Cinema Effect

Published by the Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution
Washington, DC, in association with
D Giles Ltd, London
000 illustrations, 000 in color
Front and back cover:
Kelly Richardson, Exiles of the Shattered Star, 2006
HH_cinema_dustjacket.indd 1
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Available in the US through D.A.P./
Distributed Art Publishers
155 Sixth Avenue, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10013
Tel: 212 627-1999 Fax: 212 627-9484
The Cinema Effect:
Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image
With contributions by Kerry Brougher, Anne
Ellegood, Kelly Gordon, Kristen Hileman,
and Tony Oursler
The Ci
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The Cinema Effect Illusion, Reality, and the
Moving Image offers the first in-depth exploration of contemporary moving-image art and
examines the ways in which the cinematic has
blurred cultural distinctions between reality and
illusion. Cinema was the unrivaled art form of
the twentieth century; in the art world, the use
of film and video and the appropriation of cinematic language and devices for works in a
range of media has been growing since the early
1960s. In the realm of popular culture, the
influence of this technology and its vocabulary
has grown to the point where the boundaries
between “real life” and make-believe are at the
least blurred and at most indecipherable.
The volume opens with an overview by Kerry
Brougher of the cultural, social, and psychological issues raised by this two-part exhibition
that reflects the opposing poles at the core of
cinema and its role in art and contemporary
culture. Part I, Dreams, is explored by Kelly Gordon,
who discusses how and why moving-image
work has shifted from the margins to the center
of art production and considers the analogous
relationship between cinema technology and
the psychology of dreams and the ways in which
artists compel or challenge the suspension of
disbelief, encouraging viewers’ awareness of
their participation in this process. Part II, Realisms,
shifts the focus to the larger societal impact of
cinema’s pervasiveness and looks at the work of
emerging artists. Kristen Hileman explores the
complex issue of authenticity in art, film, and
culture. Anne Ellegood examines issues of subjectivity and identity raised by the artists in
the exhibition.
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The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image
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The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image
Organized by Kerry Brougher, Anne Ellegood, Kelly Gordon, and Kristen Hileman
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc
in association with D Giles Limited, London
Smithsonian
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
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This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition The
Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image, organized by
the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, DC
Page 4
00
Foreword Olga Viso
00
Introduction and Acknowledgments Kerry Brougher
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
Part I: Dreams, February 14–May 11, 2008
Part II: Realisms, June 19–September 7, 2008
00
The Cinema Effect Kerry Brougher
© 2008 the authors and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
00
Projecting Dreams Kelly Gordon
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any other information storage
and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, DC.
First published in 2008 by GILES an imprint of D Giles Limited, in
association with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution
D Giles Limited
2nd Floor
162–164 Upper Richmond Road
London SW15 2SL, UK
www.gilesltd.com
000
Man and the Movie Camera Kristen Hileman
000
Character Driven: Subjectivity and the Cinematic Anne Ellegood
000
Timestream Tony Oursler
000
Checklist of the Exhibition
000
Artist Biographies
000
Selected Bibliography
000
Lenders to the Exhibition
000
Photography Credits
ISBN 978-1-904832-50-8
For the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden:
Edited by Deborah E. Horowitz, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden
For D Giles Limited:
Copy-edited and proofread by Bernard Dod
Designed by Tracey Shiffman
Printed and bound in tbc
Front cover illustration: Kelly Richardson, Exiles of the
Shattered Star, 2006
Frontispiece:
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Smithsonian Institution
Independence Avenue at Seventh Street, SW
MRC 353 PO Box 37012
Washington, DC 20013-7012
www.hirshhorn.si.edu
Available through D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers
155 Sixth Avenue, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10013
Tel: (212) 627-1999 Fax: (212) 627-9484
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Page 6
Foreword
6
As a museum dedicated to the art and artists of our time, it seems appropriate that the Hirshhorn has organized The Cinema Effect: Illusion,
Reality, and the Moving Image. This two-part exhibition explores contemporary moving-image art, a medium that has become an increasingly
prominent and vital focus for artists in the past few decades, and examines the ways in which the notion and language of the “cinematic” has
become central to our understanding of the art and culture of today.
With little doubt, the cinema was the unrivaled art form of the twentieth century. So predominant was film’s impact on culture that it
has often been equated with modernity itself. In the art world, artists’ use of film or video and/or their appropriation of cinematic terminology
and devices for works in a range of media has been growing since the early 1960s. In the realm of popular culture, this technology (as well as
later incarnations like television and the internet) and its vocabulary have penetrated to the culture’s core so that the very boundaries between
“real life” and make-believe are at the least blurred and at most indecipherable. In order to explore this complex and intriguing subject in-depth
and given the time-based nature of moving-image art, this unprecedented exhibition is being presented at the Hirshhorn as two consecutive
shows subtitled Dreams and Realisms. Following the dual poles of cinema defined by its earliest pioneers at the end of the nineteenth century—
the escapist, magical films of George Méliès (Dreams) and the documentary work of the Lumière brothers, Louis and Auguste (Realisms)—these
exhibitions investigate these primary paths at the core of cinema and its role in art and contemporary culture.
This major exhibition containing xx works by xx artists from around the world would not have been possible without the dedication of
the entire Hirshhorn staff, and I am grateful to them all for their efforts. In particular, I would like to thank the curators of Dreams, Kerry Brougher
and Kelly Gordon, and of Realisms, Anne Ellegood and Kristen Hileman, for their creative and thoughtful approaches to this project. Deputy
Director and Chief Curator Kerry Brougher has overseen the organization of this ambitious undertaking, bringing to it his expertise as one of the
field’s foremost authorities on film and contemporary art. In his 1996 exhibition Hall of Mirrors, he attempted to define a tendency since the
1940s to dissect and analyze the cinema, both in film and art. With The Cinema Effect, the Hirshhorn has a rare opportunity to further the discussion of film’s ever-increasing permeation of society and the ways in which artists have adapted to and investigated our increasingly cinematic
world. I would also like to express my gratitude to all of the artists who are participating in the exhibition, the many lenders, and the galleries
representing the artists for their assistance and enthusiasm.
Olga Viso, director
Saskia Olde Wolbers
Trailer, 2005 (detail)
Matthew Buckingham
The Man of the Crowd, 2003 (detail)
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Kerry Brougher Introduction and Acknowledgments
an exponentially increasing presence of the cinematic in society.
of our cinematic world have not only been illuminating but truly inspir-
Julian Rosefeldt, Corinna Schnitt, Mungo Thomson, Kerry Tribe,
Certainly, advances in digital technology have been one of the leading
ing. Each curator brought a fresh perspective to this project, and I
Francesco Vezzoli, and Artur Zmijewski. Special thanks are due to artist
In the mid-1990s, there were a number of exhibitions and projects
factors in this dissemination of the moving image into nearly every
am genuinely fortunate to have such knowledgeable and creative col-
Tony Oursler who also enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to
celebrating the centenary of the birth of cinema. These endeavors
facet of our lives. “Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?” (What is cinema?) asked
leagues. I have been extremely lucky not only to have my fellow
become a contributor to the catalogue by granting us permission to
included a variety of approaches, from Harald Szeemann’s use of pro-
film critic André Bazin in his collection of essays published fifty years
curators as partners but also our managing editor of art publications
reprint his fascinating chronology of the moving image.
jected film clips in Illusion-Emotion-Reality: 100 Years of Cinema,
ago. Asked today, the question is much more complex: we would need
Deborah Horowitz, who has participated not merely in the develop-
1996, at the Kunsthalle in Vienna to Chris Dercon’s use of film itself to
to make the noun plural: What are cinemas? The artists in The Cinema
ment of the catalogue but in every facet of this exhibition: without her
of the artists’ galleries, dealers, and representatives as well as the
Introduction and Acknowledgments
8
9
In addition, we would like to express our appreciation to all
create a documentary on these various projects in Still/A Novel, 1996,
Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image attempt in their creative
knowledge and resourcefulness, neither the book nor the exhibition
lenders and others for their cooperation, including John Smith at the
produced by the Witte de With
and innovative ways to begin to answer this question. Thus, this exhi-
would have been possible. I am also deeply grateful for the participation
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; James Lingwood
in Rotterdam. Other exhibitions, such as Ian Christie and Philip Dodd’s
bition differs from a number of other moving-image shows by focusing
of my assistant, Al Miner; not only did he keep this project on track
and Tom Dingle at Artangel; Philip Hammond, Arts Council of Northern
Spellbound at the Hayward in London, 1996, or my own Hall of Mirrors:
less on the fact that film is now a presence in gallery settings and
throughout its development but added significantly to the shaping of
Ireland; Tim Blum and Jeff Poe at Blum & Poe; Colette Norwood at
Art and Film since 1945, at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los
more on the content that many artists have chosen to concentrate on,
the outcome.
the British Council; Alfred Paquement at Centre Pompidou; David Zwirner
Angeles, 1996, focused on film’s relationship with other art forms,
issues which are often about the cinematic and the way it is defining
particularly the visual arts. At the time, it seemed that the influence of
our culture and shaping our minds. In order to accomplish this ambi-
unwavering support and thoughtful insights from the inception of this
Gallery; Aleksandra Sciegeinna at the Foksal Gallery Foundation;
cinema had reached a kind of apex. More and more artists, such as
tious goal, we have divided the exhibition into two related but distinct
unprecedented exhibition to its realization. Her willingness to push
Michael Gillespie at Foxy Production; Francesca Kaufmann at Galleria
Judith Barry, James Coleman, Stan Douglas, or Jack Goldstein, among
parts. The artists in Dreams, primarily attempt to take apart the cine-
the boundaries of what museums can do demonstrates a profound
Francesca Kaufmann; the François Pinault Collection; Carol Greene,
many others, were using film or video, and their works often seemed
matographic apparatus (which now includes digital technology and
commitment to the art and artists of our time.
Alexandra Tuttle, and Jay Sanders at Greene Naftali Gallery; John
a logical extension of the experiments of such structuralist filmmakers
streaming) and elucidate its relationship to dreams and a culture built
of the 1960s and 1970s as Peter Kubelka, Paul Sharits, and Michael
on illusions, while Realisms, investigates how radically far the confu-
for their willingness to participate in these two exhibitions: for Dreams,
Maccarone at Maccarone Inc.; Kara Vander Weg, Valentina Castellani,
Snow, who had begun the practice of dissecting film and concentrating
sion between illusion and reality, fiction and fact, has traveled in our
Darren Almond, Chiho Aoshima, Michael Bell-Smith, Bruce Conner,
and Jessica Hecker at Gagosian Gallery; Rose Lord at Marian Goodman
on its material aspects. Furthermore, other artists, including John
contemporary society.
Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki, Christoph Girardet, Douglas
Gallery; Max Wigram and Michael Briggs at Max Wigram Gallery;
Gordon, Rodney Graham, Gary Hill, Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler,
Michael Kohn at Michael Kohn Gallery; Maureen Paley at Maureen Paley
Baldessari and Cindy Sherman, were choosing to make the normally
This rather ambitious project could only be realized by the
Very special thanks are due to director Olga Viso for her
And our sincerest gratitude also goes to these very artists
and Angela Choon at David Zwirner; Donald Young at Donald Young
Connelly at John Connelly Presents; Barbara and Aaron Levine; Michele
seamless and undetectable tropes of cinema visible in their still
expertise of a number of highly invested and accomplished individuals.
Anthony McCall, Steve McQueen, Tony Oursler, Kelly Richardson,
Gallery; Metro Pictures; Janice Guy and Margaret Murray at Murray
photography-based work.
The Cinema Effect has been a truly collaborative effort, and I want to
Wolfgang Staehle, Siebren Versteeg, and Saskia Olde Wolbers; and for
Guy; Olaf Stüber at Galerie Olaf Stüber; Magda Sawon at Postmasters
thank my colleagues, curator Anne Ellegood, associate curator Kelly
Realisms, Candice Breitz, Matthew Buckingham, Paul Chan, Ian
Gallery; Michelle Bolinger at Rhona Hoffman Gallery; Bert Ross; Sean
culture in general, was nowhere near its zenith. We may still not have
Gordon, and associate curator Kristen Hileman, for co-organizing this
Charlesworth, Phil Collins, Jeremy Deller, Kota Ezawa, Omer Fast, Pierre
Kelly at Sean Kelly Gallery; Tanya Bonakdar and James Lavender at
reached that point. Indeed, over the last decade, we have witnessed
project with me. Our extensive dialogues and debates on the subject
Huyghe, Runa Islam, Christian Jankowski, Isaac Julien, Michèle Magema,
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery; Erin Manns at Victoria Miro Gallery; Walker
But the influence of cinema, both on the visual arts and
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Page 10
Art Center; Geralyn Huxley and Greg Pierce at The Andy Warhol
In addition, for their help with various essential research and adminis-
Foundation for the Visual Arts; Lee Stoetzel at the West Collection; Jay
trative tasks, special thanks to the interns and volunteers who so will-
Jopling, Suzanne Egeran, and Alex Bradley at White Cube; Alexis
ingly gave their time: Elizabeth Berler, Megan Mericle, Kurt Mueller,
Johnson at 1301pe.
Maria Silva Papais, Juan Tejador, Sarah Thompson, and Beth Wilson.
For their enthusiasm for co-publishing the catalogue, their
We’d also like to express our sincerest appreciation to those
commitment to detail and quality, as well as their flexibility, particular
who have lent their support in less direct but equally essential ways,
thanks to Dan Giles and Sarah McLaughlin at D. Giles Ltd. The beauti-
including Nora Halpern, Jonathan Margolis, and James Lide.
fully designed catalogue is the result of Tracey Shiffman’s creative and
thoughtful vision.
Of course, an exhibition of this scale would not be conceivable
without the ingenuity and dedication of the entire Hirshhorn staff. It
is not possible to include them all by name here, but we do want
to acknowledge the extraordinary efforts of Al Masino, John Klink,
Scott Larson, and the entire exhibits staff for their inventiveness and
problem-solving abilities in installing these complex exhibitions;
photographer Lee Stalsworth for ensuring that all of the images are
reproduced at the highest standards; Barbara Freund and Melissa
Front for their deft handling of registrarial issues; Beth Skirkanich and
Bob Allen for their creative designs for exhibition materials; Milena
Kalinovska and the entire programs department for their innovative
approach to the associated events, lectures, and talks that offer the
public a range of ways of exploring the exhibitions; Susan Lake and
the conservation staff for ensuring the condition of the works; Beth
Tuttle and the development and communications staff for their
fundraising and public relations efforts; José Ortiz, Rich Reichley, and
April Martin for overseeing all administrative, budget, and contract
details; Karen Perry for her assistance with all travel arrangements.
Paul Chan
1st Light, 2005 (detail)
Kerry Brougher, Deputy Director and Chief Curator
10
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12
Harun Farocki
Workers Leaving the Factory
in Eleven Decades, 1995 (detail)
13
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The Cinema Effect
Kerry Brougher
It can be assumed that it is this wish which prepares the long history of cinema:
the wish to construct a simulation machine capable of offering the subject perceptions
which are really representations mistaken for perceptions. —Jean-Louis Baudry
1
Contraband poetry, therefore, yes, and consequently the more precious, for it is true,
the German Novalis tells us, that if the world becomes a dream, the dream in its turn
becomes a world. —Jean-Luc Godard on Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée
2
Benjy Stone (Mark Linn-Baker): It won’t work.
Allan Swann (Peter O’Toole): It worked perfectly well in A Slight Case of Divorce.
Benjy Stone: That was a movie.
Allan Swann: What is the difference? —from the film My Favorite Year, 1982
1 Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema,”
reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 705.
2 Jean-Luc Godard on Jean Cocteau’s Orphée in Godard on Godard (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986), 205.
Trip to the Moon amusement
park ride, Pan-American
Exposition, Buffalo, New York,
1901 (details)
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Kerry Brougher The Cinema Effect
Welcome to Alphaville
Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film Alphaville ends, as all good thrillers should, with the
hard-boiled detective Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) and the beautiful Natasha
von Braun (Anna Karina) falling in love. The two protagonists have just fled from
the city of Alphaville and are driving fast toward the safety of the Outerlands. It is
night, and the lights from the highway streetlamps reflect in the windshield and
remind us of countless film noir movies, including Humphrey Bogart and Lauren
Bacall in The Big Sleep, 1946. Natasha, a citizen of Alphaville, has been brainwashed
by the all-powerful Alpha 60 computer, which controlls the city until Caution destroys
it. The Alpha 60 has eliminated the concept of linear time, creating a world only of
3
the present where “no one has lived in the past and no one will live in the future,”
and removed all sentimental words from the dictionary. Consequently, Natasha has
never learned to express her affections.
5
a legend.” He has joined the ranks of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlow, Dashiel
Hammett’s Sam Spade, and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer; he has receded into
the past, back into the film noir and pulp fiction of the 1940s; he has returned to
the realm of fiction. It turns out, however, that Alphaville is a real place. It is thriving—and we are living in it.
In his book on Alphaville, Chris Darke discusses the gated community
6
built just outside the center of São Paulo in the 1970s called Alphaville, which is
surrounded by guarded fences and protected by high-tech surveillance cameras.
This neighborhood—itself based on a fictional setting—was advertised by its
developers, the Alphaville Urbanismo Corporation, on several episodes of a Brazilian
soap opera in which the leading man, an architect, visits Alphaville and praises the
safety of the place, comparing it favorably to neighborhoods in American films.
Darke notes that the “back and forth between image and reality is dizzying: from
cctv to soap opera, from European art cinema to aspirational Hollywood, and back
again. Where does the utopian projection end and the dystopian reality begin? We
7
might call it, with a certain queasiness, the ‘Alphaville effect.’”
When he made his science-fiction thriller, Godard was already aware of
the “Alphaville effect,” this confusion of reality and illusion in the contemporary
world. Although presented as science fiction, his Alphaville is, in fact, Paris in 1965.
With the exception of some old in-camera techniques that had been around since
the silent-film era, Godard uses no special effects to create his imaginary future
city; rather, contemporary Paris transparently stands in for Alphaville, the two
becoming intertwined. In an interview with Le Monde, Godard explained, “I didn’t
imagine society in twenty years from now, as [H. G.] Wells did. On the contrary, I’m
telling the story of a man from twenty years ago who discovers the world today
8
and can’t believe it.” The cinema is not being used to project the audience into a
fictional future; rather, Godard’s film hurls Lemmy Caution, a man from the past, a
16
Natasha: I don’t know what to say. At least I don’t know the words. I was
never taught them. Please help me…
Lemmy: Impossible, Princess. You’ve got to manage by yourself, and only
then will you be saved. If you can’t…then you are as lost as the dead in
Alphaville.
Natasha: I…
…love…
…you…
I love you.
4
Godard’s film ends on this self-consciously corny note. By communicating her real
feelings, which perhaps ironically sound artificial and clichéd, Natasha has been
freed from a programmed, desensitized state, and, by destroying the Alpha 60,
Caution has enabled the city’s citizens to overthrow the tyranny of the computer
and its ability to manipulate mind and soul. In Alphaville, everyone had been sleeping the big sleep.
Natasha’s rather monotone, almost computer-like speech, however,
suggests a different ending for real life: it is not Lemmy Caution who won the conflict, but Alphaville. And Caution, as he was warned in the film by Natasha’s father,
Professor von Braun, has become “something worse than death”—he has “become
3
4
5
6
7
8
Poster for Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, 1965
Gated community of Alphaville
outside São Paulo
Jean-Luc Godard
Alphaville, 1965
Jean-Luc Godard, Classic Film Scripts: Alphaville, trans. Peter Whitehead (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), 43.
Ibid., 79.
Ibid., 76.
Chris Darke, Alphaville (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 6–8.
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., 27.
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Kerry Brougher The Cinema Effect
figure recognizable from classic film noir and detective fiction, from the glories of
golden-age cinema into a new, post-cinema present.
