The Brooklyn Rail

In Conversation

James Little with Benjamin La Rocco

James Little's exhibit De-Classified: New Paintings will be on view at June Kelly Gallery through June 9, 2009.

In Conversation

Don Voisine WITH BEN LA ROCCO AND CRAIG OLSON

A week after the opening of his exhibit of a new group of paintings the painter Don Voisine visited the Rail’s Headquarters to talk with Assistant Art Editor Ben La Rocco, and contributing writer Craig Olson about his life and work.

In Conversation

LINDA FRANCIS with Ben La Rocco

Linda Francis has been making paintings and drawings since the early ’80s using concepts in astronomy and physics as the starting point of her thinking and exploration of form.

In Conversation

GILLIAN JAGGER with Ben La Rocco

On the occasion of her installation of Reveal at John Davis Gallery (September 15 – October 9), the Brooklyn Rail’s Ben La Rocco visited sculptor Gillian Jagger at her horse farm and studio in Kerhonkson, NY to discuss her life and work.

The Mind-Body Problem: Courbet, Poussin and Contemporary Art

Two recent exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art give insight into our heritage from the tradition of European art. The first is Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions (February 12 – May 11) and the second is Courbet (February 27 – May 18). Incredibly, Arcadian Visions is the first exhibition devoted exclusively to Poussin’s landscape painting. Courbet is the artist’s first full retrospective in 30 years.

TRACKS: Peter Young: An Unlikely Artist

In the deeper recesses of my psyche, I preserve the ideal of the artist as a perennial radical—someone consistently at odds with convention in life and art, whose unorthodox choices often incite awe and bewilderment. I realize that characterizing artists as improvisational spirits is stereotypical and even a little juvenile. I understand the maturity and discipline it takes to stick with the arts beyond one’s early years and how the accompanying self-deprivation can curtail many avenues of expression that one might otherwise be inclined to explore.

Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly’s stubbornly poetic painting is on display in en exhibition at Gagosian Gallery entitled A Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things.

Mary Hambleton

Mary Hambleton’s large paintings on panel at Littlejohn strive after complexity but attain only earnest enthusiasm.

Adam Simon

In a manageable show of six paintings in Art Moving’s snug space, Adam Simon wrestles with ideas about consumer culture and its effects on human interaction and activity.

Fragmenting the Form

Before going to Figureworks Gallery, I had the fortunate experience of seeing Rebecca Stenn perform at the Joyce. Her company put on a playful dance and onstage musicians provided the score. The best moments came towards the end when the musicians ceased observing the dance from behind their instruments and began to take part. Unexpected scenes followed: a cellist feigned the murder of a dancer with his cello; a slight female slung the tattooed bassist over her shoulders.

Tim Wilson

Another painting, entitled "Rush," shows a monarch butterfly descending on a bottle of liquid incense in the same halcyon landscape, capturing Wilson’s concern with heightened pleasure as a form of distraction. Toys serve such a purpose for children as aids in creating imaginative fantasy. Drugs and the entertainment and forgetfulness found in barrooms serve similar ends for adults,

Danny Goodwin

"Where did he buy these?" was my first thought on seeing "Counterintelligence," Danny Goodwin’s live aerial feeds of the residences of George W. Bush and three members of his cabinet. In a row of four, just to the left of the door at Jack the Pelican, the small monitors screening the feeds are quite convincing.

Joel Longenecker

Four quickly executed watercolors begin Joel Longenecker’s exhibition at N3 Project Space. Each relies on a lattice-work of blue, green, and earth tone brush strokes for structure. The resulting grid is wide open with plenty of gray ground showing through. The marks themselves are aggressive. They cut swiftly, threatening to break free of the grid holding them. The spontaneity of these small watercolors highlights Longenecker’s gestural style of painting and shows the artist at his best: intense and impatient.

Joe Fig

Inka Essenhigh paints on plastic plates; her studio floor is littered with them. Steve Mumford’s studio is right next door to hers. Tara Donovan works out of her home. She watches TV to pass the time. Fred Tomaselli carefully catalogues his collage material, separating noses from butterflies from flowers in neatly arranged rows behind plastic sheets. Matthew Ritchie has a beautiful parquet floor in his studio. He reads quantum theory.

