The Life of Christ by Henry and George Klimowicz

The child is father of the man

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

Wordsworth, from My Heart Leaps Up (1802)

Henry Klimowicz is an artist, primarily a sculptor. His father George has kept a website for over a decade, and a few years back he asked Henry for a favor. Henry agreed to this, not fully aware of the scope of what was being asked. 

George Klimowicz's website encompasses the life of Christ, his thoughts on much of the Bible, and an extensive discussion the world's religions.  The Life of Christ section has approximately 350 numbered text entries, many foot-noted and referenced. Henry says that his  father's goal here is "to bring people closer to Christ". Henry's father asked his son to make illustrations to accompany his biblical thinking.

Henry launched into his contribution this project in 2019, and this work is still ongoing. So far he has made @ 250 drawings, short of about 100 for the nearly 350 text entries, with more to come. These are mostly charcoal and pencil drawings on acid-free white paper 11.5 x 15.5".  Henry also considers the eraser an important tool here.

For years, Henry's sculptural art has been centered on growth and form, balancing between abstraction and biomorphic figures--piles of seeds, patterns of lichens, debris, intersecting ripples in a pond, sperm. He strives to make something that looks like nature and "behaves" like nature, assuming the impersonality and obsessiveness of a wasp working to make a nest.  Henry says he did not "mine" his father's text for subject matter to draw,  for example, doves.

Henry states he is a "strong" atheist. His work nonetheless has a palpable spiritual aspect that is more animist than theistic. When pressed, he admits to experiencing exalted states in nature, without fealty to any religion. His drawings for the Life of Christ are akin to his sculptures--burrs, arborizations, eddies, debris. They could be studies for Henry's sculptures to come, but that's not why he draws these. 

More relevant, Henry says, is that when he was growing up, he and his father explored the world together with a microscope--a means to  explode "normal" seeing, bordering on the abstract. That magnified peering at the world, and the almost hypnotic fascination it can create, underlies these drawings. Henry's childhood, his father's later acceptance and support of his grown son's very different perspective on the world, and Henry's honor for his father are the sources of these drawings. Henry shows respect without the need for allegiance. Henry notes that his father's website has an obsessive aspect, and that he also is obsessive in these drawings--obsessive like JS Bach--variations upon variations of a theme. Henry has taken on is a highly disciplined drawing project that has lasted 3 years thusfar, and will be ongoing until he has completed the project. His father's contributions to his website simultaneously have diminished due to advancing age and memory problems.

I choose 3 examples, to give a sense of the arbitrary association between text and drawings (images below):

1.The apostle John leaves no doubt that Jesus had a hand in the creation of the physical universe , of space and time:

6. Matt 1:20  But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.

17. After He and all the rest of those in the crowd who repented were baptized by John, Jesus prayed and this triggered His second baptism, His born again experience, His baptism of the Holy Ghost

Something else quite other than a 1:1 match of meaning is seen in this collaboration. The relationship between the religious texts and Henry's drawings is curious although never sarcastic or perverse; it is mostly tangential. Possibly an exception to this obliquity is that images for his father's discussion of the early life of Christ resemble blastulas, dividing cells. Cellular division is, however, represented throughout the body of Henry's artwork.

Henry understands and respects that two people's religious views and beliefs can be polar opposites, especially within families, and he is not compelled to match his father's vision. To honor his father, however, he has taken on this disciplined drawing project that has thus far lasted 3 yrs, which will be ongoing until it is completed. 

Wordsworth's line:"The child is father to the man "could have many meanings. Henry's contribution to his father's work is devoted but not devotional, and is being created with slow deliberation and humility-- much like a wasp makes a nest. As with his sculptures, Henry's technique is his philosophy, and therein lies the bliss.