This textured, shadowy city was created, as Godard notes, by shooting
at night, “because night means adventure and romance. And also because it’s a
9
film about light” —or “lumière,” that wonderful French word that doubles for “light,”
the basic substance of film, and for the inventors of cinema, Louis and Auguste
Lumière. Godard substitutes contemporary Paris—the city of light and of the nouvelle vague, that pivotal movement in cinema spearheaded by Godard and François
Truffaut, among others, in the late 1950s and 1960s—for Alphaville. Godard suggests that not only is Alphaville real, it is, like numerous elements in nouvelle vague
films, a city embedded within cinema’s past. Throughout the film, Godard plants
references to his own pantheon of great films, particularly to German expressionist
cinema (“Monsieur Nosferatu!”), and that movement’s continuation in 1940s
Hollywood film noir. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s dramatic use of light and
shadow (the lighting of cigarettes, the use of bare light bulbs) not only echoes expressionist film but also, in the repeating use of pulsating lights, the film apparatus
itself, with its reliance on light and a shutter mechanism. As Darke observes, “If
Alphaville can be seen as one of Godard’s exercises in mimetic film criticism—that
is, criticism conducted in the language of the medium—its object is, of course, cinema, and the light that is brought to bear on it is a light from cinema’s past, from
10
German expressionism and film noir.” Therefore, the use of Paris as Alphaville suggests not only the end of the Paris once known by Godard, a once lovely city now
dehumanized by the computer, but also a place far enough removed from the classic cinema to be able to appropriate its vocabulary, dissect its strategies, and
restate them in new ways. When Caution kills Professor von Braun, and destroys his
computer, he references filmmaker Jean Renoir: “Such people will serve as terrible
examples to all those who use the world as their theater, where technical power
11
and its religion become The Rules of the Game.”
Alphaville is one of the earliest examples of Godard’s ongoing proclamation of the death of cinema. Throughout Alphaville, Godard plants references to
Jean Cocteau’s Orphée, a film with death at its center. Already in 1962, Godard had
referred to Jean Cocteau’s 1949 film to explain the cinema as “the only art which to
12
use Cocteau’s phrase, ‘films death at work.’” Like Alphaville’s computer, modern
18
technology is central to Cocteau’s version of the myth: Orpheus picks up radio broadcasts from the world of the dead and is taken to Hades in a limousine. Like Orpheus,
Caution and Natasha must escape Hades and attempt to get back to the “real”
world, back to the Outerlands. But Caution’s home is not real at all, but rather, it is
cinema’s past. Godard appears to have presented a mirror-image version of the
Greek myth; in the darkness of the night, Caution and Natasha seem like ghosts,
heading not for reality but rather receding twenty years into the past, into a
netherworld where cinema and pulp fiction still reside and colossal shadows still
shift and shimmer on the silver screen. Caution has traveled from the land of the
dead to that of the living and now must return to the dead. As Caution explains
while in Alphaville, “I had the impression that my life here was gradually…becom13
ing…a shadow, a twilight memory…of a, doubtless, awesome destiny.…”
Godard tells us two things in Alphaville: that the classic cinema is dead,
but also that a new cinematic world has begun to take shape. It is an expanded cinema that constantly refers back to its own history and that can be found in any
number of forms. Like Alphaville, it is a potential dystopia that intertwines technology and dreams and in which reality and illusion are often blurred. In this movingimage society, film has spilled out of the great movie palace cathedrals and has
spread into the city itself and into the way we live our lives. Alphaville is no longer
merely a place in a Godard film or even the São Paulo community named after it. It
is Paris, New York, and Tokyo; it is Berlin, Los Angeles, and Shanghai, places where
technology has splintered conventional film into a thousand new kinds of cinemas.
In our Alphavilles, cinema is confused with television and dvd, large led screens
and powerful projectors make buildings glow and shift, people connect through still
and moving images on their computer screens, “reality” television shows and the
nightly news use the vocabularies of fiction and drama, and the conventional frame
has become a multi-layered window providing immediate entry into countless
worlds, each layered over the other like geological strata. Movies and television
19
9
10
11
12
13
Times Square, New York
Shanghai, China
Jean-Luc Godard quoted in ibid., 39.
Ibid., 55.
Godard, Classic Film Scripts: Alphaville, 77.
Godard quoted in Chris Darke, Alphaville, 95.
Godard, Classic Film Scripts: Alphaville, 62.
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Kerry Brougher The Cinema Effect
shows are hand-carried in portable devices or found on the home computer screen,
streaming in from some distant digital film vault and available at any time. We can
download these films on an iPod or cell phone, a theater in our pocket. With small
digital video cameras and editing suite programs, we can all be film directors, the
creators of dreams.
As Godard predicted, life is indeed shaped by computers. In Alphaville,
in our world today, the cinema is everywhere, in the flick of a cigarette lighter, in
the glow of a light bulb, in the punch of Lemmy Caution; it is in the way we perceive
our world, in the way we speak, in the way we dream. We have no need of entering
a movie theater to experience cinema; life itself is just like a movie.
Dark Rides
Godard’s film begins with Lemmy Caution having just traveled from the Outerlands
to Alphaville in his Ford Galaxy. To get to the city of the future, he has had to travel
through space and time. It is a journey that has taken him from a film screen to a
cinematic city. In order to understand how we got to Alphaville, to a place where
dreams and reality have merged, it is necessary to retrace Caution’s route and to
know a little about the history of the Outerlands.
The desire for illusions has been a human aspiration throughout history. As film theoretician Jean-Louis Baudry points out, in order to understand the
14
cinema, one “constantly returns to the scene of the cave.…” Surely it was in the
caves of Lascaux and Altamira where the first “filmmakers” attempted to create
simulations of the real that, in the flickering firelight, could at times seem to move
and come to life. In a sense, these caves were the first movie theaters, but ones
found by entering under low rocks and through narrow crevices, then hiking
through dark labyrinths that culminated in an underground chamber. With their
dark interiors and narrow apertures, these caves were a kind of early camera
obscura, the real passing through the narrow aperture and into a place of magic
and illusion. The cave was, like the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph, the first film
camera that also doubled as a projector, a means of capturing illusion and bringing
it back to life. Little wonder, then, that an artist such as Robert Smithson, whose
work involved the contemplation of time, would suggest the creation of a “Cinema
Cavern,” a place in which visitors would journey into the recesses of a manufac-
tured cave to watch a film about the very making of that theater; the cave at once
becomes both the subject of a film, the suggestion of the real world, and the environment for the presentation of magical events. As philosopher Gaston Bachelard
has observed, the terms “‘outside’ and ‘inside’ pose problems of metaphysical
anthropology that are not symmetrical. To make inside concrete and outside vast is
the first task, the first problem it would seem, of an anthropology of the imagina15
tion.” But the classic film experience does the reverse, it makes the outside concrete, containable, and the inside vast, a gateway to the fantastic, to impossible
voyages not only to the outside but to worlds beyond. In fact, as Plato conjectured
in The Republic, the shadow world could take the place of the real world, the viewer
becoming a prisoner of illusions, an immobile dreamer.
But caves are not the only places that seem conducive to magical happenings. Gardens must take their place alongside caves as spaces in which one
experiences the cinema effect. One of the reasons for manipulating and controlling
nature, of imposing a human sense of geometry and order, is to transport the visitor to other realms, to elsewheres. Islamic Quranic gardens are spaces in which one
wanders in an earthly vision of paradise, a Garden of Allah. Walled off, quartered
into cosmic patterns, the Islamic garden generally contains a fountain at the center
surrounded by fruit trees, that, when glimpsed amid that walled splendor, easily
16
transforms into the Fountain of Life and Tree of Life. The Persian tradition of
separating the garden into geometric units, echoing the elements, is also found in
the Moorish gardens of Madinat al-Zahra in Cordoba and, more famously, at the
Alhambra and Generalife in Granada, with the beauty and scents of oleanders and
roses completing the paradisiacal effect. The visitor is transported from the harsh,
dry outside into an inner, symbolic paradise that blurs the boundaries between the
17
imaginary and the real, between this world and another.
The garden visitor, as critic Raymond Williams describes him, is a “selfconscious observer: the man who is not only looking at land but who is conscious
18
that he is doing so.…” But he is also a knowing onlooker who is willing to be
transported elsewhere and who has the imagination to get himself there. As Saint
Augustine notes, “men go forth and admire lofty mountains and broad seas and
roaring torrents and the ocean and the course of the stars, and forget their own
19
selves while doing so.”
20
The eighteenth-century English park probably had its origins in enclosed
hunting woodlands, which themselves date back at least to the tenth century. It is
likely that the concept of shaping nature in a park setting was also fostered by
painting, particularly works by Solomon van Ruysdael, Claude Lorrain, and Nicolas
20
Poussin, who were popular with the Grand Tour travelers to the continent.
Although parks might seem on the surface to be quite distinct from the cinema,
they both were forged out of scientific inquiry and the bourgeois desire to improve
upon nature. Cinema not only records the natural world, but as the scenery of
countless films attests—from the artificial indoor sets that represent an enchanted
exterior world in The Wizard of Oz, 1939, to Stanley Kubrick’s evocations of seventeenth-century landscape painting in Barry Lyndon, 1975—filmmakers manipulate
and frequently exaggerate it into the picturesque in order to enhance viewers’
sense of being transported elsewhere. This desire to conjure fictive landscapes continues in the very cinematic world of such video games as the Myst series introduced in 1993.
21
Claude Lorrain
Landscape with Narcissus and Echo, 1644
Oil on canvas
Courtesy National Gallery, London /
The Bridgeman Art Library International
Stanley Kubrick
Barry Lyndon, 1975
Background from the video game Myst
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22
23
Amphitheaters have often been part of garden settings, and, indeed,
the garden itself is often a kind of stage set, a place cordoned off from the real
world where one can pretend to exist in remote magical times or concoct allegorical
fantasies at will. The “pleasure garden” of Vauxhall in London, for instance, was
21
designed to include curving pavilions and rotunda amphitheaters. Artist Dan
Graham, writing about gardens and theater, has analyzed the conflation of the two
art forms:
By the period of the Italian Baroque, garden design and theater design were so
closely connected that they directly influenced each other. The Baroque garden,
treated metaphorically as a vast, natural theater, usually contained one or more
areas for theater performances. The theater’s architectural boundaries were
defined by boxed hedges, grass, stones, statuary, and seating areas.