Andrea Belag

In her new show, Andrea Belag does a lot with a little. The ten oil paintings that line the wall at Bill Maynes Gallery are touched very lightly with little paint. Their surfaces glisten liquid smooth due to the gloss varnish that covers them and the sable brush Belag uses to paint them. They seem to have been painted in one sitting. The raw canvas shows at times. Each mark, scumbled, wiped, pulled, or pushed, seems fresh.

Chris Caccamise

Chris Caccamise’s intimate paper sculptures are as engaging to encounter as the title of his current show at Star 67 gallery, The Secret Tornado and the Power of Being a Beast. He meticulously crafts the tiny automobiles, reservoirs, trains, and homes that compose his miniaturized world, covering the final sculpture with a thick coat of enamel paint. This last gesture gives the work an artificial veneer that facilitates the young artist’s gentle jabs at pop culture and high art.

Laurie Thomas

Enter Priska C. Juschka anytime before October 20th, and you’ll see an average-sized painting entitled "Blight" on your left. It’s part of Laurie Thomas’s current show Chandeliers. It’s special because, in a show full of very good paintings, it’s a great one. Its composition is simple. In the upper left-hand corner, small ochre circles hover in the milky white ground that covers most of the surface.

Gandalf Gavan and Susanna Heller

Gandalf Gavan and Susanna Heller face off with floor to ceiling drawings at Sideshow Gallery. The exhibition is called Out of Line after the rigorous line both artists use to pull their drawings together. The works, well installed by Richard Timperio, create an exciting atmosphere in the gallery. Gavan adds a couple of sculptures to the mix and Heller contributes over twenty-five small paintings of New York.

Future Species

In the corner of the D.U.M.B.O. Arts Center on a small pedestal sits a video monitor. Across its screen flash alarming images, the product of artist Istav Kantor’s pessimistic vision of future human sexuality entitled "The Trinity Session Video." Figures scantily clothed in wires, keyboards, and aluminum gyrate to the rhythm of discordant mechanical sounds.

James Little

Diagonals whip the length of James Little’s six large canvases at L.I.C.K. LTD Fine Arts. Adjacent lines converge at the paintings’ edges to form a series of multicolored wedges of varying dimensions flip-flopping through each image. Little reinforces this triangular architecture with intense, repetitive brushwork and flawless attention to surface.

Andy Yoder

Despite its pageantry and craftsmanship, Andy Yoder’s exhibition In a Perfect World is baffling. Yoder presents a giant pair of black wingtip shoes that mostly fill Plus Ultra’s limited space, turning the gallery into a sort of oversized shoebox. The odor in the space and the shiny surface of the shoes reveal that they are made of licorice.

Dreaming of America at Ronald Feldman

Erika Rothenberg’s white letters stand out on black board with the week's schedule at Ronald Feldman. It starts off Monday with a meeting for abused spouses and finishes Saturday with a lesson in "parenting your clone." Don’t miss the mid-week informational session on finding love on other planets.

Agnes Martin

I still remember the disappointment I felt when Agnes Martin died in 2004. Of all the artists whose lives overlapped with my adult life, she’s the one I would most liked to have met. There are two reasons why she is so singularly important to me.

Ron Gorchov

Ron Gorchov’s painting “Serapis” looms like a guardian over those who enter the artist’s current exhibition at Nicholas Robinson Gallery. “Serapis” is unmistakable as the work of any other painter than Gorchov.

Merrill Wagner

If you stand up close to Merrill Wagner’s painting “Overcast” at her current exhibition Thoughts of Form and Color at Sundaram Tagore Gallery, be careful when backing up. You may trip over “Mars Violet,” a neat block of painted slate and marble just rearward.

Being Vincent van Gogh

Inspired by the experience of standing alone in the first room of the exhibition: Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night at the Museum of Modern Art, December 2008

John Newman

Entitled Instruments of Argument, John Newman’s exhibition at the New York Studio School might have been called 14 Pearls, after Richard Tuttle’s 20 Pearls, for the gem-like quality and small scale that contribute to the fragile, delicate quality shared by both artists.

Chromophobia

on the occasion of viewing Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors, November 25–April 12, 2009, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Jeremy Sigler: Sculpture

On June 26th at a Chelsea bar called The Park, I was among a group of listeners as poet Jeremy Sigler described the inauguration of an ongoing intermedia event entitled Sculpture, in which a person (or persons) is invited by Sigler’s secretary to occupy a darkened room, naked and silent, with Sigler, also naked and silent, for one hour.

