Using grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation, and The Massschusetts Council on the Arts, hundreds of artists streamed through the studios of the WGBH New Television Workshop.
Ros and Harris were two of the earliest artists, along with fellow artist Allen Finneran who had banded together into a group called ZONE.
These were exciting moments as we allowed artists to take control of the television equipment and broadcast to an audience who were just beginning to hear the phrase “video art.” Ros Barron worked closely with David Atwood, a very talented producer/director at WGBH, producing some amazing videos.
A new website celebrates the work of these two artists who I met while running the WGBH New Television Workshop. It was a real pleasure working with such talented and serious artists as Ros and Harris.
By John Minkowsky — for the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (excerpts)
Over the past four decades, Ros Barron has created a remarkable body of video works that evolve gracefully around a consistent corpus of themes, images, and personal stylistic motifs. Time, self-definition, and the nature of consciousness itself — these are among her central concerns. She has often made use of the mannerisms and attributes of surrealism as well as elements of the occult to accomplish these ends.
Among her 18 video works there is a notable quartet in homage to Rene Magritte, some of whose characteristic images and strategies she has embraced and built upon to her own ends. The Artist speaks to the Artist who speaks to Art as it pertains to the Life of the Mind, and the results are an impressive achievement.
The video works she has produced at the New Television Workshop at WGBH, Boston, as a Rockefeller Artist-in-Television, and independently have not been in wide commercial distribution, but instead in visual art contexts: The Museum of Modern Art; Mobius; the Helen Schlien Gallery; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, as well as in university Visiting Artist Programs …
Harris and Ros Barron
After meeting Harris Barron at the Massachusetts College of Art in 1953, her marriage to him (she was 18; he was 25) was life-changing.
Her painting and Harris’s sculpture, growing larger, more complex and simpler — shown in Boston and New York galleries, along with his large-scale works commissioned for architecture — preceded the 1968 development of a unique visual theater, ZONE, an intense collaboration with Harris Marron and Allan Finneran — Harris’s former studio assistant.
After ZONE’s initial and very successful 1968 sold-out performances at Brandeis’ Spingold Theater, WGBH producers offered the three ZONE directors Rockefeller Artists-in-Television grants to work at the station’s studios. Ros’s video focus began there with a major work, Headgame. Barron’s involvement with video process and a developed philosophy has deepened considerably with the 18 video works made over the years since Headgame.
The ZONE group went on to tour 13 New York State SUNY campuses with complex visual theater programs. In 1971 they were commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum to design and realize a major performance work based on the existing 1909 notes for Kandinsky’s never realized Der Gelbe Klange [The Yellow Sound] for the museum’s 1972 Kandinsky retrospective.
From Vimeo
In 1967, Ros and Harris Barron and Alan Finneran — a former assistant in Harris’ sculpture studio — began talking about widening the sphere of their works to include elements of new technologies, to collaborate on what they saw as integrated “visual theater performance works.” This sample footage of ZONE productions was filmed in 1970.
Ron Della Chiesa, 73, voice of the BSO, sounds off on musicians from Beethoven to Lady Gaga
Over your 50 years in radio, which job has been your favorite? My MusicAmerica show at WGBH. Starting in 1978, it ran for 18 years. I played an eclectic blend of music, incorporating live interviews with people like Dizzy Gillespie and Andre Previn. I could never have done that show in a commercial setting.
Who was your best interview? Tony Bennett, [talking] about his painting, philosophy, the business. He’s a renaissance man. Read more
Robert B. Peirce, of Dedham, passed away Saturday, October 1st, after a 6 year battle with prostate cancer. He fought with strength, hope, and grace. He was surrounded by his many family and loved ones at the time of his passing.
Bob was born in 1939 in Upper Darby, PA. He graduated from the University of Delaware with a degree in electrical engineering. He later went on to do post-graduate studies at Queens University in Canada and Northeastern University. Bob spent his career in television and post production here in the Boston area, including positions as Director of Engineering for E.E.N. and co-founder of Pisces Productions.
