Reconstruction 10.1 (2010)

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Creation / Christina Fez-Barringten

A new beginning in the Grace of God. This collage exhibits the exuberance of victory. The joy of man and nature of the Lord’s triumph over evil and death.

<1>Art works of the so-called Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the sixties. Christina’s Psychic Automatism takes the form of graphic memoirs made during the sixties. While they seem to be Pop Art, Surreal, Fantasy metaphors they are really a re-assemblage of deconstructed reality.

<2> Christina’s Giclées Collages combine the beauty and brilliance of this printing technology. While photographic prints are somewhat dull and limited a giclée print let her collages pop with deep blacks, saturation and gradations hard to achieve with other media.

<3>"As she broke the Plexiglas into fragments, she also tore the magazine’s pages. As she reassembled the Plexiglas fragments to a form a new reality so she assembled the bits and pieces of magazine sheets to form metaphors of spirit, fashion, urbanism, and a fantasy life into a visual memoir of the Love Generation."

<4> The Baby Boomers of today grew up in the midst of the greatest cultural revolution of our time. A revolution, which emerged out the beat generation into the hippies’ creativity in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and England’s Soho. It was the beginning of the culture of youth where being over thirty was ancient.

<5> Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, sounds, feelings, and impressions of her three creative days in Puerto Rico while TV programs like Laugh In and the first run of Star Trek were airing in the states. At Yale she and Barie gave a lecture series published as Architecture the Making of Metaphors, encouraged by Dean Charles Moore with John Cage, Paul Weiss, Robert Venturi and others. At the time Timothy Leary was advocating the wonders of LSD while the young were tripping out on Broadway and loving at Woodstock. Society listened to acid rock and painted psychedelic illustrations and paintings. They listened while crowds proclaimed against the Vietnam War to “Make Love and Not War” while the musical Hair reaped in millions at the box office. The streets of New Haven were charged with African Americans rioting against the “establishment.” Christina dressed in her own designed and high fashion minis and soaked in the psychedelic sounds of Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Bee Gees, Beatles and the Mamas and the Papas. All the while she collected the many magazines she would later use in her collages. She and her husband made graffiti and guerilla art on buildings in Puerto Rico.

<6> Christina’s Pop Art collages are a part of visual artistic movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain. It paralleled in the late 1950s in the United States. The early 50s was the time when Christina had to flee from East to West Germany, leaving her home city of Leipzig. Christina was born and educated in Leipzig and its surrounding area. It was the home of Gutenberg, Luther, Bach, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Handel, Klinger, Goethe’s Faust and Auerbach’s Keller, only to mention a few. Its neighboring small town is Dessau, the seat of the Bauhaus. Christina grew up in an atmosphere of great music and art. She draws upon that culture and sensitivities of grace and tenacity of that time.

<7> Christina was the first artist to use Plexiglas (acrylic). Her sculptures are amazing examples of three dimensional abstract expressionism and movement in the transparency of space. She studied sculpture under Peter Augustino at Columbia University. While Pop Art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, Christina’s work challenged this mundane idea with her passion for harmony, grace and balance. She demonstrated that the two could work together and that “deconstructivism,” Dada and Surrealism could be placed into world of fashion and cosmopolitan urbanism.

<8> Christina’s giclée collages are her response to Abstract Expressionism and marked a return to representational art. She uses images from mass culture and ordinary commerce as a relatively new development. In fact her work incorporates the shapes and forms of her abstract expressionist foundation where each piece is a whole shape consisting of abstract forms arrayed in a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms in tension and counter tension, dynamics and repose.

<9>While Christina loathes any social preoccupation with psychoanalysis, her work is pure imagination drawn from her own pure psychic automatism, by which she proposes to express the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation. She puts into practice Husserl’s theory phenomenology of subjective experience as the source of all of our knowledge of objective phenomena.

<10> Christina’s Psychic Automatism is a surrealist technique involving spontaneous assemblage without conscious aesthetic or moral self-censorship. Automatism is perhaps parallel to the non-idiomatic improvisation of free jazz.

<11> Christina’s Collage surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.

<12> Christina’s mass image art combines eclectic mysticism, high-end fashion metaphors and values of her real and exaggerated impression of the social values around her. With each completed piece we see the combined segments of what man has made out of modern reality.

<13> Like all the pop artist of her time, Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Liechtenstein, Christina delights in using and reusing and converting the obvious into the new. This fact remains also true in her acrylic paintings. She is a true maker of metaphors, making the strange familiar and communicating one thing in terms of another. Formally trained also as a fashion illustrator at the New York Art Students League she uses figures, costumes and textures to recreate styles and fashion looks of the dream world.

 

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