YUN-FEI JI Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts

 Yun-Fei Ji is among the few remaining adherents to a once-great tradition now besieged from within and without. The arts of Chinese landscape painting and calligraphy evolved over millennia in symbiotic relationship to a culture now in the throes of its second massive revolution since the 1940s—communist, then capitalist.

Gray Cat

Walking home on Bushwick Avenue this evening, I crossed paths with a gray cat. I was walking east when he emerged from behind some garbage cans five paces up. I saw from his lean musculature and dingy fur that he was stray.

Painting at 56 Bogart

Clive Bell said the job of an art critic was to be a signpost pointing toward what was worth looking at. That’s always stuck with me for its succinctness. There’s been a whole lot of talk in recent years about the role of art critics, the importance of art criticism and so on, mostly among art critics.

NORBERT PRANGENBERG The Last Works

Norbert Prangenberg: The Last Works is on display at Garth Greenan Gallery in Chelsea. There are a lot of firsts in this exhibition of last works.

Edge of Desire

The first major exhibition of contemporary Indian art in the United States is currently taking place at the Asia Society and the Queens Museum. It is entitled Edge of Desire and is composed of five sections—Location/Longing, Unruly Visions, Transient Self, Contested Terrain, and Recycled Futures—each intended to address another aspect of Indian art and the changing culture that produces it.

How to Proceed in the Arts (after O’Hara and Rivers, with love)

The following collaboration was inspired by the text “How to Proceed in the Arts,” by Frank O’Hara and Larry Rivers reprinted in “Frank O’Hara: Art Chronicles 1954-1966” (Braziller, 1975). Their “detailed study of the creative act” is a smelling salt for the bureaucratic tool in us all.

Alabama Picasso

Recently, I saw Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a woman more beautiful than the paintings, which were very beautiful. We walked from one to the next and I could see her seeing the paintings, which was so much better than looking at them myself.

Artists at Max’s Kansas City, 1965–1974

I wasn’t there, but sometimes I feel like I was. Andy Warhol was there, drinking and smoking with Morrissey and Janis Joplin, their table piled with a giant salad bowl and empty beer bottles all over the place.

Thomas Nozkowski

In his current show at Max Protech gallery, as in his career to date, Thomas Nozkowski demonstrates an absolute commitment to easel painting.

100 words on Mike Cockrill

Mike Cockrill’s current exhibition of paintings at 31 Grand is entitled Over the Garden Wall. One part John Currin, two parts Balthus, Cockrill’s garden is a place where childhood play meets adult sexuality in an elixir equally suggestive and nostalgic.

In Conversation

Mike Womack with Ben La Rocco

On the occasion of Mike Womack’s first one-person exhibition at ZieherSmith Gallery on West 25th Street in Chelsea, the Brooklyn Rail’s Ben La Rocco visited the artist in his Clinton Hill studio to discuss his work.

Gelah Penn

Gelah Penn is exhibiting an installation entitled “Detour” at Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn.

Christopher Wilmarth
Sculpture and Drawings

Chris Wilmarth wrote country music and loved it enough to contemplate giving up sculpture for it. Like his sculpture, his songs are without frills. They’re rough around the edges and wistful, with a strong dose of nostalgia straight out of the blues. His voice is high and nasal and has a bit of Dylan and a bit of Guthrie in it. Hank Williams was his favorite.

Aron Namenwirth

At artMoving, Aron Namenwirth exhibits abstract paintings that critique contemporary politics

Vincent Katz & Vivien Bittencourt

Of the quality of Vincent Katz’s confessional poetry on the walls of Bruno Marina Gallery, I am little qualified to judge, except to say that it is touching in its intimacy.

Ron Gorchov

Ron Gorchov is from a generation of painters singled out by Barbara Rose as passionately committed to painting as a transcendental art.

Darren Bader Rivington Arms

Darren Bader seems preoccupied with the point of intersection between the real and the fictive. Hence his fascination with film, his interweaving of myth and personal narrative. Hence his use of real world objects, primarily food, as sculpture at Rivington Arms

Raha Raissnia

The Miguel Abreu Gallery is low lit for “Free Way,” Raha Raissnia’s composite 35mm slide projection and 16mm film. Her big black and white paintings and small drawings don’t suffer from the dimming, a testimony to the toughness of all Raissnia’s work­—you can see it in the dark.

