Word: lifson
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Unlike most of the artists whose works are in Faculty '76, Ben Lifson had the luck to assemble a cohesive and slightly more comprehensive collection photographs. (Significantly, he is one of the few faculty members who bother to comment on their work in the explanatory notes attached to each flat...
...Lifson's pictures of California, of Niagara Falls tilt lyrically to the left--why? He says simply: "Because I like...
These pictures are without exception more than just likeable, though. Lifson's lens views a subject and catches the formal connections and the frame intrinsic to that subject. "Niagara Falls", for example, is seen through a glass window and balcony that enclose the foreground. A row of skyscrapers provide the backdrop. Looking closer, one perceives the interconnections between the forms in front of the falls--the in bric-a-brac on the window sill--and those behind, the buildings on the sill of the river...
...Lifson's work is among the most recent in the show. Distressingly, the dates of most of the other stuff reveal Faculty '76 to be a collection of artifacts. Perhaps the demands of teaching interfere with practice, but whatever the reason, drives home the point that the VES staff hasn't been producing much art worth exhibiting recently. Unquestionably they are a bunch of talented people, but what has happened to their creativity here? Faculty '76 shows artists institutionalized into Harvard professors. Trying to prove them still artists, the show is unfair to them both as practioners and professors...
...only brief respites; chances for tenure are slim. "They were quite blunt about it," says a young Harvard Ph.D. who was recently awarded an assistant professorship. "They said my appointment was as terminal as cancer." The result is bitterness toward the System. "I personally feel sold out," concludes Tom Lifson, 23, a sometime antiwar organizer now studying for a Ph.D. "All this time we were told how important it was for us to go to graduate school and how much we could do for ourselves and the country...