*In memoriam: with this podcast we invoke the extremely rare and charming
wisdom of Robert Janz (1932-2021), while he shares his urban interventions,
his take on art, Buddhism, politics, poetry and the passage of time.*
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http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/robert-janz-/capsula>
Listen to Robert Janz:
http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/robert-janz-/capsula
Painter, sculptor, printmaker, poet and street artist Robert Janz 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 made sculptures out of branches and bits
of wood he found on the streets. He made drawings with water on rocks and
walls. And he projected fleeting shadows in the city. Don’t be surprised if
you had come across him painting arrows, mountains, or buffalo on torn
posters and graffiti in New York. Or if you came upon a haiku street poem
as you wandered through Tribeca: it was probably one of his 'POST NO BILLS'
poems. For Janz, the walls of the city were 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 defended
the incendiary power of art.
*Timeline*
*03:14* I'm not a street artist. I do things in the street
*08:05* Art words
*10:16* From the caves of Almeria to the asphalt of Tribeca
*12:50* Waterglyphs
*13:45* People cannot see what there are not prepared to see
*15:35* A work that disappears
*18:25* Paper and lemon
*19:50* Politics and poetry
*21:58* The power of words
*RIP, you charming soul!*