RACKSTRAW DOWNES: Onsite Paintings, 1972–2008

If religion died in the 19th century and became art, then there is no better place to see art than in a former church. Exhibitions at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton are accessed through the nave, where the worshippers once sat and circumambulated via the crossing and transepts. A former church, the Parrish seems a less presumptuous place to exhibit art than many contemporary galleries. In fact, it is rather homey.

Rudy Burckhardt

Rudy Burckhardt, best known for his photography, films and beguiling autobiography, Mobile Homes, also made extraordinary paintings of everyday life. In “29th Street Panorama” Burckhardt records every detail of the water towers, windows and brick buildings visible from the rooftop from which he worked.

Picasso and American Art

To a certain degree, Picasso is behind the eight ball in Picasso and American Art, which sets out to demonstrate that for each aesthetic territory staked out by an American painter, Picasso had already been there. “That man missed nothing,” in the words of Jackson Pollock, quoted at the exhibition’s entrance.

Bruce Pearson

Where do language art and biology meet? Can they be seen to have a common root and might any one of the three exist in its particular form contingent only on the forms of the others?

Lincoln Capla

When Lincoln Capla died of cancer in 2006 at the age of 36, he left over 2000 paintings behind. Throughout his career he returned to a set of motifs, a sampling of which comprises his mini-retrospective at Capla Kesting Fine Art. All the selections are from this millennium and all his themes are represented.

Comic Abstraction

In order to pass muster with the critical establishment, art today needs to be a critique. It must reveal an awareness of cultural perceptions dating back as far as the 60s such as: “America has a racist history,” or “Male sexuality tends to objectify females,” or “High art is about cultural snobbery.”

Mel Kendrick

Simplicity in a work of art can shock. It has been mistaken for crudeness as with Courbet’s reductive brand of realism; for arrogance as with Duchamp’s readymade; and for mere inadequacy as with Judd’s early work. In each case, an artist’s insight into how art could communicate more clearly caused viewers to balk

7 New York Painters

Though both are now deemed historical phenomena, there is still a Hudson River School and a New York School of painting. Both are in evidence at BRIK Gallery, Catskill, New York, in an exhibition entitled 7 New York Painters, so named for its participants’ ongoing connection to both New York City and the Hudson Valley.

ROBIN PECK

In his book, Sculpture: A Journey to the Circumference of the Earth (Broken Jaw Press Inc, 2004), sculptor Robin Peck travels far and wide, immersing himself and his readers in foreign landscapes to ruminate on the nature of sculptural experience.

Jim Long

Jim Long, fellow contributor to the Brooklyn Rail, is exhibiting four monumental tondi, entitled For Jaganatha 1 through 4 in a show organized by Rackstraw Downes at CUE Art Foundation.

Charles Cajori

A founding member of the Tanager Gallery and intimate associate of the 10th Street School, Charles Cajori has had an extraordinary career steeped in the history of twentieth-century art.

J.M.W. Turner

J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) has been recognized both as a leading representative of the sublime in landscape painting and a harbinger of the Modernist temperament that would endeavor to do away with exactly such literary influences in art. Of the sublime Turner was well informed, while of the Modern mind he could only have guessed.

Sharon Horvath: Parts of a World

Sharon Horvath is exhibiting new paintings at Lori Bookstein Gallery. I never imagined what paradise might look like—I never thought of its looking like anything at all—until I looked at these paintings.

Rosson Crow

At Canada Gallery on the Lower East Side, Rosson Crow exhibits a cohesive set of baroque interior paintings.

Bradley Wester: When In Rome

Bradley Wester exhibits painting, collage, and relief in his current show at Bruno Marina Gallery.

Sebastiaan Bremer

Sebastiaan Bremer’s art concerns surface and association.

STANLEY LEWIS, HANS HARTUNG, MARGRIT LEWCZUK, and PETER ACHESON

When I look at Stanley Lewis’s paintings, I see places I’ve known. Though Lewis lives in Leeds, MA, to me these are New Jersey spaces, because those are what I know. They take me back to meandering walks through Teaneck, Montclair, and Bergenfield, to the familiarity of tree-sheltered suburbs with urban-scented air.

Bill Jensen

Looking at Bill Jensen’s paintings demands effort and openness. Their emotion runs the gamut of experience with touching vulnerability and imposing force.

