“Fluxus and the Essential Question of Life” Review The New York Times Liberating Viewers, and the World, With Silliness By KEN JOHNSON Published: September 23, 2011 Dima Gavrysh for The New York Times A door that George Maciunas outfitted with blades to ward off New York State officials. Fed up with being hounded by the […]
Mr. Fluxus Exhibition Review View of Mr. Fluxus, 2010.” The birth of the curator has led to the death of the artist. Or, at least, that’s the impression one gets from a gloss of the current literature on exhibition practices. Concerns percolate that the expanded portfolio of the curator now encroaches on the artist’s autonomy. […]
Reviews of Greetings from Daddaland By Andrew Russeth From Modern Painters Stendhal Gallery, New York Through May 29, 2010 The rubber stamp is the twentieth century’s definitive emblem of bureaucracy, providing an official mark of acceptance or rejection of governments and corporations. Military, housing, and job applications have been sealed with a stamp, as have […]
Artopia John Perreault’s art diary KEN FRIEDMAN: FLUXUS PRODIGY 99 Events September 10 – October 10, 2009 Stendhal Gallery Refluxions A recent exhibition at the Stendhal Gallery in Chelsea gave pause for thought. And another chance to play catch-up with Fluxus, during what might be a Neo-Fluxus period. Solidified just before Conceptual Art per se, […]
Art In America Cologne Jonas Mekas Museum Ludwig Over the last 50 years, Jonas Mekas has been without doubt one of the most important figures in experimental film. Along with his own filmmaking, he started the magazine Film Culture in 1955, organized the Film-Makers’ Cooperative (1962) and the Cinematheque (1964), and, finally, founded Anthology Film […]
NEW YORK SCREEN RENEWED BOHEMIAN When avant-garde film pioneer Jonas Mekas left Soho for Greenpoint, it seemed like a setup for another sad story: the latest downtown icon in exile. Instead, the sprightly 83-year-old founder of Anthology Film Archives made Letter From Greenpoint, a high-spirited, wine-drenched rebuttal to the idea that the counterculture dies when […]
Art In America By Janet Koplos Shigeko Kubota at Maya Stendhal Gallery Shigeko Kubota’s most notorious work was a Fluxus performance in 1965, a year after she arrived in New York from Japan. For Vagina Painting she attached a paintbrush to her underpants, hiked up her dress and repeatedly squatted over an expanse of paper, […]
GEORGE MACIUNAS Maciunas (1931-78) is best known as a leading member of the sixties Fluxus movement. The charts, diagrams, films, documents, and atlases here bear some marks of Fluxus—particularly the lo-fi, D.I.Y. elements—but they also draw heavily on Maciunas’s personal history and heritage (his mother was Russian, his father Lithuanian). The “Atlas of Russian History” is a painstakingly drawn […]
George Maciunas at Stendhal Gallery The career of Lithuanian-born George Maciunas (1931-1978)- art historian, architect, designer, editor and founding member of the international Fluxus movement-happily defies categorization. Maciunas recognized that to be engaged with many different areas of endeavor is more amusing and, ultimately, more intellectually stimulating than to know a lot about just one thing. Between 1949 […]
Art and Anti-Art Maya Stendhal Gallery June 15-September 16, 2006 by David Markus Hans Richter is best known to art history for his contributions to avant-garde cinema. “Rhythmus 21” (1921)— one of the earliest examples of abstract film—set a precedent for the application of painterly formalism to the expanding realm of cinematography. And works like […]
Hans Richter (1888-1976) Dada: Art and Anti-Art Maya Stendhal Gallery 545 West 20th Street, Chelsea Through Sept. 16 Hans Richter might have been a great avant-garde filmmaker, but the late abstract paintings and reliefs that dominate this partial yet dauntingly large survey of his work feel like well-made acts of desperation. Dating mostly from the […]
New Perspectives on Dada & Cubism By JOHN GOODRICH As art movements go, Dada burned brightly and briefly, its spirit too nihilistic to be sustained by mere paint and poems. Jean Arp and Marcel Duchamp moved on to influential careers, but the Berlin-born Hans Richter (1888-1976), a founder of Dada’s Zurich chapter and author of […]
HANS RICHTER The death knell for Dada sounded in 1924, according to art historians, and many artists moved into Surrealism. Others, like Richter ( 1888 – 1976), a founder of Zurich Dada, never vacated the premises. In fact, he wrote one of the early comprehensive texts on the subject, “Dada: Art and Anti-Art” (1965). Richter’s […]
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