Author Archive
Planet Waves
Why “Free Radio” Rocks “Once upon a time” began Bob Dylan in June, 1965 and his 10-20 page “rhythm thing” became the six minute rock phenomenon “Like a Rolling Stone.” The song hit the radio waves a month later and the “be bright, be brief” juke box format of radio programming changed forever. At CUE...
Tribute to Dynamism
Appreciating the ageless sculptures of John Chamberlain (1927-2011) John Chamberlain’s sculptures of crushed automobile metal are as immediately iconic as Hokusai’s wave. Careful to explain that the material he used was not found but chosen, Chamberlain conceived sculpture as groups of semi-chaotic modules that could be coaxed to fit, and the result seemed the most...
History Lesson: Leutze
How Washington icon crossed the pond From time to time over years of visiting The Metropolitan Museum of Art, I would find myself in front of Emanuel Leutze’s iconic “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” About 12 and a half feet high and 21 feet long, the huge rectangle was simply and plainly framed, hanging at just...
Mechanical Garden
Pollack’s error makes art Carrie Pollack is a poet of impermanence. Her subject is memory and the visual echoes that surround us everywhere. On daily walks with her camera, she records deteriorating poster debris, the sky at a particular moment—the usual stuff to which we ordinarily pay little attention—then subjects the imagery to computer processing...
Three Degrees of Art: Paul Sharits’ on location masterpieces
Paul Sharits made his first film Wintercourse (1962) at age 19 while studying painting at the University of Denver. There he became a protégé of Stan Brakhage, 10 years older and already in the forefront of the international film avant-garde. The “beat era” was evolving into “counterculture,” and Sharits’ generation began inheriting the weight of...
Rediscovering Alexander Calder
Stabiles versus mobiles Try to picture yourself in a Paris apartment in the early 1930s. Alexander Calder is giving a performance of his newly created circus made of twisted wire and cloth scraps. In the audience are Miró, Léger, Mondrian, Arp, Brancusi, the Delaunays, Duchamp, Kiesler and Man Ray; in short, the European avant-garde. Man...
Approaching Barnett Newman: Radical master goes wild
The exceptional installation at Craig F. Starr Gallery and its Upper East Side atmosphere might not immediately signal Barnett Newman’s lifelong commitment to anarchist politics (a philosophy he shared with artists as varied as Signac, Courbet, Pissaro and Bellows), but it shines forth in the radical approach of his work. This group of six early...