22
But as Graham notes, these demarcations also gave way to a blurring of the theater space and garden. Productions sometimes used the garden’s pathways or vistas as part of the set. The great eighteenth-century English gardens, such as Stowe,
Rousham, the Studley Royal Water Garden, or Stourhead, with their arches, pavilions, and temples, continue to this day, perhaps with a little help from the haze or
twilight, to plunge us back into classical antiquity, allowing us to be characters in a
mythical drama, while the follies, like cinema, compress time, bringing the past into
the present. In the garden, artificial memory is created, and our past becomes real
not through factual reconstruction but through fictional re-creation; the eighteenth-century interpretation of medieval chivalry and Gothic spirituality replaces
history and becomes a revised story intended to instill a sense of the sublime. In his
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Baudry, “The Apparatus,” 690.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 215.
The Garden Book, ed. Tim Richardson (New York: Phaidon Press, 2000) 13.
Filippo Pizzoni, The Garden: A History in Landscape and Art (London: Aurum Press, 1999), 13–15.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 121.
Saint Augustine quoted in ibid., 121.
Ibid., 122.
John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1994), 55.
22 Dan Graham, “Garden as Theater as Museum,” in Rock My Religion: Writings and Art Projects, 1965–1990
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 288.
Francis Nicholson
A view of Stourhead in Wiltshire, the seat of
Henry Hoare, Esq., eighteenth century, engraving
© Private Collection, The Stapleton Collection /
The Bridgeman Art Library International
Samuel Wale
View of the Grand Walk at the entrance
of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens with
the orchestra playing, mid-eighteenth
century, colored engraving by Muller
Courtesy Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs,
Paris, France, Archives Charmet /
The Bridgeman Art Library International
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Kerry Brougher The Cinema Effect
1708 treatise Course de peinture par principes, which was influential on English
landscape designers, Roger de Piles suggests that buildings “in general are a great
ornament in landscip, even when they are Gothick, or appear partly inhabited, and
partly ruinous.… they raise the imagination by the use they are thought to be
23
designed for.”
Gardens are, of course, for wandering, but the great garden designers
such as William Kent or Capability Brown were proficient at subtly controlling the
walker’s course through pathways, and at using picturesque vistas to capture the
stroller’s gaze. In Eccentric Spaces, architecture and design historian Robert Harbison
recounts the journey through the great English garden of Stourhead:
The only path circles the lake, dipping sometimes toward it but never straggling
far away, and buildings form a narrow band or chain around it, spaced a few
visitor entered Luna Park, which opened at Coney Island in 1906, it was through a
small rocket ship echoing pioneer filmmaker and magician Georges Méliès’s La
Voyage dans la lune, 1902, which, in turn, may have been influenced by the successful cyclorama ride A Trip to the Moon created at the 1901 Pan-American Expo28
sition in Buffalo by Luna Park builders Frederick Thompson and Elmer Dundy.
Luna Park was most effective at night. The park was made up of thousands of electric lights and even held its opening in the evening. No doubt taking
their cue from the World’s Fairs of 1889 and 1900 in Paris and 1893 in Chicago, all
29
of which had complex illuminated architecture and installations, Thompson and
Dundy created an otherworldly experience, the actual city disappearing in the
shadows and glare of the park lights. Author Albert Bigelow Paine described the
scene thus:
hundred yards apart without any disproportionate gaps, the ten stations of a pic-
A long festoon of electric light leaped from one side of the park to the other, and
turesque passion. A certain kind of path gratifies homing rather than adventur-
was followed by a second and a third. Then there was a perfect maze of them. Tall
ing instincts, and this feels pure of that kind like the paths in Ariosto. The riddle
towers that had grown dim suddenly broke forth in electric outlines and gay
of why that stay-at-home poet is obsessed with the word path (sentiero) is
rosettes of color, as the living spark of light traveled hither and thither, until the
explained when each path connects with some earlier stage, when each puts us
place was transformed into an enchanted garden, of such Aladdin never dreamed.
back in a place we were before…we must end where we began.
24
And even Maxim Gorky took a turn at describing the innovative park:
From the late eighteenth century onward, art and entertainment fuse
in garden design. Pleasure gardens such as Vauxhall in London, the Jardin de Tivoli
in Paris, and the Prater in Vienna became sites not just for strolling, but for balls,
equestrian circuses, exotic plant displays, and concerts—places for amusement.
Rides were introduced, such as the Ferris wheel and the switchback, an early form
of the rollercoaster, some with specific references such as the “Niagara Falls” in the
25
Ruggieri gardens in Paris. By the mid-nineteenth century, with the opening of
Tivoli in Copenhagen with its Oriental design, theaters, and bandstands, the stage
was set for the birth of the modern theme park.
Dan Graham has suggested that electric lighting was “responsible for
the birth of both film and the amusement park. Around 1900, Freud’s theory of the
26
‘unconscious,’ the cinema, and Coney Island appeared, almost simultaneously.”
Architect Rem Koolhaas has likewise proposed that Coney Island was an uncon27
scious dreamscape for the conscious, rational world of New York City. When the
With the advent of night a fantastic city all of fire suddenly rises from the ocean
into the sky. Thousands of ruddy sparks glimmer in the darkness, limning in fine
sensitive outline on the black background of the sky, shapely towers of miraculous castles, palaces and temples. Golden gossamer threads tremble in the air.
24
25
moonstruck Pierrot. The combination of electricity and moonlight, found only in
sunless places, surely made the park dreamlike and enchanted. It is no coincidence
that Dyrehavsbakken, the oldest existent amusement park, located in Klampenborg,
31
Denmark, still to this day uses Pierrot as its mascot.
But if the theme park itself was a place that functioned best without
sunlight, there developed over the next couple of decades darker areas within the
parks, fictions within the fictions, places that came even closer to creating dreams
in three dimensions. These spaces sometimes led to heaven, but more often to hell.
In the dark ride, which appeared in the late 1920s, the visitor was placed into a
small car running on a single track and was sent into a dark building on journeys of
They intertwine in transparent, flaming patterns, which flutter and melt away in
love with their own beauty mirrored in the waters. Fabulous beyond conceiving,
30
Darkness allowed the dream to be realized fully; with the surrounding world no
longer visible in the glare and magic of the electric night, the visitor was free to
enter into, as the poet Coleridge had described it, “the willing suspension of disbelief” much as did the first movie-goers in the early darkened cinema theaters in
which Méliès’s films were screening. In Luna Park at night, one was sent on an
impossible voyage, a trip to another world and in the process became a kind of
23 John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 180.
24 Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 18.
25 Isabelle Auricoste, “Leisure Parks in Europe: Entertainment and Escapism,” in The History of Garden Design,
eds. Monique Mosser and Georges Teyssot (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), 486–89.
26 Graham, “The Garden as Theater as Museum,” 293.
27 Ibid.
28 Wikipedia, “Luna Park, Coney Island,” www.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_Park,_Coney_Island.
29 Dietrich Neumann, “Luminous Buildings—Architectures of the Night,” in Luminous Buildings—Architecture of
the Night, (Stuttgart: Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006), 24.
30 Maxim Gorky, quoted in “Coney Island Historiography,” The Independent (August 8, 1906): http://history.
amusement-parks.com/coneyhist1.htm.
31 Wikipedia, “Pierrot,” www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierrot.
Niagara Falls, Ruggieri Gardens, Paris, early
nineteenth century, anonymous print
Trip to the Moon amusement park ride,
Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo,
New York, 1901
ineffably beautiful, is this fiery scintillation.
Georges Méliès
La Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon), 1902
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Kerry Brougher The Cinema Effect
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Postcard of Luna Park at night
27
Luna Park, Coney Island, New York, at night
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Kerry Brougher The Cinema Effect
love and romance or thrills and horror. One of the best-known manufacturers of
dark rides, The Pretzel Amusement Ride Company, made rides for theme parks and
for traveling carnivals. The names of the rides give a sense of dark ride thrills: The
Caveman, Haunted House, Lost Mine, Bucket O’ Blood, Devil’s Inn, Orient Express,
Mad Giant, Laff in the Dark, Pirates’ Cave, Paris after Dark, Arabian Nights Tunnel of
32
Love, Spook-A-Rama, and Dante’s Infernos. Although the dark ride, or geisterbahn (ghost-train), as it is known in Germany, had precedents in the switchbacks
of the pleasure garden and late nineteenth-century scenic railroads (which would
sometimes run indoors to see illuminated tableaux of biblical scenes or painted
33
panoramas), it seems rather to have emerged, like the theme park itself, out of
cinema and the early twentieth-century interest in and speculation about dreams.
Relying more heavily on narrative, the chamber of horrors themes were certainly
extensions of magic lantern phantasmagorias that can be traced back to Athanasius
Kircher’s 1645 treatise Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (The Great Art of Light and
Shadow). But unlike the magic lantern show, which involved a spectator whose
view was fixed and who could at any moment leave the darkened chamber, travelers journeying through a dark ride were trapped in the car, sometimes literally
strapped in. Once the ride had begun, there was no turning back; like characters in
a story, the travelers had no way of getting out of it. They entered the dark tunnel,
powerless to stop the force that pulled them deeper and deeper into the “narrative.” As if in a dream, they knew it was not real yet remained powerless to shift
course or wake up. The ghost train became the dark version of the poet Ariosto’s
desire for a journey always leading home, always circling back upon itself; like
Orpheus, we are mesmerized by the tantalizing joy of scary things from which we
cannot look away, but we have the knowledge that the dream will end and we will
return home, back to the reassurance of reality and wakefulness.
Part of the thrill of the dark ride is that we simply do not know where
we are going; we are jolted in one direction, then another, never knowing when the
next ghoul may pop up. If the dark ride came out of theme parks, and theme parks
out of pleasure gardens, this chain may lead us back to the labyrinth as the true
precursor to the dark ride. In discussing labyrinths in his The Vatican to Vegas: A
History of Special Effects, Norman Klein has suggested that “the spectator is often
sent into a fictional space where the exit is hidden, or missing altogether. Imagine
it simply as the Freudian model of condensation in the dream, one space collapsed
34
into the other. I prefer to call this condensed design a labyrinth effect.”
Although it appears that anything can happen in a dark ride, in fact, this
chaotic state is the result of what Klein calls a “scripted space.” Klein traces these
spatial precursors to cinema from early theater special effects using “machines” and
“engines,” such as those extravaganzas by Giacomo Torelli in the seventeenth century that included complex changes of scenery and jets of water and the vertiginous
illusions of painted domes such as the one by Fra Andrea Pozzo at San Ignazio in
Rome to Baroque clockwork automatons and Madame Tussauds waxwork museum
35
in London. It seems appropriate that the Musée Grevin in Paris, modeled after
Madame Tussauds, which touted waxworks of events and celebrities as “a living news36
paper,” in 1892 became the first establishment to show Emile Reynaud’s Panto37
mimes lumineuses—projected animated images using hand-painted film strips.
