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which, in their ordered overlapping of planar shapes, as well as their format, call to mind certain analytic Cubist works. However, Ryan never used still life as a pretext for her pictures; her constructions evolved out of themselves without reference to external reality. The importance of intuitive decision-making in Ryan's work links her to the Abstract Expressionist sensibility of her time. While a few of her collages jumble fragmented scraps of color in a chaotic all-over pattern, the comparisons are generally closer to Hans Hofmann than to Pollock. Ryan's colors, though, are rarely as vivid as those of Hofmann. Indeed her best works are a series of pale, predominantly off-white collages covering the entire surface of the rectangular support. Through the esthetic arrangement of torn against cut edges, opaque [[ the rest of the page is cut off ]].

of the Fauves. Although one can point to the influence of Gauguin, perhaps Bonnard, certainly Derain and Vlaminck, Zorach's work offers images of her own: a lively market scene where numbered signs pop out amid the jumble of pure hues and simplified figure shapes flatly arrayed across the picture surface; the abstract shapes of olive trees designing a Provence landscape; swirling brush-strokes tumbling down a hill in a sun-drenched, whitened view of the Road to Bethlehem.

After returning to the United States, Zorach continued for awhile to pain in an energetic Fauve manner -- rendering the California forests in bold strokes and saturated colors. Two arcadian landscapes of 1913-14 utilize Matisse's arabesque figure drawing within a high-keyed color range and symbolic context which suggest a knowledge of Puvis de Chavannes, as well as affinities to the work of her husband William Zorach at that time. This incipient symbolism is carried over into later paintings which employ a Cubist breakup of form in a decorative surface pattern. Here Zorach used Cubist fragmentation to design her compositions while retaining a strong narrative content. Her sources are Metzinger and Gleizes rather than Picasso and Braque. Subsequent paintings present a hodgepodge of formats over which the subject matter usually dominates. The indications are that Zorach never found her own personal language; she remained an artist in search of a style.
  -- SUSAN HEINEMANN

PETER CAMPUS, ANDY MANN, IRA SCHNEIDER, TOM MARIONI, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; PETER SAARI, C.W. Post Center Art Gallery; RICHARD MOCK, Louis Meisel Gallery; BARBARA ROAN and the Blue Mountain Paper Parade, Concord Hotel, Kiamesha Lake, New York:

As a conference, "Video and the Art Museum" at the Everson Museum was unexceptional. The same antagonisms continue to divide the early experimenters (the video underground) from the latecomers who found museum and media recognition; the distribution of creative work remains problematic; and the panel of critics met with a hostility born of fundamental mistrust and a perception of critics and curators as units in a political and economic system that represses the video artist. Perhaps I was overly optimist to expect this conference to quiet my misgivings about video art. Conferences are to get business done and teach access to tools. They are not generally sources of critical or generative thought about their own basic premises.

The museum, however, mounted several video installations in conjunction with the conference of which PETER CAMPUS' Closed Circuit, a series of seven works taking up and entire floor, was the largest. Campus' systems of camera, screen, and video projector are activated by the spectator moving into them, past them, or standing in the pools of light on the floor that indicate optimum vantage points.

Two of Campus' projector pieces in particular make an affecting demonstration of the transformatory potential of large scale in video art. In Shadow Projection, the first piece in the installation, the spectator standing in a pool of light from a ceiling spot confronts a twice life-size shadow and video image of his/her back on a large screen. There is a sense of momentary violence to the self in the sudden taking from behind and casting on the screen. The spectrum of body movements and feelings is momentarily translated into two dimensions and subverted. As you move toward the screen, the video image sinks into your expanding shadow, becoming itself a darker and inner shadow, until quite close to the screen, only your shadow and the swimming scan lines remain.  Investigating the illusion in the piece, then, transforms the initial shock into a clear realization of the unreality of the video image.

Interface, the second piece, is made up of two image-bearing surfaces. As you walk toward the piece, you spot your reflection in a large freestanding sheet of glass just before you notice your life-size video image moving to meet you along the wall behind the glass. The sense of otherness engendered by Shadow Projection is compounded by Interface into a feeling of momentary incorporeality. The piece roughly simulates movie special effects of the shadowy double returning to enter the unconscious body as you find that you can make your reflected and projected images coincide  (the same effect is stronger in the last piece, Amanesis).

My experience of [[italics]] Interface [[/italics]] was physical. In the first few seconds of incomprehension, my body resolved the unreality of the scene by feeling in on itself - I shook my shoulders and hair to reassert my physicality in the face of the ghostly image. Shadow Projection

[[penned note]] ARTFORUM JUNE '74