Author Archives: jolanta

Doug Aitken’s video performance in Turin Enrico Pedrini There is a bigexhibition about Doug Aitken running now in Turin, Via Modane, in the new centreof the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation. The show opens with the video installation“New Ocean”, where a most perfect editing rich in special effects leadsus to the borders of new sensitivity. The […]

Halfway Home The Recent Artwork of Uri Dotan Erik Bakke “I’mJewish-American,” “Encino California, US,” “Jewish,”“Jewish,” “I’m Jewish,” are audible fragments in UriDotan’s sound and video piece of 2002 We Fall. The viewer sees Daniel Pearl’sthroat cut. Ted Koppel makes an argument, on his program “Tip of the Spear” documentingthe 3rd Infantry’s two week march to […]

Lachman: The Act of Seeing Geoffrey Hartman I have followedZvi Lachman’s work for many years with growing interest. He is surely oneof the best, if not the best sculptor working presently in Israel. His seriesof “Heads,” at once so material and yet porous, fully modeled, andwhich must be viewed from all sides, bear witness (in […]

Louisa Matthiasdottir Harriet Zinnes In the catalogue essay by Lance Esplund of the exhibition of Louisa Mattiasdottirat the Salander-O’Reilly Gallery in New York City (through April 26, 2003)we are told that the artist usually painted her landscapes by memory. It is notalways the method of artists, and yet Matthiasdottir is studiously adhering toa rigorous objectivity […]

Robert Rauschenberg Harriet Zinnes The artist Robert Rauschenberg hardly needs an introduction. Since the mid-Sixtieshis work has absorbed attention. Perhaps it is his “Combines” thatheld together painting and found objects that still remain his most prized works.His interests are never single. He juxtaposes lithography, painting, photography,silk-screening along even with sculpture to make his signature work. […]

WILLIAM COUPON: First nature Horace Brockington For more than threedecades William Coupon has produced an outstanding body of photographic worksthat defy simple classifications. Having acquired a rich knowledge of the historyof photography, and expressing no limitation towards experimentation and investigationsin the medium, Coupon continues to create works that suggest a multitude of approachesthat speaks to […]

Woke up This Morning, Got Myself a Gun – Erik Bakke’s Weatherby Painting James Kalm We Americans likeour guns! We like to pull out the “big guns,” “shoot straight,”“hit the bull’s eye,” and “blow away the competition.”Let’s face it, there are few objects or images that are more “loaded”than guns. Since 9/11here in New York […]

Seeing Red Joao Ribas A comprehensiveand exhaustive narrative of Western painting has been constructed by the analysisof how figuration transforms throughout history. The great cultural project ofthe visual arts develops across a range of representational tensions, with typologicalpeaks and valleys, and a long expressive tradition of mutability. Twists andturns define this history of representation, and […]

Comix Semiotix – Robert Reitzfeld’s “Landskapes” James Kalm To paraphrase MarshallMcLuhan in “Understanding Media,” mankind, because of electronic media,like TV and radio, is on the verge of reverting to a preliterate condition. Asthe transfer of information takes place in a more and more passive state, peopleare losing their ability to glean meaning from the older […]

The Aesthetics of Horror and Disgust Justin Lieberman The method of artmaking in which the interpretation of the work is entirely determined by theartist is a relatively new concept. This particular approach may be seen as onethat directly opposes modernism. As meaning ceases to become ambiguous, the ideaof a center (god, science, universality of experience) […]