Thoreau heard trains in Walden. There is the recorded sound of one in the exhibition Walden, revisited, on view through April 26 at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, but there is nothing to suggest that it is anything other…
After the flood, imagine letters scattered by their floating. This is how the past returns to us, in fragments of single pages pulled free of their bindings, or as newspaper clippings of memory, loosened from an album. As an artist…
Charcoal is made by burning, so an artist might use slivers of charred ruins to draw with. In the midst of all the color, it is the prominence of this dark medium from out of the flames that resonates most…
By STEPHEN V. KOBASA This is the scene that tells everything. The soldier is visible only from the chest down, wearing shorts, sneakers, and no socks. He is firing an automatic weapon. The spent bullet casings are falling around his…
By STEPHEN V. KOBASA When asked his opinion of Western civilization, Gandhi famously replied that he thought it would be a good idea. Peter Waite¹s sculptures are evidence of it being a bad one. These are miniatures of the frenzy…
By STEPHEN V. KOBASA Do you remember Franz Kafka’s drawing machine? It is the executioner’s device of the story In the Penal Colony, where it punctures the text of the violated law onto a prisoner¹s body. In Daniel Heyman’s images…
By STEPHEN V. KOBASA War’s dogs are out and about. We should know this. A thousand Americans dead in Afghanistan, and the number of slaughtered civilians only an underestimated approximation. But we are not keen to have such news. In…
By STEPHEN V. KOBASA Comedy refuses mortality. That is Buster Keaton’s lesson, and why, I think, he is a greater artist than Charlie Chaplin. There is something too elaborately contrived about all of Chaplin’s encounters with disaster; he simpers too…
By STEPHEN V. KOBASA In Provincetown, there is a great deal of what no longer is. Who sits in the poet Stanley Kunitz’s garden now, or writes in Norman Mailer’s house? And even in October, the hulking tourist buses angle…
NATHAN LEWIS @ SETON ART GALLERY By Stephen V. Kobasa What if there was painting that mattered? There is an unequivocal answer to this question in the survey of work by Nathan Lewis now on exhibit in West Haven, Connecticut.…
By STEPHEN V. KOBASA Print this article These were the flash cards for resistance. Corita Kent began as an artist in a Roman Catholic religious order, until her outrageous reverence (“Mary Mother is the juiciest tomato of them all”) proved…