European and North American books, music, and films (access to outside artistic production had been previously restricted under Stalin). During this time it also became easier to make films, and Tarkovsky managed to direct several, though not without some resistance from Soviet authorities, who accused him of elitism and of having “cut [himself] off from reality.”1 He eventually left the Soviet Union, and although he never identified as a dissident, he was ardently anti-materialist. Disturbed by both the science-worship of the Communist leadership and the consumerism of the West (though he saw much Soviet art, too, as made for a kind of consumption), he worried about the destructive capacity of civilizations that had abandoned their spirituality. He wrote of Marx and Engels: “They observed the situation as it was then, without analyzing its causes: namely, man’s failure to recognise that he was responsible for his own spirituality. Once man had turned history into a soulless and alienated machine, it immediately started to require human lives as the nuts and bolts that would keep it going.”2 Included in this exhibition is a collection of clips from Tarkovksy’s film Solaris (1972), based on Stanislaw Lem’s book of the same title. The film’s plot consists of scientists visiting a sentient planet whose consciousness is capable of influencing the realities of the researchers observing it, bringing forth hallucinations or apparitions of significant people and things from their pasts. The clips are of the planet’s oceanic surface as depicted in the film; composed of overlapping and manipulated shots of Earth’s oceans and sky, they call to mind the idea that consciousness itself may not exist solely within the bounds of the human brain. —EDB 1 2
Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (1986; rept. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 165. Ibid., 235.
Lenore Tawney b. 1907, Lorain, Ohio; d. 2007
The space around Lenore Tawney’s work—the air and light circling the towering “woven forms” for which she is best known, the expanse of her studio, the meticulous zone of graph paper—is a material that the artist utilized as much as linen, wool, ink, or paper. Tawney is a pioneer of fiber art, only achieving recognition later
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