Robert Berlind

One of the great challenges of painting the landscape is overcoming one’s romantic response to it. This is just what much of the Hudson River School failed to do. In their work, the artist’s emotional response to the natural world replaces a true feeling of nature, of the world as it is. Strong landscape painters avoid this fate by coming to grips with history, examining its products and learning from them.

Out of Bounds

At sunset in the Bronx in the gardens of Wave Hill, the light slants through the open windows and doors at Glyndor House. From inside, the smell of fruit trees in bloom seems to press in from all directions.

home

The challenge to orchestrating group shows is in coherence. Given a theme, how do you integrate the differing approaches of various artists to it in order to produce an exhibition with a message?

Amanda Guest

The temptation of complacency in making art is nearly irresistible, particularly when one attains a modicum of success with one’s work.

Thornton Willis and James Little

Raising the Bar is an apt title for Sideshow’s exhibition of the paintings of Thornton Willis and James Little because it’s what these two painters do for the painters who succeed them. This is what a painter’s painter does: He opens a door for other painters onto the history of the art and shows that history to be rich in possibilities.

Arlingon Weithers and Matt Freedman

Five Miles gallery is currently exhibiting painter Arlingon Weithers and sculptor Matt Freedman. Considering their divergent interests, the two are perhaps a bit too close in style to be adequately distinguishable in a single exhibition.

Crossing the Bridge

The wine is served in goblets at the opening of Crossing the Bridge at Axelle Fine Arts, an international organization founded in 1994 to bring French art to the States. This evening on Smith Street, however, Axelle is showcasing its own young artist-employees.

Michael Scoggins

Do you remember your childhood drawings? If you’re a boy, they were probably small stick men enacting unspeakable scenes of violence. If you’re a girl, horses and princesses, I suppose.

Ronald Bladen: Sculpture of the 1960s and 70s

One of art’s longstanding bugaboos is the perceived difference between “rigorous” geometric art and “intuitive, expressive” art. If, however, such dark, dull formulations allow artists like Ronald Bladen to shine more brightly, then perhaps they aren’t all bad.

Post-Everything

We’ve got post-feminism, post-structuralism, and post-Marxism, all enveloped by post-modernism.

Jon Gregg
Heads, Hands, and Leaves

Sometimes in painting exhibitions, one piece jumps out to indicate a direction the other paintings might have taken but didn’t. This is the case at Jon Gregg’s show entitled Heads, Hands and Leaves at 55 Mercer.

NICHOLAS KRUSHENICK Early Paintings

It is important to look long and hard at the early paintings of Nicholas Krushenick as they appear on the walls of Garth Greenan Gallery 50-plus years after they were made.

Up In Arms

They’re literally up in arms at Parker’s Box. A set of economically built display cases lines the left-hand wall as you enter. They’re all full of guns. Wires run down from the ceiling to light florescent bulbs under the cases’ upper shelves. Along with the makeshift tables made of boards on sawhorses, these metal-framed cases give the space the aura of a military training camp.

Fairfield Porter

The survey of paintings by Fairfield Porter (1907–1975) at Betty Cuningham comes as a welcome corrective. Under-championed in his own time, Porter is due full acknowledgement for the scope of his contribution to painting.

Shirley Jaffe
Tibor de Nagy

When you think of the French tradition in painting, you think of Poussin, Delacroix, and Ingres. Monet comes to mind. Braque, Matisse, and Léger follow along with all the foreigners who flocked to Paris at the turn of the 20th century to help make it the center of the international art world.

Ideal

Metaphor Comtemporary Art’s show of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) is remarkable for several reasons. Metaphor is a relatively young gallery that has established a reputation for showing young artists. The AAA, established in 1936 for the purpose of promoting abstract art at a time when it was genuinely embattled, is anything but young. The presence of such a group in such a gallery is a view into history through a very contemporary lens. The show’s second distinction rests with the AAA itself and its newfound openness to curators.

Saul Steinberg

In 1974, Harold Rosenberg, one of Saul Steinberg’s earliest and most eloquent supporters, wrote that “Cubism… which in the canon of the American art historian is the nucleus of twentieth-century formal development in painting, sculpture and drawing, is to Steinberg merely another detail in the pattern of modern mannerisms; in a landscape, he finds no difficulty in combining Cubist and Constructivist elements with an imitation van Gogh ‘self-portrait.’”

