Per Contra
Summer 2007
Visual Arts
Still Against The Grain: Thomas Chimes’s Commemoration Of The Original Avant-Garde, Or Of The Old Exceptions That Have Become The Rule, Or Of The Underground That Has Become Aboveground by Donald Kuspit - Click Here
"In a sense, the corpse in the conscious photograph is brought to unconscious life by Chimes’s painterly handling. Mechanically reproduced or copied in a photograph, the avant-garde artist is dehumanized and loses originality, but the painterliness rehumanizes him and preserves his originality, if only as a trace of creative spirit. Chimes is not a mechanical imitator of mechanical reproductions--his work does not serve the trendy thesis that there is no originality, only an infinite regress of copies--but rather an artist who regenerates a “degenerate” photograph by bringing it to expressive life, implying that it is creative nourishment rather than dead matter."
Donald Kuspit, The Per Contra Interview with Miriam N. Kotzin - Click Here
"But a good art critic has to know art history, and be expert in the complexities and issues of some particular area of old art. This affords a sort of stable “foundational” consciousness that allows the critic some perspective on new art, an alternative measure of value to the measures used to legislate certain sectors of new art into importance."
Rembrandt and the Jews, Revisited by Larry Silver - Click Here
"By their reckoning, the artist’s frequent depiction of Old Testament subjects, from Abraham to Daniel and Tobit, stemmed from his careful reading of the entire Bible and his sympathy for both the Jews as “People of the Book” as well as his universalizing approach to the human content of these primal stories."