The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world. Through the back door, my title also pays homage to my physicist father, Irving Zinnes, whose long discussions with my mom got her thinking about entropy and tropism in the first place.
Jennifer Parker & Jasper Johns at the Whitney
2021.11.24
The final two enlightening shows from my recent gallery visits (See my last three posts for reviews and photos from William Eckhardt Kohler , Kyle Staver , Catherine White and Larry Rivers) I'd like to post are the Jennifer Parker and Jasper Johns exhibitions at the Whitney. Cathy Diamond joined me on this leg of my tour, and so I was lucky to profit from her insightful comments. I hadn't known Parker's work before, and was pleased to find some of it was in fact quite strong. I was especially impressed by some of her portraits which seemed to bring out the sadness of the current African American experience, as well as her unexpected and sensitive flower paintings. Unfortunately, though much of her work seemed to want to make emotionally charged statements about the African American experience, it actually looked pretty, or simply thin.
Jasper Johns has never been an artist who interested me very much, so I was quite pleased to see his work from the last decade. Now in his 80's, not surprisingly he's facing his mortality, and I felt this fear, sense of eternity, and simply an emotional honesty I'd never felt from him before excuded much of this late work.