New Landscapes in Art
IN THE DARKNESS on top of the volcano, wrapped in a sleeping bag against the desert cold, I am watching the oncoming night draw in around me. The stars seem to bend down from the zenith and tuck themselves in behind the crater’s lip. Beyond its black silhouette, I can hear mountain lions coughing on their hunting rounds.
The New York Times, 1979
Cautionary Tales of Wisdom in Ferocious Forms
FROM A NOSE-LENGTH AWAY, Robert Thurman is scrutinizing the three glaring bull’s-eyes and two fire-spouting horns of a fierce Tibetan deity. A row of skulls parades across the creature’s blue-black head. Roaring red flames wreathe its body. But Mr. Thurman points to a peaceful face on the creature’s headdress: Manjushri, representing sublime cosmic wisdom.
The New York Times, 1999
Dividing the Light from the Darkness
AS CITIZENS OF ART, we’re conditioned to ask questions about time and space, questions that have defined the art of this century. What we’re not conditioned to do is to cease asking questions, to invite suspension within time and space, to enter a voiceless, wordless, and silent state. But it is this voiceless condition when nothing happens, and everything can be noticed, that allows a “oneness.” To achieve this, one has to be so bored or exhausted or calm that what the Buddhists call “Mind” falls away, and “Voidness,” or what Western philosophy might call the ground of “Being,” comes to the fore.
Artforum, 1981
A Humble River Town Acquires the Ambience of Art
THINK of it as Brooklyn Heights marries Main Street. Two-story brick buildings rub shoulders on either side of the two-lane road ambling through this 18th- and 19th-century river settlement about an hour north of Manhattan. The pace is languid enough that moms quietly feed brownies to toddlers in the lazy sunlight falling on a sidewalk cafe. A backdrop of fluffy Catskill mountains rises at the end of the road.
The New York Times, 2002
Women’s Work (or Is It Art?) Is Never Done
SLIM AND AGILE IN A BLACK BODYSUIT, Janine Antoni crouches down and dips her long black hair into a bucket filled with Loving Care hair dye. Squeezing off the excess, she drapes her dye-soaked hair on the floor and slowly swings her head from side to side, leaving sweeping S-tracks distinctly reminiscent of giant expressionist brush strokes. As she methodically covers the floor, she forces the audience out of the room.
The New York Times, 1996
I Slept in Roden Crater
IN THE SUMMER OF 1980, I was pounding along in James Turrell’s truck on a tracery of dirt tracks crisscrossing a cattle range in the short-grass hills of northern Arizona. My best friend and I were on a Thelma and Louise road trip through the Southwest to visit Earthworks…
ARTnews, 2004
Karma? Top Floor, Next to Shoes
STALLED in a cab one evening in 1998, the businessman Donald Rubin leaned out his window, stunned by a thought. Next to him loomed the dark, vacant Barney’s building at 150 West 17th Street in Chelsea. In a flash, Mr. Rubin decided to buy the building, gut it and make a new museum in Manhattan, a glittering showcase for a reclusive spiritual art from the other end of the earth.
The New York Times, 2004
The Art was Abstract, the Memories are Concrete
THE SCULPTOR Philip Pavia remembers it as if it were yesterday. Pointing out the window of his Broadway loft, he describes the Greenwich Village of the late 40’s, where long-dead friends still stroll, as visible in his mind’s eye as steam from the street vents.
The New York Times, 2002
A Month in Shaker Country
LAST SUMMER, the artist Mona Hatoum gave a tour of the dark Shaker attic in Sabbathday Lake, Me., that had been her studio for a month. In it were fragile, small things.
The New York Times, 1997
Tracing a Long Voyage Into the Mainstream
IN HER CANAL STREET STUDIO, Laurie Anderson is pulling together half-formed fragments from a work in progress, an electronic ghost story for the stage. In front of her is a one-eighth-scale mock-up of a set draped with black and white gauze. Behind a desk banked high with Macintosh computers and digital video projectors, Ms. Anderson is furiously punching keys. Images begin to flood the set. ”I build these in the computer,” she says, ”and then animate them.” Snowflakes descend in shivering waves down the gauze. Two stick figures meet and tussle; one head rolls off and bounces away. A yellow map projection writhes on a white globe like a world seen through the eyes of a very disoriented explorer.
The New York Times, 1998