Burt Barr

Burt Barr (1938-2016) was a New York-based artist noted for his boundary crossing work between time-based media and still photography. Barr endowed his silent black and white videos with the luminous clarity of silver gelatin prints, clarifying their resolution in a rigorous editing process that strips them of the visual linear structure of video. They are photographs that move in time, varying from the almost imperceptible melting of an ice cube to the relentless pounding of the surf. His titles often are humorous takes on the nature of his investigations into the most common of video shooting devices: Slo Mo features a turtle moving in the slowest of slow motions, The Long Dissolve shows an ice cube dissolving, while Dolly Shot Twice is a sweeping back and forth pan (a dolly shot) of a '60s Cadillac with a woman, shot twice, slumped in the front seat.

Winter

 Elegiac in tone, the nine frames of Winter show bare branches against a pale sky. Reminiscent of Asian scroll forms, the mass of branches subtly evolves from dense to sparse as the print unfolds from left to right. The work is composed of three panels of three images each and purchased as a set.

The Gun and The Dog

Burt Barr’s photogravure The Gun and The Dog is a visually arresting comment on culture, dead serious but cartoonish and satirical as well. The pistol and the maw of the dog are a double-barreled threat pointing directly at the viewer. The black and white images, resembling magazine or billboard advertising, evoke the hair-trigger violence of American culture and its slick, packaged veneer in the mass media. The human figure, in pin stripes, is wreathed in smoke that could come from the just-fired gun or perhaps from a cigarette, while the smiling dog seems ready to lunge with its very white, very clean fangs.

Double Feature

Barr created the two-color photolithograph with two separate images on one sheet of paper, derived from his video August. The top image shows waves crashing endlessly on a beach, and the lower image pictures a woman in the rough surf. Using computer technology, Barr video-captured two images that were then output to film and onto lithography plates. They are hand printed on Arches cover white paper in an edition of 45.

!

Barr’s video-works often used black and white and worked from a singular viewpoint, transforming common objects and everyday situations into intensely focused paeans of stylistic beauty. This backlit image of a frog in a swimming pool at night is rendered in a photogravure with aquatint. Barr captured the image from a video shot in Hawaii, which he first showed projected in a 28-inch square on a 40-foot wall at the Sikkema Jenkins Gallery in New York.

Summer

Burt Barr’s four-color lithograph Summer is derived from a video shot in his garden in Long Island. On a lazy summer afternoon the artist aimed his video camera at a mirrored gazing ball bathed by a sprinkler, and captured the reflected house and surrounding landscape. A seated figure is seen in the middle ground, while the camera and tripod stand in for the artist. The flowing water and the curvature of the ball distort the image, and lend a sense of time passing or time past. The heightened, bleached out yellows and greens suggest both the heat of summer and the wistful, faded tones of an old family snapshot.

V-Formation

Barr produced V-Formation in 2004. The photogravure print is based on his site-specific video of the same title, which was inspired by the architecture of the USF Contemporary Art Museum’s East Gallery and was installed as part of the Burt Barr: Solid Water solo exhibition.

 

Further Resources

Burt Barr artist's page at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. gallery

Video walkthrough on YouTube of Burt Barr: Solid Water, the 2004 exhibition at USF Contemporary Art Museum

GS Blog Post: Burt Barr

Printmaking + Sculpture Terms

Printmaking Glossary

Sculpture Glossary

Sales

For sales, or more information about an edition, please contact Graphicstudio at (813) 974-3503 or gsoffice@usf.edu.

Copyright + Reproduction

Images of the artwork are jointly owned by the artist and Graphicstudio. Reproduction of any kind including electronic media must be expressly approved by Graphicstudio.