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Some of Wise's reasons for choosing a career as a gallery owner are revealed in various announcements for the gallery; they are playful, eccentric, and personal compared to the usual PR fare. The announcement for a 1965 exhibition of computer-generated pictures by Bela Julesz and Michael Noll consisted of four computer cards. The press release for "Summer Lights" in 1968 begins, "Rarely, but nevertheless now and then, because one does not expect too much, one is pleasantly surprised." In another 1968 release, after a quote from "Ecclesiastes," "But time and chance happeneth to them all," Wise wrote, A season's program hangs on the Ecclesiastical "but." In months ahead time and perhaps chance are bringing light to the Wise Gallery. R was perhaps by chance that many artists on several continents are choosing this time to reintroduce light as a dominant formal component after the long lapse since Impressionism. Wise's genuine interest in new technologies soon led him to electronics, and in early 1969 he began to explore artists' television. By 1969, video was gaining a furious if somewhat limited momentum as more artists began to use portapaks. In New York a small interconnected group exchanged ideas and equipment: Paul Ryan, a research assistant with Marshall McLuhan at Fordham University, lent Fordham's equipment to Frank Gillette, a painter; filmmaker Ira Schneider met Gillette at a party and later taught a video workshop at Antioch College with Gillette. At that time Eric Siegel was working alone, experimenting with television hardware, and Les Levine, Tambellini, and Paik had begun exhibiting video work. * The younger generation has rebelled against its elders in the home. it has stormed the campuses. About the only target remaining in loco parentis is that preoccupier of youth, television. Last week the television generation struck there too, but the rebellion as half in fun.....Within the confines of two rooms, 25 TV sets glare and blare at one another. The ten artists, all in their 20s or 30s, are sculptors from the Kinetic School, research protégées of Marshall McLuhan or electronics experimenters, united by disgust with usual TV fare.21 -Michael Shamberg The Moorman-Paik collaboration is obviously the show-stopper of this quite dazzling exhibition in which artists...offer their own TV fare, most of it far more engaging than anything the TV camera records. -John Gruen -->> next page |
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