New York Times Review:
Norman Tuck
The New York Times - Review: Norman Tuck
(Exit Art Gallery, 578 Broadway)
June 28, 1985, pg. C-24
Review by Michael Brenson
Norman Tuck is a gifted artist who makes large kinetic sculptures, some of them elegant and funny, that wait for us to set them in motion. Each object, in materials ranging from steel to wood, can be identified with a machine we know. When the sculptures move, however, they shift our perspective away from the routine order of machines in the direction of ritual and disorder, in the process suggesting the imaginative potential of objects about which we normally do not think.
The most complex work in this show, “Random Clockwork,” consists of bamboo poles organized into the frame of a tall, tepeelike construction. When a metal weight is attached to a string on one or the other side, the poles start banging away at each other. The sounds suggest the ticking of a crazy clock. The clacking wood makes us think of jousting, or of Karate chops. Some of the movements seem slapstick, some lethal. (Through tomorrow.)