From: andrew lampert (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Mar 13 2009 - 10:49:46 PDT
This is a follow-up to the post I sent a few hours back about the Sharits show in NYC. The review below by Roberta Smith is included in today's edition. I am posting a link and the review itself below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/arts/design/13gall.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&sq=sharits&st=cse&scp=1
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PAUL SHARITS
Greene Naftali
508 West 26th Street, Chelsea
Through March 21
This show is a historic event. It restores to full four-projector glory
“Shutter Interface,” a structuralist masterpiece from 1975 by the
filmmaker Paul Sharits. The piece is so big that it was shown only
rarely during the artist’s lifetime. Since his death at 50, in 1993, it
has been seen once, in 2001, in a reduced two-projector version in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “Into the Light” exhibition.
Now
Greene Naftali and the Anthology Film Archives have turned up all four
of the original five-to-six-minute loops and restored the work to what
Mr. Sharits called its “optimal arrangement,” with the four projectors
aimed at one long wall. Here the film loops — on which multiple frames
of color alternate with single frames of black — create a jumping,
flickering, pulsing Minimalist kaleidoscope, or an animated abstract
panel painting (“Brice Marden: The Movie”).
It is quite a sight
to see and hear, what with the whir of the projectors and the
high-frequency screeches emitted by the soundtracks when the black
frames appear, and the field of colors shrinks or breaks for an instant. The
anarchic character of Mr. Sharits’s formalism may be explained by his
early contacts with Fluxus. He could also be described as a
structuralist with a preference for delirious, hallucinatory effects.
Either way, he took clear advantage of film’s physical properties — the
frames, speed, color, light, darkness and (in other works) easily
scratched surface. With a little effort, you could always pinpoint the
source of his delirium.
As enveloping as the installation is an adjacent gallery of 50 drawings, notes and film scores. Mr.
Sharits plotted the color changes of his abstract films in bright
grid-paper drawings. He also covered sheets of paper with scribbled
horizontal lines in different hues. Their bright, nervous static may
explain why Mr. Sharits eventually took up painting: to slow down.
ROBERTA SMITH
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.