PAST 2004 | BORIS LURIE: FEEL-paintings show — Catalog + Preface

executed for
Amikam Goldman's Film " NO!art MAN"
JANOS GAT GALLERY
1100 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10028
February 17 - March 20, 2004
Catalog: 16 pages, 8.4 x 6.6 inches,
with an essay by Boris Lurie published as the 1988 Edition Hundertmark Poster of the Galerie Hundertmark, Cologne, "Feel-painting" exhibition reproduced in facsimile as the centerfold of this catalog. Translated from the original German by Karina von Tippelskirch and Boris Lurie. Cover photograph of Boris Lurie with "Feel-painting" by Mike Maytal. Special thanks to Dimitriy Rozin.

BORIS LURIE: Introduction to Janos Gat Gallery's "Feel-painting" exhibition with Amikam Goldman's film "NO!art Man", featuring Rocco Armento, Arturo Schwarz, Dabney Hailey, Dietmar Kirves, Gertrude Stein, Clayton Patterson, Martin Kirves, Boris Lurie, Amikam Goldman and Yonni Maron (photographs)

Amikam Goldman worked on a documentary film, the "NO!art-man," so to speak about me-and much more-for a period of about 3 years... while laboring full time at Kim's record store on New York's Saint Marks Place in the old Lower East Side, now upscale-renamed the "East Village." As crowning glory to his intended masterpiece, he proposed that I perform some feel-painting before his camera; he insisted so. I don't like such undertaking, particularly when it comes to so called "Feel-painting," which should be an entirely personal, dead-quiet affair (...with NO!art-making it is different; it could also be a group activity; at one time, for instance, Sam Goodman contributed his final touch to my already finished large-size "Saturation Painting"-a swift caricature of my face.) Furthermore, I thought that such public painting-action had been performed quite a bit many times before... and usually, by most of the painters, even more artificially than "arty." Also, Picasso performed such painting/drawing on glass plates for the movie-camera; and naturally, the French artist Matthieu did public painting in front of large theatre-audiences in the 1950's-earliest perhaps of "performance events."

So I resisted and delayed, but finally gave in, and Ami Goldman run out of my East 6th Street workshop to a hardware store on First Avenue to buy a huge aluminum pot in which to mix the paint and wax, and then heat the mixture dangerously on the gas stove.

Clayton Patterson and Charlie Rehwinkle watched religiously in appreciative silence as I publicly performed the extreme private acts of "Feel-painting," pushing, scratching and slapping. They said they liked the results. Well, it's been done. And Amikam Goldman and his camera were outright happy. And so was I-since I had overcome, perhaps in sinfulness. And Janos Gat liked that section of the film so much that he wanted to exhibit those "Feel-paintings" later in his gallery together with showing Amikam's film. Everyone is ever happy.

(P.S. The two paintings in white on black canvas belong to a previously made set of "feel-paintings" containing concentration-camp echoes.)