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November 2007
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
4:22:00 PM EST
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4:22:00 PM EST
A New Look At My Old Art
Flying High
Upon emigrating to the U.S. after the second world war, Marcel Duchamp declared that if this is what art would lead to then he wasn't going to make any more. Wondering if Steve Poleskie's seemingly abrupt departure from the art world might have been enacted under similar sentiments, I decided to visit him at his Ithaca residence to try to uncover what motivated him to stop making art - or at the very least, to find out what he has been up to since.
For those unfamiliar with his work, Poleskie is perhaps best known for his Aerial Sky Performances, a type of performance art involving flying an aerobatic bi-plane with trailing smoke through a series of maneuvers to create a four-dimensional design in the sky. Musicians, dancers, and parachutists often accompanied the pieces, making his art in many ways closer to dance than say, painting or sculpture. The French art critic Pierre Restany called it 'Planetary Art,' and described it thus: "It escapes the exhibition room to conquer nature, its infinite and elemental spaces."
In a 1983 performance, Poleskie flew his plane around the World Trade Towers. Today, viewing the pictures taken during the performance encourages the type of visceral reaction that really good art is capable of evoking. Says Poleskie: "You used to be able to fly around and make art - if someone tried to do this now we would think it was the second coming of Jihad."
Though the performances, as well as the drawings and collage that accompany each piece, may appear difficult to understand, seen within the context of art made at the time - when artists were either taking it out into the landscape or exploring the possibilities of performance art - the Sky Performances incorporated elements of both, while working within the framework of a previously unexplored format: the fourth dimension of time.
Sky Art proved especially popular in Europe, where an emphasis on conceptual art was the focus of many dealers, curators and critics during the 1970s and '80s. So popular in fact, that works on paper from this period are found in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London's Tate Gallery, the Castlevecchio in Italy, and the State Museum in Poland.
However, as the story goes, in 2000, Poleskie set out to destroy a vast number of his early works, and, withdrawing the rest from the market, stopped making art. "You just get tired of them, or you think the work wasn't so good anyway, so off they go. Then later you remember you pitched it out one day in a frenzy of cleaning and wish you hadn't. I remember living on 76th St. and throwing some of my sculptures down the air vent because I didn't know how else to get rid of them. "
While it is not unusual for an artist to destroy pieces or even entire collections of work, it is usually not so common for a successful artist who has managed to make a career out of it to stop. Nevertheless, that's what happened. Selling both of his airplanes, and taking early retirement from Cornell, because "it's kind of hard to teach art when you don't care about it anymore," he turned his attention to writing.
His most recent achievement being The Balloonist, a biographical novel on the Civil War aeronaut Thaddeus S. C. Lowe which, after taking four years to complete, was published earlier this year. "I figured I had exhausted the potential for Sky Art to go where it was going. Very few people understood what I was doing anyway - I think I had more influence at air show flyers than on art - so I decided to retire and stop making these events that no one cared about anyway. No sense pestering people."
Though, for the record, the evidence - the vast amount of work that is in some of the top art institutions of the world - would indicate that this is not entirely the case. Not to mention that in terms of art's influence over future generations of artmaking, it is often simply too soon to tell.
As a visual artist, Poleskie's roots are traceable to around 1958, when as an economics major at Wilkes College, he signed up for an art elective. After graduating, he moved around for a few years, traveling and working at various jobs ranging from party designer to high school teacher, and focused on his painting.
His earlier work, small, often oddly-shaped abstract landscapes, reveal his Minimalist origins, and examples can be found in collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the National Collection in Washington, D.C.
Inevitably, Poleskie decided it was time to go to the center of Western art's leading edge. Renting an empty storefront at E. 11th St., he opened a silkscreen workshop called Chiron Press, employing the young painter Brice Marden as one of his first printers. Being New York's first commercial press of its kind, Chiron was wildly successful, and soon had to relocate to larger quarters.
The new site was based at 76 Jefferson St., a five-minute walk from Max's Kansas City, the favorite hangout of the Abstract Expressionist crew, who it seems, at one point or another, all deployed Chiron's services. During the five years that Poleskie ran the operation, Chiron made prints for artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler.
With an increasing feeling that working in two dimensions was too restrictive, he expanded into the third by making sculpture. His work during the time was a kind of sculpture/painting hybrid, not entirely unlike the Minimalist 'specific objects' infiltrating the artworld at the time.
In 1968, Poleskie sold Chiron and accepted a teaching position at Cornell. It was after moving to Ithaca that he met his wife, author Jeanne Mackin. It was also when he became a pilot. "I was making these huge landscape paintings and no one would exhibit them, so I decided to learn to fly."
Whilst he has devoted a large chunk of the past four years focused on writing - he is currently wrapping up his latest novel, a fictional story centered around a political election scandal - there is evidence to suggest that he hasn't completely lost the urge to create art.
Somehow, in the process of teaching himself to operate his new digital camera, he inadvertently created a new series of images, a collection of colorful compositions featuring handsome arrangements of fruit, flowers and other pretty things, inspired by 16th Century Dutch still life paintings.
Poleskie commented that he is surprised to find the pictures 'selling like hotcakes' at the Terrain Gallery in New York. Perhaps this boost in confidence is just what he needed to reinvigorate his faith in art, and in his ability as a creator - though, it may be too soon to tell. Local residents can see one in the forthcoming group show at the Upstairs Gallery, opening on Nov. 27.