Henry Klimowicz's art  http://henryklimowicz.com

George Klimowicz's annotated website-- http://www.musicbysunset.com/An%20Annotated%20and%20Illustrated%20Life%20of%20Jesus%20with%20out%20referencs.htm

Image 1

Image 6

Image 17

ROOM/RAUM at Time & Space Limited in Hudson

The film work Room/Raum premiered at Time & Space Limited in Hudson on Oct. 21, 2021. This event marked the formal establishment of the Mussmann/Bruce Archives and celebrates 43 years since the mining of the first verbal blocks of the piece. Linda Mussmann worked on the text from 1977 to 1984 which was performed at intervals as a perpetually-in-progress piece by Claudia Bruce and company. The piece was incepted in Mussmann's railroad storefront (room/raum) in NYC, where words were chalked and painted on the walls--an apt space to promote an unconditional surrender to language.

This current iteration as a film work is the 2nd troving of the Mussmann/ Bruce archives by Henry Munson. Seemingly ephemeral performance pieces made in Bruce's earlier days – we might have thought unretrievable except in memory –find entirely new life when Munson rifles through the boxes of tapes and journals in the TSL archives. Our dense amnesia of wild performance pieces back when, and the seeming absurdity of stuffed file cabinets and room-filling boxes of ever-evolving media, are conquered by applying fresh new mind. 

Mussmann grew up in the midwest. She says that her parents spoke German when they didn't want their children to understand, so learning enough German was a survival skill for her. An abiding interest in Gertrude Stein and Wittgenstein (the Steins) delivered her to the radical grammar of Room/Raum. 

This film about Bruce's adaptation of Mussman's words led me to ponder how at both ends of life we struggle to fit images and our worded sense of things into our breath, with complex movements of the lips and tongue. Most of us forget this learning how to speak, but are "naturally" facile with our native tongue. Add writing to the spoken/sung word and it can become byzantine in its complexities. Add another language – in this case German – and parallels and perpendicularities of meaning leap, collide, and spar. Munson’s film lays this bare. He digitizes and & "animates" the elements of Mussmann's Room/Raum writings, and Bruce's bell-like sung/spoken performance of them. Words move about the screen incessantly, in 2 dimensional phalanxes, in ropey meanders, sliding along  perpendicular and oblique planes, marching, rising like bubbles. This film makes me ponder language as a pressure –-

– The pressure words put us through from first utterance to final words

– The pressure  of language on the many strata of sleep

– The pressure of language on relationships, e.g.,the pressure of the word"love

In this film piece the pressure of language is illuminated by mid-screen collisions by torrents of words and phrases. The film is insistent--it goes on and on. Anyone who meditates can tell you – language does just exactly that, and is relentless, no matter how you try to clear it from your mind. This film puts into relief the unremitting aspect of language, the skittering and word-shuttling skein of the mind.

Mussman's text is lined up along lines and points. Henry Munson's film is more of a field of words moving along planes. The near-military discipline and precision of avant-gardism is there in the original text and performance, and in the film.

So--Bruce's original performance piece is no longer consigned to taking up space as photos, notebooks, and tapes in boxes. It rises now as a new thing, and is alive. And the audience at the premier did know this.

Archived material from Bruce’s performance(s) of Room Raum mined by Munson to compose the film.

“TO GIVE UP MY NAME” extracted from this page of Mussman’s text and animated in Munson’s film. This image shows an example of the intersectionality of verbal thought and written words in both English and German.

ARTE4A 2020 PROTEST ART SHOW

The following is not a critique, but rather a running commentary about an ongoing show that  pools artwork curated by Pauline de Carmo, George Spencer, and Tom McGill, which can be viewed  on their Arte4A website. The images will be posted and refreshed, so these comments and thoughts will be edited and augmented as opportunity permits.

In Fall of 2019, ARTE 4A held a Protest Art show at Time and Space Limited in Hudson. It was  a  vital exhibit, funky, and diverse. Now, in 2020, there are, you can believe it, even more reasons to protest--greater systematic inequality, more violence, more social and political insanity and its berserk explainers. What's not to rage about? No need to elaborate here the long list of issues--NY Times regularly ticks off Trump's crimes, Congress's egregious and craven behaviors, and the stink of modern American culture. 