The definitive “scripted space” is, of course, the theme park Disneyland
(and its offshoots around the world), the amusement park in its ultimate manifestation and perhaps the one that makes the connections to the cinema the most
apparent. To comprehend Disneyland fully, it is necessary to start where Walt
Disney did—in his home. Disney was an aficionado of miniatures and model trains;
in the late 1940s, he built in his Los Angeles backyard a one-eighth-scale railroad
he christened the “Carolwood Pacific Line,” named after the street on which he
38
lived. Disney’s love of trains and fantasy dovetailed in a theme park idea that he
conceived in the early 1950s. After being turned down by Los Angeles, Disney took
his project to the suburbs, and the park opened in 1955 in Anaheim. Disney chose
to use animators and film production people, particularly set designers, to establish
the look of and rides in Disneyland. Unlike Luna Park, whose designers attempted
to create an otherworldly, ghostly feel, Disneyland sought to evoke a sense of
Americana and comfort. Visitors enter the park through Main Street usa—the embodiment of small-town America that exists for most only in the movies. The use of
buildings designed at five-eighths scale with some forced perspective reduces reality to movie-set dimensions. The journey through the park begins in a place that
lies somewhere between reality and illusion. Disneyland is a sort of back lot, a set
on which movies could be made; yet it is also the film that could have been shot
there with the visitors as characters. Like the darkness that enfolded Luna Park at
28
29
night or the sunless spaces of dark rides, Disney knew the advantage of distancing
the real world. Disney’s term for this divide was the “berm,” the wall that surrounded the park and kept the parking lots and housing tracks of Orange County
39
out of sight. The park was an escape from the Los Angeles and Orange County
sprawl that was mounting just outside Disneyland’s gates.
Like Luna Park, Disneyland had its own Rocket to the Moon in Tomorrowland, but this one was not derived from Jules Verne and green cheese but from
utopian visions of science and technology. Both Luna Park and its neighbor on
Coney Island, Dreamland, had closed by the late 1940s, and Disney, who disliked
40
“carney” atmospheres, realized the public wanted something more “reassuring.”
Emphasizing the nostalgia for the recent past and the benefits of near-future technological wonders, Disney put a bizarre spin on the notion of the suspension of disbelief; no longer was the theme park just illusion and dark rides—the park itself
began to be conflated with the big-picture American dream. If this was still fact
flowing into fiction, it was not long before the stream reversed itself and fantasy
began to flow into reality. In Las Vegas’s Freemont Experience, Universal Studios’
CityWalk in Los Angeles and Orlando, or in just about any mall-entertainment complex built since the 1980s, we find mini theme parks replacing real neighborhoods.
In his well-known passages on Disneyland in Simulations, the late philosopher Jean
Baudrillard suggests that the Magic Kingdom
is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when
in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of
32 Wikipedia, “Pretzel Amusement Ride Company,” www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretzel_Amusement_Ride_
Company.
33 Brenda J. Brown, “Landscapes of Theme Park Rides,” in Theme Park Landscapes: Antecedents and Variations,
eds. Terence Young and Robert Riley (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002), 246.
34 Norman Klein, The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects (New York: New Press, 2004) 101.
35 Ibid., 51–132.
36 Vanessa R. Schwartz, “Cinematic Spectatorship before the Apparatus: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin-deSiècle Paris,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, eds. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 304.
37 Vanessa R. Schwartz, “Cinematic Spectatorship before the Apparatus,” 310.
38 Michael Darling, “Walt’s World,” Frieze 43 (1998): 46.
39 Norman Klein, The Vatican to Vegas, 307–8.
40 See The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks, ed. Karal Ann Marling (Paris:
Flammarion, 1997).
Main Street USA, Disneyland,
Anaheim, California
Rocket to the Moon ride in Tomorrowland,
Disneyland, Anaheim, California
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Kerry Brougher The Cinema Effect
the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false
representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no
longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.… The Disneyland imaginary is
neither true nor false; it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in
reverse the fiction of the real.
41
This is what Godard knew back in 1965, that Paris could stand in for Alphaville
because major cities had become cinematic spaces, places embedded with the
memory of fifty years of cinema and populated by people who accepted the imaginary as reality. With its extension of the dream world of film into real three-dimensional space, Disneyland had taken another giant step in the progressive march
toward the blurring of reality and illusion. The berm was no longer necessary.
At the same time that Disney was designing his Magic Kingdom, cinema itself was also at work on further erasing the demarcation between illusion
and reality. Until the early 1950s, film had been primarily confined to black-andwhite images seen in a nearly square, 1:33 to 1, “Academy” aspect ratio and heard
in monophonic sound. By the late 1940s, Hollywood was losing a substantial per42
centage of its audience to the new technology of television. Simultaneously, the
movies were losing out to new postwar lifestyles, in particular the population shift
43
to the suburbs and away from the big-city movie palaces. In the nineteenth century, cinema had been born from technology—out of optical devices, film stocks,
chronophotography, and intermittent shutter mechanisms that hid the line between
frames; now, with their audiences rapidly dwindling, the movie studios turned to
technology once again to win them back. Within the first half of the decade, film
would re-invent itself through an “expansive” approach, through the overt widening of its screen ratio, the addition of stereophonic sound, and the increased use of
Technicolor.
The year 1952 was key in the transition from conventional cinema to a
new expanded cinema. That year two new technologies were introduced: 3-d
movies and Cinerama. Stereoscopic viewing dates back to nineteenth-century optical devices that used two photographs shot from slightly different perspectives
that mirrored the two angles of the human eye, thereby imitating natural depth
perception. 3-d cinema utilized two cameras, filming the action from two slightly
different perspectives, and a two-projector screening system. The system also
required that the audience watch the film with glasses divided into two colors, usually blue and red. Hollywood rushed into a number of productions, including Bwana
Devil, 1952, House of Wax, 1953 (ironically directed by André de Toth, who only had
one eye and therefore could not see in three dimensions), and Alfred Hitchcock’s
Dial M for Murder, 1954. But by the time Hitchcock’s film was released, the novelty
of 3-d was wearing off; coupled with problems with projection and the awkward
glasses, 3-d was already dying out.
Nevertheless, the desire to push cinema closer to actual ways of seeing
moved forward in other arenas. Cinerama utilized three cameras to create a huge
panoramic image that expanded the screen ratio from 1:33 to 1 to 2:77 to 1,
thereby enveloping the viewer by including peripheral vision. Cinerama certainly
delivered on its advertising promise that you “won’t be gazing at a movie screen—
44
you’ll find yourself swept right into the picture, surrounded by sight and sound.”
Not surprisingly, the first film produced for the three-screen process, This Is Cinerama,
1952, takes a theme-park approach, launching the spectator on a series of thrill
rides including a rollercoaster, an aerial view of Niagara Falls, and vertiginous flights
45
over the diverse American landscape shot by a stunt pilot. Although only a handful of films were actually made using the complicated Cinerama process, the success of the system led the studio Twentieth Century-Fox to experiment with a new
and simpler widescreen process they called CinemaScope. Utilizing normal 35mm
film and anamorphic lenses that had been developed for viewing through periscopes,
the image was stretched vertically so that it could be stretched horizontally when
projected and thus made wider. CinemaScope combined the panoramic views of
Cinerama with the ease of one camera and standard film stock. The introduction of
Cinerama and CinemaScope (mimicked by other studios in VistaVision and Todd-ao,
among others), shifted the experience of film viewing from a framed window look41 Jean Baudrillard quoted in Christopher Butler, Postmoderrnism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 113.
42 Peter Lev, A History of the American Cinema, Vol. X: Transforming the Screen, 1950–59 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2003), 108.
43 John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 70–74.
44 Ibid., 188–89.
45 Ibid., 89.
Advertisement postcard for
This Is Cinerama, 1952
30
31
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ing out onto another world to the collapse of the frame and the envelopment of
the viewer. A seamlessness between the real world and the cinematic world had
thus been created. If classic cinema had mimicked historical paintings’ framed
world view, now the separation between “elsewhere” and the actual world was
fading. The shot-to-shot approach of classic cinema gave way to longer takes, and
the viewer now looked around within the cinema world much as the “flâneur” who
strolled like a character through Disneyland’s movie-set theme park. Experimental
filmmakers built upon this expansive approach. In 1957, Jordan Belson, along with
the electronic composer Henry Jacobs, began using the Morrison Planetarium in San
Francisco for a series of Vortex concerts that combined abstract films by James and
John Whitney, Hy Hirsh, and Belson himself with electronic scores by composers such
as Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti, while in 1963 artist Stan VanDerBeek
built his Buckminster Fuller-inspired “Movie Drome,” a multi-surfaced environment
for multiple projections; both of these projects foreshadowed the giant imax screens
46
introduced in the early 1970s. With this “expanded cinema” and the rejection of
any kind of film frame or border, the real and the imaginary became less distinct—
or, as a promotional campaign for widescreen cinema put it, we had achieved “all
47
the illusion of reality.”
Impossible Chambers of the Imagination
If Alphaville is one of the first hybrid films, part science fiction, part film noir, it is
certainly not the last to conflate these two genres and to examine a world in which
illusion and reality are blurred. In 1966, a year after the release of Alphaville, Philip
K. Dick published a short story titled “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.” The
plot revolves around a mundane man who wants to go to Mars but cannot afford
the journey. He seeks out a company, Rekal, which implants memories in the brain.
In his case, he will have a memory of a visit to Mars. What is real and what is an illusion, an actual memory and a fake memory, soon become complicated in this story
that was later turned into the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Total Recall, 1990.
Dick focuses on the blurring of the line between illusion and reality, between hallucination and certainty. Along with Godard, his stories and novels are among the
first to reflect a growing concern about the collapse of our ability to distinguish the
real from the artificial, waking life from dream states.
