TO HAVE A GRIP ON THE EARTH SO THAT THE WHOLE OF THIS GLOBE CAN QUIVER

"In his most recent sculpture, installed at the edge of Buffalo's historic, Larkin Distric, Reitzenstein has eschewed the natural object in favor of making an industrial object more natural.  The concise gesture of an electrical tower curving back into the earth immediately evokes the sense of an entity with an organic inner life, an icon of the civilized world apparently aspiring to reacquaint itself with the actual earth from which it originated.  There is a strange quality of humility in the work-industry acknowledging its relationship to nature- but it is also strikingly dynamic, pimped out with red paint (Security Red) as though to reaffirm the pulse of life. 

Reitzenstein is specifically alluding to and idea pursued by Nikola Tesla, inventor of alternating current, in his studies into wireless electrical transmission, particularly his unrealized ideas, about using the earth itself as a transmitter.  Formally the work evokes Tesla's unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower in Long Island, albeit with the original tower's bulbous head apparently hidden beneath the earth, which was planned as a wireless communications tower. Reitzenstein's sculpture holds within it multiple meanings, if you are prone to think that the pursuit of alternate energy is too slow in development, the tower may be stubbornly sticking in its head into the ground, mourning unrealized dreams.  However, its aspect is ultimately more energetic, and lively, the emphatic expression of the ultimate Utopian promise. "

John Massier
Visual Arts Curator
Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center