And then there's COVID !9. How is one to work as an artist in the face of all this? For artists, if one has the means and time, art making can take the edge off isolation and the stripping away of social contact. It may be a way to make some sense / meaning of these times. Where and how to share the work, though--that's a harder problem.

Novel solutions are emerging for exhibiting art--e.g. drive by exhibits, Re institute (buried art), web exhibits. Web showing is nothing new--many artists document their work as soon as the paint or clay dries, and then upload it to a broad audience. However, the virtual images cannot have the tactile presence of real artwork. Arte4A is "place-holding" selected submitted artworks on the Art4A website, under the headings Black Lives Matter and Protest Art Show. Some of the artists presently exhibiting on the Arte4A website include:

--Christine Heller: Black Lives Matter. Orange letters on a black backgound This is a placard made for a protest march, direct, no frills. There is no point in debating whether it is art or not.

--Daniel Baxter: Native American faces drawn on a map of North America. Skilled illustrative images of well known blacks (Malcolm, AOC etc)  against North American map backgrounds. There is a dialectic, a call-and-response between the maps and faces.

--Owen Greathead: Peculiar image of dark skinned woman raising an elongated arm, confronting a white cop in gas-mask, also with elongated arms.

--Mary Breneman: A crying Statue of Liberty, partially submerged, ink on paper. This reminds of the sentiment of the film Escape from NY.

--Sandy Moore: Khashoggi's Last 5. This is my work, so briefly-- I made 5 paintings of Khashoggi as news became available about his dismemberment/ murder in the Istanbul Turkish Embassy. Barging into this torture space are POTUS with a long sword, Jared, and Mohamed Bin Salmon, toting a heavy garbage bag. More notes are available on sandymooreartist.com

--A collage by Sher Stevens, 2020, shows Trump as a long nosed puppet-  king sitting on a throne, with documentation of his misbehaviors and crimes strewn around him, including a painting of Lady Liberty listing, partially submerged.

--Leonard Sideri. In Sideri's recent crisply executed works there is a recurring icon--X (x=man); in this case the X is partially submerged, in rising tides. Is this abstract art or direct political commentary?

--Leon Axel makes striking and at times jarring caricatures of the current political scene, frequently focussed on Trump. Here Trump, as a macabre dominatrix with whip, is spilling out of a bikini. "For a  couple of years In response to the current administration, I have been making a series of political cartoons, using watercolor and ink, following a satirical  tradition going back to Rowlandson and Cruickshank. While using exaggeration and humor, the topics depicted in these cartoons are real and tragic; I hope that the humor will help to bring the underlying  message of protest across." Axel's Trump figure was originally avuncular, grinning like a drunk uncle, but the evil of his machinations grows clearer in Axel's recent works. 

--Sandra Kaponen :" I had already started this work and had done another painting of the McCloskey's (couple in their yard in St Louis pointing guns at marchers) before learning that they had been invited to speak at the Republican National Convention. In this painting, the woman is holding the gun with mouth agape, rage and stunned incomprehension on her face. 

--Wayne Coe "Trump Virus" makes (I think) an odd equivalence between Trump's bouffant hairdo, and vomitus. 

--Some of Eva Melas' work is about gun violence. There is a "Make art not bullets" paper coffee cup. I would love to see these cups  mass-produced and disseminated. Another piece--a porcelain white pistol on a pillow questionably with a tiny cherubic figure near the hammer of the pistol.

Artists who make protest art have so many "ancestors" to emulate: John Hertzfeld, George Grosz, Goya, The Guerilla girls, and Pasolini come to mind (that's an incomplete ultra-short list). Political art can be many things-- sentimental, personal, humorous or dead serious. It doesn't have to be polemical. The common theme in this show is outrage (and possibly submersion--but let's hope, not drowning); these are shouts, and cries of  people pushed past their limits. Compared to last year's show, these artists are not so engaged in any witty pleasantry or the art marketplace.  They acknowledge the stench, and look about for the source of the smell. We all have a lot of work to do.