32
33
It is not surprising that filmmakers in particular have been inspired by
this theme, for it is partly the cinema itself, coupled with new technology, that has
created this Alphaville effect. From Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, 1982, also adapted
from a Dick story, with its confusion of humans and android replicants, and Kathryn
Bigelow’s Strange Days, 1995, with its invention of “playback” digital recordings of
peoples’ lives, to the Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix, 1999, and its questioning of
the real and the artificial, along with Michel Gondry’s The Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind, 2004, in which memory can be erased, filmmakers have demonstrated a deep anxiety about what is real and what is not and how we have arrived
at a new era in which our minds have been altered by the moving image.
This confused state of mind, this unreal reality, physically manifests
itself in the nightmarish milieu of the city, which has taken on aspects of both the
present and the future simultaneously. While Godard was content to create his
future out of the cool, late modernism that was displacing pre-twentieth-century
Paris, Ridley Scott and the Wachowski Brothers, in order to present a more advanced delusional state, generate vast worlds in which modernism has evolved into
a new gothic culture as the steel and glass of the mid-twentieth century morph
into dark, organic towers and sinewy industrial wastelands. Back in 1899, H. G.
Wells imagined the city of the future as “a vast lunatic growth, producing a deepening torrent of savagery below, and above ever more flimsy gentility and silly
48
wastefulness,” a vision clearly replayed in The Matrix, with the underground
netherworlds of Zion, where the last free humans dwell, and the shiny, clean modernism of the virtual world “above.” These cities of literature and film have reversed
the cinema experience; the real is found underground in labyrinths and caverns,
while the surface is a dream.
In his lecture on Georges Méliès, the experimental filmmaker Stan
49
Brakhage refers to “an ‘impossible’ chamber (of the imagination).” This reference
to a chamber in which magical events occur could refer to Plato’s cave and its off-
46 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (Toronto and Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin, & Co., 1970).
47 “The CinemaScope Demonstration,” Harrison’s Reports 35, no. 12 (March 21, 1953) quoted in John Belton,
Widescreen Cinema, 202.
48 H. G. Wells quoted in Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, 273.
49 The Brakhage Lectures, reproduced at www.ubu.com/historical/brakhage/brakhage_lectures.pdf
Ridley Scott
Bladerunner, 1982
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spring, from the seventeenth-century magic mirrored compartments of Athanasius
Kircher to Victorian parlor rooms darkened for magic lantern phantasmagorias to
the dark recesses of the ornate and exotic movie palaces from cinema’s golden age;
it could also suggest the television den, dimly lighted by the watery blue glow of
the cathode-ray tube; it could also be applied with equal ease to dark rides and
their pitch-black labyrinths or to the cool, shadowy rooms of the waxworks
museum; and it could even extend to the more recent phenomenon of the gallery
black box space for the presentation of artists’ films or videos.
But Brakhage had something else in mind as well. He was not just referring to an actual architectural space for the presentation of illusions, but also to
the beholder’s mind, “the gray hills and valleys of each brain present, [holding] a
50
(thus) many-headed host of terrible monsters.…” The cinema in all of its forms
is a magic show provided by a conjurer like Méliès, and the grand illusions they
have presented to us over thousands of years have been implanted in our brains,
changing the way we view the world around us, even the way we live our lives. For
most of us, reality and fiction are now layered in a continual state of wakeful
dreaming. We have been turned, as Brakhage suggests, into a monster, a “Hydra,”
with “a tangle of dangerous angel hair—that electrical thought-glass which cuts
instinctual nerve to pieces…in this the most forbidding, and utterly foreign, land
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shape of all.”
In a paper titled “Why did we think we dreamed in black and white?”
Eric Schwitzgebel investigates the widely held belief in the 1950s that people
dreamed in black and white; today, however, a majority of people feel they dream
in color. Schwitzgebel concludes that we do not dream in black and white, but that
classic cinema and early television played a major role in the belief in monochro52
matic dreaming. Clearly there is a deep relationship between dreams and cinema.
In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud remarks that “the unconscious, insofar as
it belongs to waking thought, needs to be represented in dreams, it is represented
53
in them in underground places.” These “underground” places are found in our
unconscious, but they are mimicked in the real world in dark chambers. In these
“unconscious” sunless places, we travel in little cars through a dark-ride narrative
or slide down a projected cone of white light to elsewheres on the other side of the
movie screen.
Doug Aitken
Sleepwalkers, 2007
Five-channel video installation at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Since the 1950s, the need for dark chambers as passageways into lands
of illusion has given way to a cinema of the city, existing indoors and outdoors.
Since the creation of Disneyland and Universal Studios’ CityWalk, with their attempts
to translate the two-dimensional film experience into three-dimensional strolling
and shopping arcades, since the dissemination of led illumination and high-powered video projection, which has transformed city buildings into glowing, pulsating
membranes of cinematic motion, and since the spread of digital technology, which
has made the downloading of film onto handheld devices possible and created a
portable cinema, dark chambers separated from the world at large are no longer
a necessity for the cinema effect. Although architectural illuminations and giant
screens still have more punch nocturnally, today there is no longer the need to walk
through the lobby of a movie palace into the dark womb-like red cavity containing
velvet chairs and plush curtains. Rather, the cinema is now a liquid medium, existing simultaneously in many spaces and forms.
This evolution of a cinematic city has no doubt altered our psyche. In
the movie theater, or in the dark ride, there was pleasure in understanding that we
were being fooled, a thrill felt from the suppressed but conscious appreciation that
what we were watching was indeed special effects; the curtains parted or the doors
opened, and we were plunged into a great adventure or a chamber of horrors,
knowing full well that the light of day was soon to reappear at the end of film or
the dark ride. Now, there is no longer the need to suspend disbelief. As Godard predicted, the cinema is everywhere—it is in the home and out on the street. Film noir
detective Lemmy Caution walks among contemporary Paris, and we walk among
glowing, moving towers with our personal soundtracks blasting away on our iPods.
Philosopher Paul Virilio put it thus: “After the age of architecture-sculpture we are
now in the time of cinematographic factitiousness; literally as well as figuratively,
from now on architecture is only a movie…the city is no longer a theater (agora,
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forum) but the cinema of city lights.…”
50
51
52
53
54
Ibid.
Ibid.
Eric Schwitzbegel, “Why did we think we dreamed in black and white?” www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa.
Sigmund Freud quoted in Baudry, “The Apparatus,” 698.
Paul Virilio, Aesthetics of Disappearance, quoted in Neumann, “Luminous Buildings,” 27.
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But if the cinema is surrounding us, then how do we escape from the
dream chamber? Perhaps, as the artist Doug Aitken recently observed in his 2007
film installation projected on the sides of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, we
don’t; rather, all in the city are “Sleepwalkers.” We are dreaming all the time, and
reality and illusion have lost their meaning.
It would make sense then that the image of sleep, although occurring
throughout art history, seems to have become a more prominent theme in recent
years, particularly among those artists investigating the cinema experience. Perhaps
Andy Warhol was doing no more than Giorgione and Titian when he filmed his own
sleeping Venus, the poet John Giorno, in 1963. But Warhol was enamored not only
with Giorno but also with cinema itself. Choosing for his first film the subject of sleep
may also be Warhol’s comment on his own state of mind as much as on Giorno’s, or
on that of the viewer, the voyeur who watches and is transfixed, who is in, as the
heavy-lidded Proust suggests, “a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for
my eyes, but even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensi55
ble, without a cause, something dark indeed.” Warhol’s film is the first of many
artists’ works focusing on sleep and dreaming, from Bruce Conner’s Valse Triste,
1979, to Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler’s House with Pool, 2004.
Throughout the history of film, some critics have established a dichotomy between realism and illusion. On the one hand, the Lumière brothers used
their cinematograph to capture L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (Arrival of
a Train at La Ciotat Station) or Sortie des Usines Lumière (Workers Leaving the
Lumière Factory), both 1895, which seemingly serve as documents of everyday
reality that suggest that the cinema is the medium that comes closest to reproducing life as it is. On the other hand, the films of Georges Méliès, such as Le Voyage à
travers l'impossible (The Impossible Voyage), 1904, or La Conquête du pôle (The
Conquest of the Pole), 1912, provide, in Méliès’s own comparison of his films to the
Lumières’, “fantastic or artistic scenes…thus creating a special genre which differs
entirely from the customary views supplied by the cinematograph—street scenes
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or scenes of everyday life.” Méliès’s world is defined as one of enchantment and
magic, a dreamland.
This dichotomy has been central to the works of artists like Harun Farocki,
whose Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades, 1995, is a direct homage to
the Lumière brothers and even includes footage from their film, photographed a
century earlier, on the first of the twelve monitors that comprise the installation.
The other monitors in the piece present excerpts of workers leaving factories from
both documentaries and fictional feature films throughout cinema history. These
clips range from documentary footage of Siemens employees leaving their factory
in 1934 to attend a Nazi rally to excerpts from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times,
1936, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il Deserto Rosso (The Red Desert), 1964. Like
Godard, Farocki questions the accuracy of the conventional cinema polarization,
suggesting that film, whether “documentary” or “fictive,” presents us with something that lies somewhere between reality and illusion. Referring to the Lumières’
short film, Farocki states that the “basis for the chief stylistics of cinema was given
in the first film sequence. Signs and symbols are not brought into the world, but
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taken from reality. It is as though the world itself wanted to tell us something.”
55 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. I, Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin,
revised by D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 1.
56 Georges Méliès quoted in Mast, Film Theory and Criticism, 14.
57 Harun Farocki, “Workers Leaving the Factory,” www.sensesof cinema.com/contents/02/21/
farocki_workers.html.
Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler
House with Pool, 2004
Single-channel video transferred to DVD
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Holenia Purchase Fund, in memory of
Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 2006
Harun Farocki
Workers Leaving the Factory
in Eleven Decades, 1995
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Through the cinema, the world reveals itself to be both terrifyingly real
and merely a dream, and, as a result, cinema becomes confused with the world.
Stephen Frye proposes in his novel Making History that when
you walk along the street, you’re in a movie; when you have a row, you’re in a
movie; when you make love, you’re in a movie. When you skim stones over
the water, buy a newspaper, park your car, line up in a McDonald’s, stand on a
rooftop looking down, meet a friend, joke in the pub, wake suddenly in the
night or fall asleep dead drunk, you’re in a movie.
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As Doug Aitken suggests, we are all now sleepwalkers, somnambulists
moving through an ongoing cinematic dreamscape. We no longer suspend disbelief—it is always suspended, and the real and the unreal have lost their meaning.
