John cage, born in Los Angeles in 1912 was a major influence not only in music, but as a thinker in all the arts. His 1988 Opera, “Europera” was commissioned by the Frankfurt Opera in honor of his 75th birthday. John delivered the prestigious Charles Elliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1988-89. Composed in 1985, the world’s longest concert began on September 5, 2001 in Halberstadt, Germany to continue for 639 years on a specially built organ, “Organ 2/ASLSP” or “organ squared/as slow as possible”, the work started with silence and the only sound for the first
1 ½ years was air. John died in 1992

John Cage was invited to participate in a two-day residency with the New Arts Program the first week of November 1980. Kermit Oswald had written him and asked if he would like to make prints with the help of student assistants. Cage stated the best time for him to come to Kutztown was in the fall because that was the best time for him to hunt a special mushroom growing in the area. Cage had much earlier published a book on mushrooms. He was also due to be an honored guest at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, so after the award was presented a chauffeur drove him up to Kutztown with Cage sitting in the front seat. The chauffeur commented that he did not know John Cage before but he knew him now. Cage dressed in blue jeans and a jean jacket, had a big smile that put everyone at ease. He was fascinating to watch, at the same time he was working with the prints he was having consultations and/or playing chess during the consultations.

The procedure for printing was to take one sheet of paper, which became the master print or plate and place it on the bed of the press, onto which strings were dropped. After each string was dropped a paper was placed on top of the master print and run through the press. We would take the paper from the top, take off the sting and proceed to drop another string onto the master print. All of the other markings are the residue of the marks that are on the master. Thereby each print becomes a monprint that produces a series of like impressions derived from the same master print. The prints’ singularity is achieved by altering or doctoring through the I-Ching process to make each print uniquely one of a kind, then signed and numbered accordingly.

The first step of this process was to help Cage find strings of various lengths and thickness, ranging from thread to rope, synthetic and natural materials. After a few hours Cage made a selection of 20 strings he opened his briefcase and took out a computer-generated chart based on the hexagrams of “I-Ching”, the Chinese book of divinations. When asked if the resultant hexagrams had a spiritual meaning? Cage replied, “Perhaps they have that meaning for some people, but for me it is a system for making art and music.” This computer printout was a surprise but we later realized it eliminated a lot of manual paperwork. He proceeded to set up some of his conditions of “I-Ching”. After Cage had selected the strings to be used, he chose the seven cans of colored ink. Next he selected a stepladder from which to drop the strings from various steps and heights and then he selected various pressures for the press. Cage used his computerized statistics to make computations in relation to these selections. After the first few dropping of strings they seemed to locate themselves in the same location on the paper, because he had dropped them from only one side of the press, it was suggested he use the four sides of the press as another variable. This proved to be the last element in the system of chance for making the prints. But before we decided to move the ladder to the other four sides of the press, Cage, in trying to step one foot over onto the press for support, missed and fell onto the press. A week later we learned that he had fractured a rib.

What we have in this exhibition of selected prints is the original pressured image appearing on each print together with the residue of the previous droppings. The residue is from the master paper or print. The colors were not measured physically, but instead measured visually. In other words, if we were to have a mix of 70% of one color and 30% of another, we accomplished this by a visual estimate, and the mixture being pulled over the string by hand. The pressure of the press was also made a variable, so with some big strings there could be tight pressure and with some thin strings or thread it was possible to have very loose pressure. By this process, before the day was over, we had finished the edition of 20.

Cage was asked if he wanted to make another edition and he enthusiastically said, “Yes”. As we were setting up for a second edition he was asked how many, thinking possibly less than the first edition or up to 40 at the most, he said, “62”. That was a random set number, which was from his hexagram printout. The second edition took the rest of the day and much of the second, intermixed with his continuing consultations and playing chess. After making the two editions, the student assistants asked for a print but it seemed they all wanted the same print. To resolve this it was suggested that Cage use the same random process of “I-Ching”. Each assistant received one print from both editions. Cage wanted some additional prints from both editions. Since he only used “I Ching” for making art or music his personal selection process of an additional nine prints was beautiful and fun to watch, we could almost feel the cogs in his brain moving as the different prints were put before him and he said, yes or no. We could almost anticipate his choices and preferences. We found one print did not become more important than another, it was only in the beginning that priorities were imposed.

