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A Review of Fourth Door Review, No. 7


by David Rothenberg

The Blue Pollen Issue

The Fourth Door Review is a "zine" in the best sense of the word. Appearing sporadically, about once a year, whenever the editor Oliver Lowenstein has gotten enough material to fill 140 A4 pages, this journal is eagerly awaited by its devoted readers. There is nothing quite like it, with its focus on alternative ecological vision both practical and beautiful. It reaches beyond the self-congratulatory fear-mongering common to most environmental journalism, and the aesthetic it promotes is far from the flowery propaganda that passes for eco-art in the rest of the media.

Cover of Issue Number 7: The Blue Pollen Issue
Cover of Issue Number 7: The Blue Pollen Issue
Fourth Door dares to take a critical look at sacred cows like Andy Goldsworthy. It investigates the link between techno music and the Earth. It covers the latest in postmodern architecture, and covers art from the Paleolithic to the plastic and the digital. This issue contains features on Jan Garbarek, Frank Gehry, George Dyson and Anniken Amundsen, and with every volume I find new voices that I am excited to learn about.

I call it a "zine" because it is mostly written by one contributor, the polymathic and wide-ranging Oliver Lowenstein. His unique sensibility pervades the pages, and I appreciate his particular mix of concerns. Lowenstein is making a specific argument, with a specific perspective, in this multi-volume work: that art can push the envelope with technology and culture and still be close to the Earth, that we can live a better way and still be concerned with a beauty that may surprise and astonish us. There is plenty new under the sun, and Lowenstein is still wide awake enough to find it for us.

All of you Green Museum visitors should subscribe to Fourth Door, and I for one am eagerly awaiting a whole book by the perceptive Mr. Lowenstein, so we might eventually find out what he is really thinking about. For now we have, about once a year, a new Fourth Door to savor, and I wish they came out a lot more often than that.


To learn more please visit the Fourth Door Review website.

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