According to the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, this dream state has led to a desire to
recapture something actual:
Symmetrical to this short-circuit between fiction and reality is another (obverse)
case of the dialectic of semblance and Real. It makes clear how the “returns of
Little wonder then that the rugged detective? Lemmy Caution and beautiful Natasha von Braun, fictional characters who clearly represent a time when illusions were clearly demarcated from reality, are trying to escape the present for the
past. We are left with a cliff-hanger: will Lemmy and Natasha reach the Outerlands
or will they only continue driving forever through an endless night? To escape, they
must overcome time and space like Orpheus, passing from a city of pulsating lights,
a cinema city governed by re-creations from film’s past and computers that control
thoughts, back to a place where illusion and reality are separate and dreams are
experienced only by those who are really asleep. Perhaps they will make it if they
don’t look back.
As Alphaville is in part a homage to Jean Cocteau and his film Orphée,
perhaps we should give the final word to the filmmaker and artist Godard greatly
admired. Back in 1930, in an intertitle in his film Le Sang d’un poète (Blood of the
Poet), Cocteau presciently depicted us today when he described his poet character
(himself) as “The sleeper seen from up close or the surprises of photography, or
how I got caught in a trap by my own film.”
the Real” in our culture (our obsession with the intrusions of the “raw real” of sex
or bodily violence) cannot be reduced to the rather elementary fact that the virtualization of our daily lives, the experience that we are more and more living in
an artificially constructed universe, gives rise to the irresistible urge to regain the
firm ground in some “real reality.” the real which returns has the status of
a(nother) semblance: precisely because it is real, i.e. on account of its traumatic/
excessive character, we are unable to integrate it into (what we experience as)
our reality, and are therefore compelled to experience it as a nightmarish
apparition. This is what the captivating image of the collapse of the World Trade
Center was: an image, a semblance, an “effect,” which, at the same time,
delivered “the thing itself.… the real itself, in order to be sustained, has to be
perceived as a nightmarish irreal specter.”
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58 Stephen Fry, Making History (London: Arrow Books Ltd, 1997), 160–61.
59 Slavoj Žižek, “The Foreign Gaze Which Sees Too Much,” in Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, eds. Atom
Egoyan and Ian Balfour (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 291.
Jean Cocteau
Blood of the Poet, 1930
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Chiho Aoshima
City Glow, 2005 (detail)
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Projecting Dreams
Kelly Gordon
Dreaming was the first so-called cinema effect. The confusion between what is
actual and imagined, the disjuncture of temporal continuity, and the persistence
of vivid, memorable imagery is not the invention of art or advertising, cinema or
cyberspace but is as old as consciousness itself and its attendant realm of dreams.
Moving-image technology provides the tools to imitate the look, feel, and power of
dreams, and surfing today’s constant image stream causes a cinematic sensibility
that impacts how we think, feel, and even dream. Accessibility to these tools has
inspired increasing numbers of artists as well as the general public to explore this
impact and to become more cinema-savvy as perceivers and producers.
In the public sphere, cheaper equipment and expanding internet platforms have created a participatory phenomenon. Such websites as YouTube,
MySpace, and Facebook and webcasts ranging from lonelygirl 15 (the fake teen
diary that became a real online soap opera) to the Numa Numa guy (a real homemade work, beguiling for its earnestness) to Rubber Johnny (an extended-play
version of the music video professionally produced by Chris Cunningham) quickly
gained cult status with a double-edged effect on the arts. The growth of this trend
may expand the museum audience to those who want to mine its resources for
inspiration for their own cinematic projects and may increase mainstream interest
in online artworks and events. But certain types of interactivity and viewercontrolled response—originated with the television remote control “clicker,” the
Steve McQueen
Bear, 1993 (details)
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Kelly Gordon Projecting Dreams
joystick, and, now, the mouse—may also foster partial-attention syndrome to the
extent that artists and museums will have to change how they interface with seekers of more and more diverse and dynamic stimuli.
Well into the 1980s, experimental film and video was considered marginal in the art world, with the exception of some star practitioners and well-known
artists who included moving-image work within their practice. Galleries were
unsure of how to convince collectors what it was they actually owned, and art institutions relegated this work to a kind of underground status. Since the mid-1990s,
media work and particularly media installations have gained equal visibility and, to
a certain extent, market share with other contemporary art. Today, museums and
galleries regularly commission and co-produce works. During the 1980s, there were
distinctions between film and video work and well-defined genres emerged (performance/confessional, gender/identity, desire/taboo, voyeurism/surveillance, imitating/critiquing mass media, formalist/minimal emphasis on process and material
qualities of the medium, to name a few). Now, labeling art or artists only according
to content or choice of film, video, or digital technology has become a blurred if not
moot point as the diversity of approaches and formats reflected in Dreams confirms.
The pace and impact of the mediasphere have been topical in contemporary art, especially since Andy Warhol. The artworks in Dreams adopt the cinematic
technologies that generate it, but focus on a means to escape its encroachment
into daily life. These installations evoke the stages of this escape as a parallel to
states of dreaming—a veil under which the dreamer drifts off to sleep and journeys beyond the everyday that transports the dreamer beyond the everyday; an
encounter of physical dimensions; a pull toward things thought, remembered, or
seen in childhood wonderlands; a visit to environments vividly familiar, vaguely
strange. These states are but one means to navigate this imaginary territory—
there is also a simpler dichotomy at work. In some instances, the artists did not create their subjects but found, assembled, or reassembled them. The departure point
was something that exists or existed in the real world. In effect, these could be
termed oblique documentaries. In contrast to traditional documentary, these are
not strictly agenda-driven or didactic, but transport something real beyond its conventional reality, as dreams often do. By contrast, some of these installations operate as ambiguous dramas. The catalyst was purely imagination, and the artist’s
invented scenarios have some degree of linear continuity, even dramatic peaks, but
remain elusive metaphors, like the fragmented and interrupted narratives of memories and dreams. Inevitably, there are overlaps, as to insist on rigid categorizations
for the interpretation of dreams or art would be to miss the point of why they are
so affecting. Also, an artwork, like a dream, is only fully activated through viewers’
own projections. The works in Dreams suggest a state suspended outside the waking world but also the means to reflect on what has become of it.
44
ing as well as the glory days of grand cinema houses and their plush fixtures. The
artist, known for his conceptual gymnastics, has provided part funhouse effect and
part ontological experiment but has also crafted an irresistibly beautiful projected
image illusion that is also a tangible metaphor.
45
The Veil of Sleep Descends
Douglas Gordon
Dualities that tamper with time and illusion are central to Douglas Gordon’s work.
Off Screen, 1998, does not initially appear to be a video installation—it is comprised
of an actual white curtain made from screen-like material onto which a red curtain
is projected and through which viewers pass. On the other side, they are momentarily blinded by the projector beam that also throws their shadows onto the curtain, producing silhouettes that can be seen from the entry side. The artwork becomes
a fluid rather than fixed object as viewers penetrate and augment its layers of illusion and actuality. This typical Gordian knot raises questions about how cinema
effects defy but also become part of the substance of reality, like his notorious
installations 24 Hour Psycho, 1993, and 5 Year Drive-by, 1995, in which the narrative of Hollywood feature films are slowed to a state of dissolution but repossessed
by actual time. In works like these and Warhol’s Sleep that involve extremely
dilated time, cuts bring a monumental rupture, but also relief. The sustained fixed
focus is uncanny but also banal. Part of the experience is the viewer’s presupposition that some if not most of the artwork will likely remain unseeable. Comparably,
Off Screen toys with paradox. Observers unwittingly become performers who cannot observe their own performances. They are and are not part of the “movie.”
Off Screen also brings to mind literary and mystical allusions to veils and
curtains as thresholds for expanded perception. The artist’s work, which includes
photography, text-based pieces including letters and imaginative novels, as well as
video installations and feature films, is often shrouded with a gothic, shadowy aura
inspired by his fascination with nineteenth-century morality tales and adventure
novels. This theatrical drape harkens back to nineteenth-century tromp d’oeil paint-
Douglas Gordon
Off Screen, 1998
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Andy Warhol
The most radical of Andy Warhol’s works are his early films. Much discussed, rarely
seen, but often illustrated, they remain influential as ideas and rumors. His first
film, Sleep, 1963, is a five-hour-and-twenty-one-minute black-and-white study of
an almost motionless man sleeping, shot from different angles, projected at 16
frames per second. Despite the film’s reputation as a pretentious exercise in
absurdity, the subject, John Giorno, poet and sometimes Warhol paramour, has
described how the artist studied him all night as he slept and was mesmerized by
1
the beauty and stillness of sleep and asked if he could capture this. The artist
filmed him for weeks, sleeping, passed out drunk, napping; and although Warhol
was known for courting notoriety, Giorno claims that the artist discarded any
2
footage he felt would sensationalize the film as homoerotic.
Warhol edited the footage into a length he thought seemed like an overnight, even repeating some of the footage. The film culminates in a still shot of
Giorno’s face, grainy now since extant versions are far from the original, but also
then, like the quality of Warhol’s painted and silk-screened portraits based on rephotographed imagery.
Arresting white flashes indicating the switch out of film rolls are jolting, especially between passages that feel like a slide show of a medical experiment. Giorno is obviously not acting, and James Rosenquist remarked that when
3
he first saw the film, he worried that the subject was dead. Giorno is amazingly
oblivious to the raking light that creates the shifting abstract patterns of dark and
light, that are the film’s chief diversions during hours of eventlessness. The duration and repetition in Warhol’s Sleep has been linked to his attendance at an
eighteen-plus-hour-long concert organized by John Cage in which an eighty-sec4
ond piano piece by Eric Satie was repeated 840 times by different pianists.
Perhaps in both, the anticipation of variance builds suspense, but Cage’s production seems to mark time, while Warhol’s project seems to emphasize cinema as a
vehicle to lose track of time.
Sleep is also a hypnotic meditation on watching as well as a bold, deadpan consideration of a timeless subject, the beauty of the human form. Unlike the
artist’s later films, which contributed to the popularity of on-screen shamelessness,
in Sleep there are no prurient pans or seductive cinematography. The onus is on the
viewer to supply the “drama” by re-seeing something familiar and obvious in a
fresh way. Sleep reminds viewers that part of the allure of art is not in analyzing it
so much as unquestioningly experiencing it, free-association or association-free, as
one does images in dream states.
