Rebekah Rutkoff

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  print December 2017

  Rebekah Rutkoff

  “In Russia, the inability to live up to one’s dreams of self . . . seems to have released a particular form of male sadness, traced with disappointment and violence, humming under everything, blooming like radon from the dusty ground.” In Nicholas Muellner’s hefty and sumptuous picture book In Most Tides an Island (Self Publish, Be Happy Editions), moving narratives of the author’s encounters with closeted gay men in the remote provinces of Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea are intercut with a fictional vision of vivid-dreamer Isabel, who lives on an unnamed Caribbean island. Muellner, a

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  print Summer 2017

  Thomas Wilfred

  IN 1951, Jackson Pollock flung paint on glass while Hans Namuth stood underneath with his film camera, catching the descending cords of color. Jackson Pollock 51, along with Namuth’s still photographs, generated a captivating picture of the processual motions of body and pigment that yielded Pollock’s hyperkinetic paintings, enshrining artist and Abstract Expressionism as forces of liberatory rebellion. The following year, Dorothy Miller included Pollock’s painting in “15 Americans” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, along with work by a Danish-born artist, Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968), who

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  print October 2016

  PAINTING BY NUMBERS: THE ART OF LILLIAN SCHWARTZ

  THE CRYSTAL PEN

  On a Sunday in 1970, Salvador Dalí summoned pioneering computer artist Lillian Schwartz to the St. Regis hotel in New York. She was instructed to wear beautiful clothes, and so she chose a fitted dress with multicolored stripes and long Mylar earrings. Escorted through beaded curtains into a cocktail lounge with candle-topped tables and a coterie of attractive men and women, one dressed in a metallic jumpsuit open to the waist, one wearing body paint, Schwartz arrived at a platform on top of which a tuxedoed Dalí sat with a top hat, cape, and cane. A boy with platinum hair stood

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  film September 08, 2014

  Frame of Mind

  “LITTLE DID I KNOW when I made my first film at the age of twelve, [A] Christmas Carol, three minutes long…that the language of film was in constant birth within me, myself as a filmmaker.” Thus wrote the American filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos (1928–1992) in his 1971 essay “A Supreme Art in a Dark Age.” From September 8 through 13, on the occasion of the publication of Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos (The Visible Press, 2014), Anthology Film Archives will present ten of the filmmaker’s rarely seen works. It’s an extraordinary opportunity to witness the unfurling

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  film January 2014

  Robert Beavers’s Listening to the Space in My Room

  IN THE YEARS since Robert Beavers completed his epic cycle My Hands Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure (1967–2002), which encompasses the seventeen films he made in Europe after leaving the United States in the late 1960s, he has realized three new works: Pitcher of Colored Light (2007), The Suppliant (2010), and, now, Listening to the Space in My Room, which made its US debut at the 2013 New York Film Festival’s “Views from the Avant-Garde.” Between 2002 and 2012, Beavers lived on the ground floor of an old house in Zumikon, a quiet Zurich municipality, just underneath

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  picks February 07, 2013

  Július Koller

  The late Slovak artist Július Koller investigated the utopian possibilities of art and developed his own conceptual vocabulary of symbols, ideas, and interventions—embracing the question mark, “anti-happenings,” and Ping-Pong. This three-floor exhibition of Koller’s work features documentation of some of the most significant long-term projects he created and performed during the last four decades of his life: J.K. Ping-Pong Club (U.F.O.), 1970–2007; Galeria Ganku, 1971–89; and work connected to his flexible concept of “Universal-Cultural Futurological Operation”—his first of many uses of the