The Seeing I

In this new volume, Buky Schwartz broadens the parameters he had set in 'Videoconstructions'. His wider perspective has produced sculptures that are at once witty and inventive, rich and complex and include -- in addition to video systems -- stainless steel, tables, Hebrew letters, artificial red roses, PVC tubing, scaled figures, chairs, indoor and outdoor sculptures, among other materials and objects. The two books -- available separately or together -- constitute a kind of multi-layered autobiography of the artist. Schwartz, like conceptual artists Peter Campus, Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham, engages, as John Hanhardt puts it, ""in an inquiry with the construction of the image as an experience within real time."" Schwartz ""celebrates our need for illusion, and makes that illusion something we can inhabit."" Schwartz's artistic power lies in his talent to create art objects that reverberate in our own minds; thus he creates art ""...for us to remake in our imaginations and in our direct experience of the artwork.