Suzi Gablik

Suzi Gablik, born in 1934 in New York, New York, is an American artist, a prolific and influential visionary author and art critic, and a professor of art history and art criticism.^[1] She lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.^[2] A prevailing theme for Gablik, enunciated in Has Modernism Failed? and quoted in the Kirkus Reviews article about her book The Reenchantment of Art, states, "Since the enlightenment . . . our view of what is real has been organized around the hegemony of a technical and materialist world view . . . we no longer have any sense of having a soul."^[3]

Education and art training

In 1951, after a summer studying at Black Mountain College, she entered Hunter College where she studied with Robert Motherwell and received her B.A in 1955.^[4] After working primarily as a painter, she had her first solo show in 1966. Later, she turned her attention to collage.

Work as art critic

Gablik is a writer of articles for Art in America (for which she was the London correspondent for fifteen years),^[5] Art News (1962-1966),^[6] Times Literary Supplement,^[7][8] The New Criterion^[9] and web blogs ^[10] Chapters 2 and 5, the second and last chapters of her book Has Modernism Failed? ^[11][12] are included in an aesthetics online study guide. The book was published in print in 1982 by Thames & Hudson. In her article "Deconstructing aesthetics:Toward a responsible art" in New Art Examiner, she contended that "The national framework of aesthetics--which has favored an ontology of objectification, permanence, and egocentricity--has hardened into a presumption that is conserving and reinforcing a reluctance to make art which is inherently communicative and compassionately responsive."^[13]

Author

Her first book was Pop Art Redefined, co-authored with art critic John Russell.^[14] In 1977 she published Other books include:The Reenchantment of Art,^[15][16][17] Has Modernism Failed,^[18] Conversations before the End of Time,^[19] Living the Magical Life: An Oracle Adventure,^[20][21] and ^[22] She wrote the book Magritte about the Belgian surrealist René Magritte while living with the Magrittes.^[23] Some of her articles are interviews with other artists, art critics, or philosophers such as Richard Shusterman.^[24] She has also written articles for exhibition catalogues of shows which she has curated.^[25]

Teaching

Gablik taught at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts and Washington and Lee University and lectured at many others. In 1976 - 1979 she participated in US International Communications Agency lecture tours in India, Hungary, Pakistan, and countries of South Asia.^[26] She participated in a March 7, 2013 podcast on the subject of "Solastalgia and Creative Response" with Angelo Manno and Glenn Albrecht.^[27] She gave a presentation at the Fall 1986 Mountain Lake Symposium on "Postmodernism and the Question of Meaning: For a New Spiritualism."^[28]

Biography

The daughter of Anthony J. Gablik and Geraldine Schwarz Gablik, Suzi Gablik was born in New York, New York in 1934. She "hung out with Jasper Johns"^[29] and was an acquaintance of John Cage, Ad Rhinehart, Ray Johnson, and Robert Rauschenberg. In 2014, she donated a collection of her papers, lectures, notes, and other files to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.^[30]

References