Cage suggested calling Crown Point Press, a major printing house who he had made a print edition with, to inform them we had made two print editions. They asked for examples and slides of what we had done as they might be interested in handling them. Although the director found the prints interesting he thought the printmaker had not had enough control over the printing process. The director was reminded that John Cage WAS the printmaker, the artists, the controlling factor.

These prints are some of his most dynamic, embellished by the random dropping of strings, becoming embossed, fresh, raw and innocent. The prints have the theory and physical-ness of having been manipulated and dispersed by John Cage himself.

     In Oculus, a series of paintings, Frank Mann explores the act of seeing and depicts the circularity of life. He expands the boundaries between abstract and representational art, using a style that art critic Franklin Sirmans describes as a kind of stretching. It fuses outer configurations of shapes and inner psychic states and is part of an architectural format that Mann builds on and continues to evolve. Loose circular orb-like structures depict life’s flow. By doing so he creates leaps of consciousness and a new architectonics of form. Post-modernist John Ashbery does this in his poetry in works such as CAN YOU HEAR BIRD? and FLOW CHART. Previously, Mann derived his content from dream imagery, a subject also rich in allusions.

     In Oculus the subject is vision itself and these muscular paintings show the outer and inner eye at work. These vibrant palette elocutions allow the viewer to fill them with his or her own interpretations. Thereby, the paintings evoke open fields of possibility, such as planets rushing across the Milky Way. He uses primary colors such as bright reds, blues and yellows, and other rich chromatic hues, such as orange and magenta, which he loosens and frees utilizing brushes and branches and applying the paint in a spontaneous manner. The inner process of the eye is externalized, so that what the artist presents is open-ended. Starting with the light of the eyes, the images are transformed in the back of the retina and then interpreted in the visual cortex in the back of the brain.

     By visualizing this process, Mann conveys a variety of images related to stages of seeing and provides a richness of experience in ambiguity, imagery, and color. Painting from experience and projecting it forth, he provides a three dimensional inner trip and return to the surface. The forms are created by using translucent layers of drawings which he cuts through and then paints. The plasticity of the surface gives them this three-dimensional look or one that charts shifts between two and three dimensionality. Therefore, Oculus is an inner vision of the body in which the tensions, a disjunctiveness between two and three dimensions, is always there.

     Mann exercises freedom and control simultaneously. He is trying to give the sense of an oculus, such as the round opening in the dome of the Pantheon in Rome or a window penetrated by natural light.

     Art editor Ed McCormack compares Mann to Frantisek Kupka, due to Mann’s preference for spherical forms and calls him and Kupka “kindred spirits”. In making this connection with Kupka, a pioneer in abstract painting, McCormack suggests that Mann is creating a new visual language. He also observes (In his review of an earlier exhibition) that “there is also a suggestion of musicality in his exquisite chromatic sensibility that imbues his compositions with a spiritual dimension of the most authentic kind.” It is therefore this authenticity that is important to him.

     It is not surprising that Mann explores the eye, although he did not consciously choose this subject, but sees this choice as part of the automatic process. The word oculus is derived from the Latin for eye and similar to the word ocular,  which means resembling the eye in form and function. These medium-sized paintings are suspended in interactive fields that suggest vision itself.

     Mann has been working on this series for several years and continues to explore his pre-occupation with visual perception. He takes the viewer on a journey through a variety of phenomena, using automatistic techniques. Oculus then, represents Mann’s search for his own personal language, that gives freedom to the imagination.