Dawn Clements
Drawings

Imagine being caught inside a claustrophobic soap opera in which the generic characters and superficial lines are constantly encroaching on your space. Dawn Clements provides visitors to Drawings, her latest show at Pierogi 2000, with just such an experience.

Sasha Chermayeff and Chuck Bowdish

Sideshow Gallery’s current exhibition of works on paper by Sasha Chermayeff and Chuck Bowdish is a case study in the challenges on the road to making art. In the front room, Chermayeff exhibits what one might call roller paintings. She uses brayers—soft rubber rollers usually used for inking lithographic stones, etching plates or woodblocks—roughly four inches wide to apply one color at a time in curving arcs and swirls on 18” x 24” mid-weight paper.

Brice Marden

Brice Marden’s paintings are hard to love. Their sheer composure leaves little room for intimacy. Even within the austere arena of monochromatic painting, the muted green-gray of “Nebraska” (1966) is cool and removed.

Alfred Jensen

The Number Paintings by Alfred Jensen at Pace Wildenstein is a great exhibition. Superlatives such as this are generally of little use in criticism, but every so often you see something that reaffirms your love for art, reminds you how it is truly constituted and reveals why it is so hard to come by.

Alias Man Ray

As American art drifts back toward its literary roots, the Jewish Museum has mounted a timely exhibition with an ill-chosen title. Alias Man Ray, at the Jewish Museum, is a comprehensive survey of Man Ray’s 60-year career as an artist, and what an artist he was. But Man Ray did not seek an alias, or an escape.

James Castle and Walker Evans

In an exhibition entitled word play, signs and symbols, Knoedler and Company has insightfully paired collages and drawings by James Castle with a selection of Walker Evans’ late SX 70 Polaroids. Both artists found a way to flourish in isolation.

Barry Le Va

Barry Le Va’s current show at Mary Boone is restrained to the point of discomfort. Large chunks of cast resin and rectilinear segments of aluminum are positioned around the gallery according to an impenetrable logic laid out in drawings on view in the gallery’s small rear office. Telltale signs of pointed decision-making are everywhere apparent but the show is obstinate in its refusal to reveal the reasons for those decisions.

Stephen Rosenthal 06—08 Paintings

Stephen Rosenthal’s new paintings are hard to differentiate from one another in words. To describe one is, with little variation, to describe any of them. They are all painted in ochre and grays, with forms hazily suggested in darker pigments that give the impression of an undifferentiated landscape perceived out of focus.

Abby Leigh The Eye is the First Circle

In Abby Leigh’s painting, a naturalist’s sense of empiricism coexists with a mystic’s sense of wonder. In her previous show at Betty Cuningham, entitled “Systems,” the naturalist in Leigh was dominant.

Barry Le Va Voltage

Thought, as I experience it, is generally an unpredictable, often murky process. Sometimes a whole strain of interesting thought may spring on me fully formed and unannounced, one facet leading smoothly into the next, complete and beautiful. If I’m lucky, I have a pencil handy. But those are rare and beneficent days. For the most part, the act of thinking is a muddled, disappointing and tedious journey over well-worn ruts and patches of quicksand up to my neck.

JAKE BERTHOT

 “Berthot is stuck.” “Is he?” “Yes, he is stuck in a place, but he’s stuck the way humans get stuck, and if you’re stuck that way, then he’s right.

Gordon Moore

In his new show at Betty Cuningham, Gordon Moore proves that he is dedicated to evolving as a painter without abandoning the path he has determined for himself.

Willem de Kooning The Last Beginning

A body of work spanning de Kooning’s career from the early ’40s through the late ’80s is on display at Gagosian’s 21st Street gallery in an exhibition entitled Willem de Kooning: The Last Beginning.

BILL JENSEN

Tarkovsky is the only artist explicitly invoked by Jensen in the exhibition, press release notwithstanding. The film he invokes, Andrei Rublev, is the story of a painter, so a specific equation is made here between Tarkovsky’s art and that of painting.

Art and the Power of Placement

In Art as Experience, John Dewey describes form in art as, “the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene and situation to its own integral fulfillment.”

Searching for Virgin Territory

It seems at times that there are no fresh tracks to be made in dance, or in any of the arts. No matter where you step, at least one footprint can be found. Dance Theater Workshop’s Fresh Tracks series stands in defiance of this jaded view; the audition-based program aims to ferret out new choreographic voices. Sometimes, it even succeeds.