inches. Courtesy of Loretta Howard Gallery" src="https://artcritical.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/AA-Tapestry_2-71x71.jpg" alt="Anni Albers, Untitled Tapestry, based on a 1933 design. Hand knotted wool, hand twisted wool and silk, 72 x 116 inches. Courtesy of Loretta Howard Gallery" width="71" height="71" srcset="https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2011/09/AA-Tapestry_2-71x71.jpg 71w, https://artcritical.com/app/uploads/2011/09/AA-Tapestry_2-150x150.jpg 150w" sizes="(max-width: 71px) 100vw, 71px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-19062" class="wp-caption-text">click to enlarge</figcaption></figure>
<p><strong>RELATED EVENTS / PROGRAMS:</strong><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>A Black Mountain Poetry Reading<br />
</strong>featuring Francine du Plessix Gray, John Yau, Vincent Katz, Maureen Howard and others. <strong>Wednesday October 19, 6-8PM</strong></p>
<p><strong>An afternoon with independent curator Jason Andrew</strong>, as he discusses his recent exhibition and publication: <em>JACK TWORKOV: Accident of Choice, The Artist at Black Mountain College 1952</em>. Mr. Andrew will discuss Tworkov, his arrival at Black Moutain College and his relationship with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Fielding Dawson, Jorge Fick, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, during one of the most historic summers in the history of the Black Mountain College. <strong>Saturday, October 22, 4:00PM</strong></p>
<p>JASON ANDREW is the manager, curator and archivist for the Estate of Jack Tworkov whose recent projects include the publication <em>Jack Tworkov: Accident of Choice, The Artist at Black Mountain College 1952</em>. A prominent figure in the Bushwick art scene, his independent collaborative projects with artists and dancers and others are presented through the Norte Maar company. He is also the co-owner of Storefront, a gallery in Bushwick featuring young talent and revisiting the work of established artists. He can be followed on twitter: jandrewARTS</p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com/2011/09/29/black-mountain/">An Education Over Coffee: Black Mountain College and Its Legacy</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://artcritical.com">artcritical</a>.</p>
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