Word: chryssa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...curb ready to make deliveries. In the '30s George Grosz did a series of watercolors: a childlike view of the harbor and a lurid skyline. Piet Mondrian, who spent the last four years of his life in Manhattan, found the city a perfect model for his grids; later Chryssa sculpted Times Square, appropriately, in fluorescent tubing...
...Chryssa responds, she explains, to "ancient presences in contemporary commercial and industrial symbols. Times Square, I relate to Byzantine art; the background of the sky against the neon signs resembles the gold in the background of an icon." But Times Square is already a work of art which, like the Vegas Strip, cannot be mimicked in a gallery. No painting can be as immediate as a billboard. No artist, with a limited budget and space, can equal the circuitry and programming of a full-dress neon display. Knowing this, Chryssa prudently went into neon as fictive archaeology...
...result is a chimerical amalgam of cultures, as though Chryssa's eye had got ahead of the present and were looking back on Times Square from a vantage point as remote in time from it as ours is from ancient Greece. The neons still work, but they do so with fitful spareness; a cunningly formed squiggle lights up here or there, or a labyrinth of reversed and superimposed red letters glows inside a dark plastic box. They spell AUTOMAT, but in fact they defy reading. The signs have ceased to signify. They are fragments-not in the sense...
...What Chryssa extracts from modern commercial symbolism is not its vulgarity and blatancy. Rather she attempts to distill its cool independence as form. "The less I am in love with 'nature' and 'people,' the clearer is my work," she explains. Craftsmanship is part of her art, and Chryssa's work is constructed with a sort of fastidious anonymity that rarely wavers off into slickness: ineloquent hieroglyphs reflected to infinity within their polished, night-colored cases...
...times, Chryssa's work is prone to the weaknesses that bedevil a good deal of other technology-oriented...