Bob was an avid outdoorsman, pursuing his passions for rock and tree climbing, sea kayaking, bicycling, hiking, and cross-country skiing. Bob also enjoyed putting his MacGyver-like skills to work building furniture and doing home repairs. But, above all, Bob was happiest spending time with his beloved wife Angela Kane, his children Robert Peirce and wife Liz, Garry Peirce and wife Brenda, daughter Lisa (Peirce) Boyle and husband John, stepchildren Bernadette (Kane) Goudreault, John Kane and wife Kristin, Rich Kane, Linda (Kane) Maerov and husband Jeff, and Grandchildren Alex, Kate, Jenna, Cammie, Adriana, Ben, Andrew, Haley, and Samantha.
With the loss of Steve Jobs, we have our own remembrance of him, in a superb WGBH interview from 1990. It’s from a series called The Machine That Changed The World. In it, Jobs talks about how that revolutionary device, the Macintosh personal computer, came to be and the particular gifts of the people who made it.
Steve Jobs: “I think the Macintosh was created by a group of people who felt that there wasn’t a strict division between science and art. Or in other words, that mathematics is really a liberal art if you look at it from a slightly different point of view. And why can’t we interject typography into computers. Why can’t we have computers talking to us in English language? And looking back, five years later, this seems like a trivial observation. But at the time it was cataclysmic in its consequences. And the battles that were fought to push this point of view out the door were very large…”
Jobs: “My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the ‘thinker-doer’ in one person. And if we really go back and we examine, did Leonardo [da Vinci] have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years out in the future what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it? Of course not. Leonardo was the artist but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. He knew about pigments, knew about human anatomy. And combining all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, was the exceptional result.”
Get ready for a mind-expanding trip with LSD guru Timothy Leary on Open Vault. We’ve just posted LSD: Lettvin vs. Leary, an extraordinary hour-long debate from 1967, shot before a packed house at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium.
The posting comes in connection with an upcoming radio feature story on WGBH 89.7 by local Morning Edition host Bob Seay. It’s about some young researchers at Harvard Medical School who have cracked open the door to the LSD vault, which has pretty much been locked for more than forty years.
We’ll post a link to the radio story when it airs. In the meantime, here’s a brief description of the film:
Leary speaks first. Dressed in Indian-style tunic and trousers, he makes his case mainly in darkness, with psychedelic images flickering on a screen behind him. He describes LSD as a sacrament, a psychedelic technique that enables us to reach a deeper level of thinking and inspiration. “It’s a gamble,” Leary acknowledges:
It’s Russian Roulette…I don’t know the effects of LSD on the nervous system…[But] of all the Russian Roulette games I see around me, including Vietnam and polluted air, I would say the Russian Roulette of LSD is about the best gamble in the house.
Lettvin then takes the stage. In his short-sleeved shirt and pocket protector, he seems like a character in a different play. He offers an impassioned critique of Leary’s case, based in part on his experience as a senior psychiatrist in an addict ward. “I look upon you as a fundamentally vicious tool of the devil,” he says to Leary, “and I will explain to you why.”
Lettvin compares the effects of another drug, alcohol, with those of LSD, focusing on what he calls LSD’s “return trips,” the repeated episodes that sometimes follow a single dose of the drug. “You pay for whatever visions you get by this loss in judgment,” he says, “the loss of judgment that stays and stays.”
He sums up his criticism of Leary’s case with one word. “[It’s] not a scientific word, wrote a critic in the Boston Globe, [but] sometimes the right word has to come from the street.”
The film was produced by Austin Hoyt, and shot and edited by Boyd Estus.
Ron Della Chiesa, 73, voice of the BSO, sounds off on musicians from Beethoven to Lady Gaga
From Gary Peirce
Ros and Harris Barron in the ZONE
Harris and Ros Barron
From Fred Barzyk — 11/20/2011
Using grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation, and The Massschusetts Council on the Arts, hundreds of artists streamed through the studios of the WGBH New Television Workshop.
Ros and Harris were two of the earliest artists, along with fellow artist Allen Finneran who had banded together into a group called ZONE.
These were exciting moments as we allowed artists to take control of the television equipment and broadcast to an audience who were just beginning to hear the phrase “video art.” Ros Barron worked closely with David Atwood, a very talented producer/director at WGBH, producing some amazing videos.
A new website celebrates the work of these two artists who I met while running the WGBH New Television Workshop. It was a real pleasure working with such talented and serious artists as Ros and Harris.
By John Minkowsky — for the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (excerpts)
From Vimeo