|
 Crossing Borders by Steve Kowit & Lenny Silverberg
ISBN
978-1-933132-74-7
$18.00 US |
$20.00 CAN
Book design by Deborah Ross
Buy the book at
SPD>
Find the book on
Amazon>
Although
humor can be a switchblade of critical
deconstruction and these guys
can swing it with the best of them, right here,
right now, they’re going for soul.
Cutting deeper.
So get ready. They render a double dose,
slicing to the bone
with achingly
fine-tuned artistry. Kowit and Silverberg have each honed their
characteristic
styles down to a focused, reductive form—accomplished contrarianly (as is
their wont)
by addition.
Kowit plus Silverberg equals way more than
two. Yet
together, they reduce abstract
social, political and economic issues to
somethng more basic: representational humanity.
R.B. Kitaj once wrote, “Art needs a job.”
No shit.
Here it is: Making better metaphors.
Lenny has made a great one: He draws lines of
baggage. Literally
and figuratively.
Recently, by way of explanation—or something—he told me, “I
draw baggage from my head.”
Robbie Conal, from the
Introduction to Crossing Borders
Lenny
Silverberg and Steve Kowit
met in 1960 when they were
students at Brooklyn College where
Lenny was studying in the Art
Department
with the painters Ad Reinhardt,
Burgoyne Diller and Robert Henry, and Steve was
studying linguistic philosophy
with John Hospers and Martin Lean. They both
contributed to the Brooklyn College
Art and Literature Magazine, Landscapes,
of
which Lenny was Art editor in 1961-62.
|
