Son[i]a #233
Robert Janz
Robert Janz is a painter, sculptor, printmaker, poet and street artist. He was born in Belfast in 1932 and studied at the Rinehart School of Sculpture in Baltimore, and by the time he turned twenty he had started drawing on the wet sand on Venice Beach, Los Angeles, using sticks he picked up along the way. The lines were erased by the incoming waves and he obsessively drew them again and again. These early ephemeral drawings eventually became the project ‘Waves Between Waves’ (1977), which got him into a gallery and into the art scene.
With his long-standing interest in transience, change, and movement, the work of Robert Janz is imbued with Zen philosophy and defends the poetic potential of the ephemeral. Janz makes sculptures out of branches and bits of wood he finds on the streets. He makes drawings with water on rocks and walls. And he projects fleeting shadows in the city. Don’t be surprised if you come across him painting arrows, mountains, or buffalo on torn posters and graffiti in New York.
Or if you come upon a haiku street poem as you wonder through Tribeca: it will probably one of his ‘POST NO BILLS’ poems. For Janz, the walls of the city are like the rocks of primitive artists, and his figures, reminiscent of cave paintings, flood the streets with prehistoric echoes. From the freedom of his “outsider” art, Janz defends the incendiary power of art.
SON[I]A talks to Robert Janz about his urban interventions, about art, Buddhism, politics, poetry and the passage of time.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with finish artist Terike Haapoja that we were unable to include the first time around.
Pere Noguera
Pere Noguera is a conceptual artist. Since the early 1970s he has been experimenting with the aesthetic, poetic, and metaphysical possibilities of mud, water, landscape, paper, photocopies, photography, everyday objects, action, and the passage of time. In FONS AUDIO #51, he gives us some insight into works such as "La fotocòpia com a obra document" (1975), "Càntirs" (1976), "Pedra i ganxos de ferro. Sèrie 'Massanet'" (1977) and "Porta doble" (1990).
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Robert Janz that we were unable to include the first time around.
Àngels Ribé
Àngels Ribé creates works in which space, nature and the body become the articulating elements of a poetics of fragility based on de-emphasising the artistic object, the use of unconventional materials, and a defense of the ephemeral.