     In doing this art critic J. Sanders Eaton suggests Mann employs “chromatically luminous oils in which sensually rounded forms appear to allude to a host of anatomical forms and possibilities without sacrificing their abstract autonomy..” and that “canvases are noted for their buoyancy as well as luminosity” whereby “his exquisite draftsmanship creates forms that shift ambiguously between two dimensionality and spatial depth enabling him to interweave figure and ground with consummate grace.” These forms can appear hallucinatory when viewed, appearing as if bands of imagery are drifting and swirling in heightened colors. Therefore, Mann’s visual language, while abstract, alludes to the mysteries within the body in these stream of consciousness paintings. Thus the compositions have a most authentic look, one that is a natural consequence of his dedication to the creative process. Each of his paintings is a field central to post-modernist abstraction, and like Ashbery he is always pushing the boundaries of this field towards something as yet undiscovered, such as what one does in poetry when the poet says “I held the verb and fell upward.” Eaton also observes that “Since exploratory automatism is at the heart of Mann’s work, given the seemingly unpremeditated fluidity of his technique and the rhythmic quality of his compositions, form seems to be generated out of forms in an unending flow. Vibrantly colored spheres orbit each other and overlap, their very roundness moving the orb that views them and suggesting the metaphysical mating of the art object and the eye.” This is made all the more explicit by the Latinate mythicness of the name Oculus.

     These open images, which follow the journey of the eye, are the result of a disciplined technique combined with an artful chaos that reveals to the viewer the greater possibilities of the physical and spiritual world. Mann’s demanding style suggests that he is a significant painter, one who creates an autonomous system for the arrangement and perception of things.

     Sunlight emanates from the windows of his studio on East 34^th Street where he creates these luminous works. Thus Mann’s process and his engagement with paint become a poetic language for the energy of light made visible. The paintings are surrealistic but still specific to his vision, one that creates an inner space in which objects have an anatomical reality, like the elements inside an atom. To achieve this he references the internal processes of the eye and states of mind somewhat like those of the chained prisoners in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, who when freed and brought out of darkness, visualize vision. Similarly, the imaginative rendering of the process of seeing is consistent in his work.

     Therefore, Mann creates a dialogue with the viewer and an awareness of how to see something that opens the viewer up and creates discourse. He wants the viewers to be more aware of how they look at art and to be conscious of the process of seeing what is there. The emphasis is on personal invention. He thankfully leaves it up to the viewer to discover this for him or herself.                                                                          Dorothy Friedman

    The  images may be subject to copyright.

Click thumbnails to enlarge images.

An award-winning exhibitor, Blake Hurt is a digital artist–exclusively creating digital portraits that blur the arts of traditional printmaking and photography.  In addition, he writes and publishes papers on the history of digital art and the creative applications of computers, computer programming and commercially available software.  From 1995-2000, Hurt studied painting under Richard Crozier at the University of Virginia.  By 2004 Hurt was exhibiting his seminal portraiture.

Hurt’s technique, which he calls, “ink collage,” involves a family of original software programs.  By layering several drawings, one on top of another, he creates a wirelike digital framework.  Through these dark lines, colors from an underlying image are digitally “squeezed”  through the mosaic-like openings.  Interestingly, seeing the picture in its entirety requires that it be physically printed since computer screens are too small in their resolution to show the full image.

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View Blake Hurt’s website

New Arts Program is pleased to present new works in a solo exhibition by New York conceptual artist Betty Beaumont entitled Who Will Our Children Sing Songs About in 100 Years? from September 19 through December 6, 2008.

For Beaumont, educating the world’s children in the context of our global population explosion raises questions and she has taken them to Main Street.  Broadly speaking, is education who we are?  As we look around the globe at countries with the greatest population explosion, China, Africa, India and the US, who is guiding our children?  Who will enable them across generations to become innovators and collaborators in shaping our dynamically unfolding world?  Why are only 25,000 children in America studying Chinese when 3 million children in China are learning English?  