For those unfamiliar with his work, Poleskie is perhaps best known for his Aerial Sky Performances, a type of performance art involving flying an aerobatic bi-plane with trailing smoke through a series of maneuvers to create a four-dimensional design in the sky. Musicians, dancers, and parachutists often accompanied the pieces, making his art in many ways closer to dance than say, painting or sculpture. The French art critic Pierre Restany called it 'Planetary Art,' and described it thus: "It escapes the exhibition room to conquer nature, its infinite and elemental spaces."
In a 1983 performance, Poleskie flew his plane around the World Trade Towers. Today, viewing the pictures taken during the performance encourages the type of visceral reaction that really good art is capable of evoking. Says Poleskie: "You used to be able to fly around and make art - if someone tried to do this now we would think it was the second coming of Jihad."
Though the performances, as well as the drawings and collage that accompany each piece, may appear difficult to understand, seen within the context of art made at the time - when artists were either taking it out into the landscape or exploring the possibilities of performance art - the Sky Performances incorporated elements of both, while working within the framework of a previously unexplored format: the fourth dimension of time.
Sky Art proved especially popular in Europe, where an emphasis on conceptual art was the focus of many dealers, curators and critics during the 1970s and '80s. So popular in fact, that works on paper from this period are found in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London's Tate Gallery, the Castlevecchio in Italy, and the State Museum in Poland.
However, as the story goes, in 2000, Poleskie set out to destroy a vast number of his early works, and, withdrawing the rest from the market, stopped making art. "You just get tired of them, or you think the work wasn't so good anyway, so off they go. Then later you remember you pitched it out one day in a frenzy of cleaning and wish you hadn't. I remember living on 76th St. and throwing some of my sculptures down the air vent because I didn't know how else to get rid of them. "
While it is not unusual for an artist to destroy pieces or even entire collections of work, it is usually not so common for a successful artist who has managed to make a career out of it to stop. Nevertheless, that's what happened. Selling both of his airplanes, and taking early retirement from Cornell, because "it's kind of hard to teach art when you don't care about it anymore," he turned his attention to writing.
His most recent achievement being The Balloonist, a biographical novel on the Civil War aeronaut Thaddeus S. C. Lowe which, after taking four years to complete, was published earlier this year. "I figured I had exhausted the potential for Sky Art to go where it was going. Very few people understood what I was doing anyway - I think I had more influence at air show flyers than on art - so I decided to retire and stop making these events that no one cared about anyway. No sense pestering people."
Though, for the record, the evidence - the vast amount of work that is in some of the top art institutions of the world - would indicate that this is not entirely the case. Not to mention that in terms of art's influence over future generations of artmaking, it is often simply too soon to tell.
As a visual artist, Poleskie's roots are traceable to around 1958, when as an economics major at Wilkes College, he signed up for an art elective. After graduating, he moved around for a few years, traveling and working at various jobs ranging from party designer to high school teacher, and focused on his painting.
His earlier work, small, often oddly-shaped abstract landscapes, reveal his Minimalist origins, and examples can be found in collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the National Collection in Washington, D.C.
Inevitably, Poleskie decided it was time to go to the center of Western art's leading edge. Renting an empty storefront at E. 11th St., he opened a silkscreen workshop called Chiron Press, employing the young painter Brice Marden as one of his first printers. Being New York's first commercial press of its kind, Chiron was wildly successful, and soon had to relocate to larger quarters.
The new site was based at 76 Jefferson St., a five-minute walk from Max's Kansas City, the favorite hangout of the Abstract Expressionist crew, who it seems, at one point or another, all deployed Chiron's services. During the five years that Poleskie ran the operation, Chiron made prints for artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler.
With an increasing feeling that working in two dimensions was too restrictive, he expanded into the third by making sculpture. His work during the time was a kind of sculpture/painting hybrid, not entirely unlike the Minimalist 'specific objects' infiltrating the artworld at the time.
In 1968, Poleskie sold Chiron and accepted a teaching position at Cornell. It was after moving to Ithaca that he met his wife, author Jeanne Mackin. It was also when he became a pilot. "I was making these huge landscape paintings and no one would exhibit them, so I decided to learn to fly."
Whilst he has devoted a large chunk of the past four years focused on writing - he is currently wrapping up his latest novel, a fictional story centered around a political election scandal - there is evidence to suggest that he hasn't completely lost the urge to create art.
Somehow, in the process of teaching himself to operate his new digital camera, he inadvertently created a new series of images, a collection of colorful compositions featuring handsome arrangements of fruit, flowers and other pretty things, inspired by 16th Century Dutch still life paintings.
Poleskie commented that he is surprised to find the pictures 'selling like hotcakes' at the Terrain Gallery in New York. Perhaps this boost in confidence is just what he needed to reinvigorate his faith in art, and in his ability as a creator - though, it may be too soon to tell. Local residents can see one in the forthcoming group show at the Upstairs Gallery, opening on Nov. 27.
©Ithaca Times 2007
This article appears in the November 21 issue of the Ithaca Times. Check out the Photo Gallery for two interesting photos of me flying my biplane in front of the former World Trade Center towers. For more information on my Aerial Theater please check the ARCHIVES which you can access through an icon just above the top entry. Please feel free to post a comment below.
Steve Poleskie
Written by spoleskie Blog about this entry |
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