ART BLOG
ART BLOG
Currently creating an archive of the Art Blog from 2012 through 2024.
3/22/2025
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“In Columbus he is installing “The Green Verb” with sponsorship by the Ohio Foundation on the Arts and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The “verb” of the title is the laser, the subjects are space, light and color, and the predicate is the architecture of space, Krebs said. The title also is a compliment to cooperative Ohio State Library personnel who work in the Front Street building, Krebs said.” Laser puts idea of art in new light, Nancy Gilson, Columbus Citizen-Journal, 1982
Laser puts idea of art in new light, Nancy Gilson, Columbus Citizen-Journal, May 27, 1982
“One afternoon early this week, I crawled out a window on the 13th floor of a downtown building and met a laser artist.
Rockne Krebs was installing his laser on the roof of the state office building, 65 S. Front St. Krebs looked like a jazzy construction worker in blue jeans, a tiger-striped T-shirt, leather vest and sunglasses. We walked to the edge of the building and Krebs pointed out the path his paintbrush – a laser beam – would take on his canvas – the sky.
Krebs is not a routine artist. “I have indeed been on a few more rooftops than most artists,” he said. He specializes in large, nighttime outdoor pictures in which vivid laser beams are bounced off buildings and shot up into the sky.
In Columbus he is installing “The Green Verb” with sponsorship by the Ohio Foundation on the Arts and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The “verb” of the title is the laser, the subjects are space, light and color, and the predicate is the architecture of space, Krebs said. The title also is a compliment to cooperative Ohio State Library personnel who work in the Front Street building, Krebs said…
Krebs visited Columbus several months ago to choose the best site for his piece. “I like to find a place that gives me two good, clean moves – like a chess game – and then work from there,” he said. Then he spent three weeks planning and another two weeks installing.
The best place to view “The Green Verb” will be the small courtyard between the two Front Street buildings. But the piece also will be visible throughout much of downtown. The piece will not be entirely visible from a single location: viewers should move around and study the sculpture from a variety of angles.
“The Green Verb” should change with the weather. Dust, chemical particles and rain, for instance, will alter the colors.
The best place to view “The Green Verb” will be the small courtyard between the two Front Street buildings. But the piece also will be visible throughout much of downtown. The piece will not be entirely visible from a single location: viewers should move around and study the sculpture from a variety of angles.
“The Green Verb” should change with the weather. Dust, chemical particles and rain, for instance, will alter the colors.
Krebs has worked on large outdoor laser pieces since 1968. He has produced 45 of them. One piece in Disneyland was described as “ricocheting light beams that weave a dramatic web.”
The difficulty in being a “monumental laser artist,” Krebs said, is making the complicated building and environment arrangements. Before he begins a piece, Krebs files an 80-page report with the Bureau of Ecological Development in Washington D.C.
In Columbus, Krebs said, he has had “total cooperation.” “I think we have an opportunity here to make a piece with no compromises. It could be very good.”
Laser art now is generally embraced by the artistic community that often shunned it in the late 1960s. “There are still people who have difficulty accepting it,” Krebs said. “The piece only exists for a given period of time, which is _______ to the established art world. The ____time to study and absorb it, _____ piece like this, which exists for ___ days, is often seen by more people than see an artwork in a museum.”
Krebs agrees that his laser pieces are entertaining, but it is more important to him that his artistic statement is sound. He turned down an opportunity to tour with the Rolling Stones, explaining that rock artists want “flicker and flash” and the “situation simply didn’t lend itself to making art.”
Photo caption – ARTIST’S BRUSH – Rockne Krebs, kneeling, and Edward Perry make adjustments on the Argon Ion laser they will use to create a downtown sky sculpture. The sculpture, titled “The Green Verb,” will be visible June 1-6. ( C J Photo by Arlen Pennell)
11/17/2024
No Land (detail), Rockne Krebs, 1966
collection: The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
9/29/2024
The city at night is light, Rockne Krebs says... 1973
I found myself thinking of an evening in 1973, in balmier weather, when I walked from my apartment a few blocks from the Art Museum to see another temporary installation there, Sky Bridge Green by Rockne Krebs.
It consisted of a green laser beam shot from the Art Museum to a mirror atop City Hall and bounced several times across the Parkway. The atmosphere was like a party. People kept throwing objects
to see if they could make this monumental beam of light disappear for a split second.
It was so much fun seeing the amazing light and the community it created, I went back for several more evenings to see it again and again.
The Krebs piece dramatized the polarities of the Parkway - with one end in the heart of the city with its commerce and politics, the other at the Art Museum, representing aesthetic contemplation
and the gateway to a natural world beyond. On the ground, the Parkway often falls short, but Krebs* work shined a new kind of light on the ideals that brought it into being. ~ Thomas Hine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 24, 2019
THAT Sky-Pi (later changed to Sky Bridge Green) should really be called Calder Green. Never mind its given name or nonname. Just think of it as a laser beam environment.
The laser lights will be greenish in color and here is where the Calder Green comes in, says Krebs. He sees his piece as linking three generations of works by the Calder family: the Alexander Calder mobile in the museum; the Alexander Stirling Calder Swann Memorial Fountain in Logan Square; the Alexander Milne Calder statue of Billy Penn atop of City Hall.
Using a laser beam is just a way of making sculpture, says Krebs, 34, whose 19 other laser environments have been shown nationwide. The laser is a tool, not unlike a pencil. The light from the laser is constituted so you can direct it to get linear drawings in space.
It is an unusual 20th Century kind of structural drawing, says Krebs, who points to historical precedents, such as Naum Gabo*s Cathedral of Light, of using light as the structure for art. ~ Nessa Forman, Art Editor, The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Laser Sky-Pi Will Light Up Parkway Tonight, May 11, 1973 (excerpts)
I was working at the Philadelphia Museum of Art back in 1973, when David Katzive, the head of the Museum's Division of Education and the Urban Outreach Program, commissioned Sky Bridge Green, which was one of the most extraordinary, beautiful artworks I have ever experienced.
I watched Rockne tinker with the impressively huge laser that he had set up on the east portico of the Museum to shoot a beam of light straight down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to a mirror on Billy Penn's hat on the top of City Hall. ~ William F. Stapp, December 2, 2012.
Former Curator of Photography, The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC / Former Staff Lecturer Education Department, The Philadelphia Museum of Art
Excerpt from Rockne Krebs: Photographs + Interpretations by Carol Harrison, 2013.
Images in the video / 1-3 scans from the 1973 roll of negatives / 4-5 photos by Patrick Radebaugh for the museum and the LA Times and Washington Post News Service. / Color photo by Rockne Krebs / newspaper articles / Art in America, September-October 1973, color photo / Museum wall text from the group exhibition Minimalism in Motion, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2015 / Study for Sky Bridge Green in East Court, Philadelphia Festival, Rockne Krebs, 1973. Collection: Philadelphia Museum of Art / Study for Sky Bridge Green in East Court, View of Piece from Ben Franklin Parkway, Rockne Krebs, 1973. Collection: Philadelphia Museum of Art.