As the US presidential campaign races towards election day amid far reaching global credit crisis bailouts, the solo exhibition Who Will Our Children Sing Songs About in 100 Years? is a primer about shapes and shaping.  With the entire gallery floor covered with rose-colored paper, each of four sculptural installations either forms a line, a circle, a triangle or a rectangle. Children’s xo laptops display world clock counters while a Swahili clock shifts our most basic assumptions.  A multiple language tear-off textwork questions Which Way, What Way, Whose Way.

Dharma Chakra, a circle eight feet in diameter, consisting of tiny blue pre-school chairs, hangs near the middle of a twenty-foot long wall.  Mirrors at either end of the wall create multiple overlapping images of the circular form.  An audio time ticker is set for New Delhi, India.  Golden Rule, a ten-foot row, a line of chrome and yellow plastic school chair-desks are installed at eye level on a freestanding wall. A series of abstract shapes (elements of the chair-desks), appear to float for a moment as one approaches, perhaps to be understood as a ‘disconnect’ that many students feel.  The feet of the school chair-desks are no longer sitting on the floor but wall, signaling a paradigm shift, possibly one needed in higher education.  Green Rectangle consists of a chalkboard black wall on which green plastic children’s chairs form a rectangle eight-feet by six-feet with the top of the chairs facing in on all four sides.  A dawn-to-dusk Swahili clock is set to one o’clock the first hour after sunrise.  A world clock cycles through many statistics including population, global warming, energy and food.  Golden Triangle consists of two red walls at ninety degrees on which yellow plastic pre-school chairs are stacked in an eight feet by twelve feet triangle. On a computer screen an online population clock of China spins.

Whose Way, What Way, Which Way is a tear-off textwork primer in an English, Chinese, Swahili and Hindi sequence that repeats to form a 500-sheet tablet. The tablet is installed below eye level on the wall.  As evidence of participation and to reveal a different text the viewer may take part in changing the work by tearing a sheet from the tablet and adding it to the pile of accumulated paper spilling from a ‘homemade’ child’s chair sitting on the paper floor. 

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Betty Beaumont works in downtown New York, her home since 1973.  For four decades Beaumont has produced thoughtful and provocative work in a variety of media including photography, installations, public interventions and new media.  Her work challenges global social awareness, as well as socioeconomic and ecological practices.

Beaumont has investigated such issues as energy and species diversity and is also involved with solution-based sustainability strategies, which reflect contemporary, historic and cultural perspectives and environmental and social conditions.

Betty Beaumont received a BA from California State University in 1969 and an MA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1972. She has received numerous grants and awards including the 2006 Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of California at Berkeley, Creative Capital Foundation grants, National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and grants, New York State Council on the Arts fellowships and Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants. She has shown at museums and galleries around the world including the Whitney Museum of Art, P.S. 1 MoMA, Queens Museum, Carriage Trade Gallery (NYC), UBS Art Gallery (NYC), Esso Gallery (NYC), American Fine Art (NYC), Damon Brandt Gallery (NYC), Exit Art (NYC), Hudson River Museum (Yonkers, NY), Katonah Museum (Katonah, NY), National Museum of Modern Art (Kyoto and Tokyo, Japan), Museum Het Domein (Netherlands), Bibliotéca Nacional José Marti (Havana, Cuba), Galerie Engstrom (Stockholm, Sweden), Bea Voigt Galerie (Munich, Germany), Stalinova Pomniku, Letenske Plani (Prague), Ota Gallery (Tokyo, Japan) and the Richard Demarco Gallery (Edinburgh, Scotland).

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New Arts Program, located at 173 W. Main Street, Kutztown, Pennsylvania, is open Wednesday through Saturday, 11 AM to 3 PM and other times by appointment.  Admission is free.  A twenty-one-page catalog accompanies the exhibition and is available upon request. 

Contact New Arts Program:

610 683 6440

info@napconnection.com

http://www.napconnection.com

Photos and other information is available upon request.