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1 John Giorno, “Commentary,” Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 238.
2 Pierre Huyghe et. al., Pierre Huyghe (Rivoli, Torino: Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea; Milan: Skira
Editore Milano, 2004), 243.
3 James Rosenquist, commentary in Cronenberg on Warhol by David Cronenberg (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario,
2006), tk9 cd-rom.
4 Callie Angel, FILL IN REFERENCE.
Andy Warhol
Sleep, 1963
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Siebren Versteeg
Neither There Nor There, 2005
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Siebren Versteeg
In Neither There Nor There, 2005, Siebren Versteeg holds up a technological mirror
to a psychic state. His double self-portrait, which spans a pair of lcd screens spilling pixels back and forth like a perpetual hour glass, brings to mind several
dimensions of waking life—the in-between sensation familiar to those who use
telecommuting, hyper-networking, cyber gaming, online surfing and shopping,
streaming, and cell phone cameras to “be” two places at once; the ways cyberdevices create digital traces that expose users to surveillance, data collection, and
marketing; and the specter of interfacing with and being subsumed by digital
interconnectivity. This mirror also suggests aspects of the unplugged world as the
artist taps into the traditional issues and conceits invoked by portraiture, fundamental questions about identity, perception, and capturing for posterity that which
is always in transition.
Versteeg enlists cinema effects related to both the oldest and newest
of moving-image techniques and technologies. In Man with the Movie Camera,
1929, Dziga Vertov portrayed the frenzied pace of the metropolis using overlapping imagery reminiscent of the superimposed planes associated with Cubist dissolution. In the digital age, the condition Vertov sought to depict is no longer city
bound as most urban attractions are only a mouse click away, and the flux and blur
of global dynamism is a pervasive state of mind and being one can experience sitting at home, or in the studio. People can instantaneously leave their bodies in the
fixed world and take any form or assume any identity—creating an ever-changing
portrait of themselves—in cyberspace. For Hollywood films, digital technologies
are increasingly used to enhance magically the look and capabilities of actors, add
to the “cast,” and inspire the tools favored by Madison Avenue (such as when
Audrey Hepburn came back to life in a recent Gap commercial and leapt out of her
big-screen past, a clip from her film Funny Face, and into the blank space of “now,”
where she doubles, quadruples, and dances). Like Warhol’s doubled then mirrored
portrait of Edie Sedgewick in Outer and Inner Space, 1965, in which her film and
video personae compete, Neither There Nor There suggests the unnerving feeling of
trying to express oneself in an age in which moving images are ubiquitous and infinitely malleable. At the same time, ironically, the artist provides a zen-like antidote
to the pace of a computer-driven, media-saturated world.
Portrait of Edie Sedgewick in
Andy Warhol’s
Outer and Inner Space, 1965
16 mm film
Courtesy of The Andy Warhol Foundation for
the Visual Arts. © 2006 Andy Warhol Foundation
for the Visual Arts / ARS, New York
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Stan Douglas
Borrowed and created elements are interwoven into an intellectual vertigo in Stan
Douglas’s noted film and video installations. A self-taught Samuel Beckett expert,
he often makes art from or referring to extant film, history, and literature by reinventing their narrative frameworks and playing upon viewers’ movie-reinforced
expectations of logic and conclusion, which are forever deferred. Douglas’s recent
work Klassassin, 2005, for example, inspired by Akira Kurasawa’s Rashomon, 1950,
comments on the dizzying effect of information overload. For this piece, the artist
created scripts from historical records of the conflicting perspectives given by witnesses involved in a trial that led to a Gold Rush–era hanging. What might be
termed an unWestern, the film never provides a ride off into the sunset. The events
and testimonies are spliced into 850 permutations repeated over more than seventy hours of running time in a rich, if ungraspable, splintered flood of non-contiguous moments.
By contrast, Overture, 1986, is an escape from media overload, a simply
structured sentimental journey. It unfolds with vintage footage of a train wending
its way through the Canadian Rockies. A male voiceover ruminates about the suspended state between waking and sleeping, reciting fragments from the overture
to Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, 1913–27. The narrator’s intonations at first seem like something overheard, perhaps the reflections of the real
projectionist, but soon this voice overtakes one’s own thoughts. The footage
repeats, but the commentary is slightly different, causing viewers to wonder if
they have already “been there.” Moreover, dips into the tunnels have been attenuated by the artist, who added “real” black leader footage and imaginationinduced disorientation. While the screen is black, it is unclear if this is a tunnel, the
end of the film, or the type of “death of the story line” cut-to-black David Chase
used to end/ not end The Sopranos. Resurfacing in the light at the far end of the
tunnel, the gently flickering imagery and somnambulant speculations combine to
hypnotic effect.
Douglas’s mountain passage is an oblique documentary about a contemporary sensibility. He reanimates remnants of a lost era and employs an image
traditionally associated with both the cinema and dreams—the train—to shed
light on what remains elusive in the perpetual “now,” the time to wander mentally.
This journey, via invisible train, invisible camera, invisible projector, invisible narrator, and insistent looping device, is created by machines that can imitate consciousness, destabilize one’s sense of space and place, and defy time while the wizard
behind the curtain, the artist, persuades us his dream vision may also be our own.
Bruce Conner
Before revolutionizing avant-garde filmmaking by applying his collage technique to
the short films he began producing in 1958, Bruce Conner was a noted practitioner
of collage and assemblage. Dadaist collage grew out of urban European culture
between the world wars, when the lives and pockets of individuals were increasingly cluttered with bits of paper. The rupture of image and surface in art paralleled
shifting socioeconomic and political forces, the threat of war, and the sense that
the dynamic pace of life was becoming overwhelming. Comparable sensibilities led
Conner, who was central to the San Francisco counterculture movement, to explore
collage and montage as a means to examine and critique conventional society with
the very stuff generated by it.
Conner, an astute and avid film fan from an early age, has discussed his
fascination with the way in which movie trailers skip through highlights of a plot
5
using radical juxtapositions without regard to linear continuity. The artist was also
intrigued by the cinematic gags of inserting fact into fiction, such as in the Marx
Brothers’ Duck Soup, 1933, in which the massing of Fredonia’s militia is portrayed
by stock footage plucked from newsreels, including a snippet of a swimming
marathon. Conner has said that from the time he began watching movies he envisioned a film constructed from a pastiche of other films and reports: “I’d been wait6
ing for someone to come up with a movie like this. And nobody did.”
By the late 1970s, Conner was well known for his film collage commentaries. Compiled from photo stills and found footage, his artful protests questioned
5 Bruce Jenkins, “Explosion in a Film Factory: The Cinema of Bruce Conner,” in 2000 BC: The Bruce Connor Story
Part II by Bruce Conner, et. al. (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1999), 188.
6 Doug Aitken, Broken Screen Expanding the Image Breaking the Narrative 26 Conversations with Doug Aitken,
ed. Noel Daniel (New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2006), 86.
Stan Douglas
Overture, 1986
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[illustrations 9,10] TK
[illustrations 7,8] TK
Bruce Conner
Take the 5:10 to Dreamland, 1977
Bruce Conner
Valse Triste, 1978
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sociopolitical powers as well as the power of images. Take the 5:10 to Dreamland,
1977, and Valse Triste, 1978, represent a departure from his agenda-driven expressions. These works, often presented together, use some of his signature devices,
but are slower, emotionally poignant, and incidentally autobiographical. Valse
Triste opens with a boy in striped pajamas. Once nestled into his pillow, the film
moves through various images that appear to illustrate motifs flowing through his
dreams—footage of a large locomotive, a spinning globe from a science class
movie, a farm family burning leaves, which appears before giving way to imagery
suggesting other fires of pre-pubescent longings. The score by Sibelius (and source
for the film’s title) was taken from the theme music of a favorite boyhood radio
7
drama, “I Love a Mystery.” The title Take the 5:10 to Dreamland combines the
running time of the electronic score Patrick Gleeson created for Conner before the
8
film was developed with a suggestion of the time of an imaginary train departure.
The film is a poetic through-the-looking-glass journey driven by ambiguous images:
men in mines, young and teenage girls, a white horse, and even a white rabbit.
These two sepia-toned films reflect Conner’s genius for mining the corners of history and memory to create what can feel like a collective home movie. Whatever
leaps the mind does not make spurred by the images, music enables, weaving an
audio-visual lullaby into an open-ended time capsule that tames the contemporary
crisis of clutter, the ubiquity of moving imagery.
Rodney Graham
Throughout his influential body of work, which spans photography, sculpture,
architecture, performance, music, text, installation, and film and video, Rodney
Graham frequently explores altered states, the perspective of surveillance, and the
passage of time with the precision of a scientist, the erudition of a scholar, the
engagement tactics of a carnival huckster, the audacity of a Dada prankster, and
the passion of a nineteenth-century poet. In contrast to his rollicking performance
videos in which the artist has appeared passed out and pajama-clad in the back of
a van whizzing through Vancouver (Halcyon Sleep, 1994) or dressed up as a shipwrecked pirate bonked on the head by a coconut (Vexation Island, 1997), in
Rheinmetall/Victoria 8, 2003, something else is being put to sleep, laid to rest,
moved from one state to another.
Rodney Graham
Rheinmetall/Victoria 8, 2003
Two machines inhabit this installation. The real and present one is a
hulking film projector—the Cinemeccanica Victoria 8, a 35mm Italian-made model
from the 1950s—which is spot lit and provides the distinctive hum for the soundtrack of this piece. The other device is projected—an old typewriter so pristine that
it looks unreal. This Rheinmetall, a German-made product of the 1930s, stars in the
film although it is silenced, minus its distinctive tapping. The film opens with a
series of fixed shots that survey the mint-condition specimen with delectation and
documentation reminiscent of Warhol’s beautiful dreamer, only the body of the poet
is replaced by a machine. Was this an order unclaimed or a gift unused? The camera
does not dwell but moves on to a shot of the entire, commanding object.
Stark, Duchampian, cool, the typewriter, once a promising portal to
written fact or fantasy now dormant is suddenly made marvelous. Snow (flour,
actually) at first gently, then relentlessly showers its contours and collects on its
keys, disguising the prop until it becomes cocooned, entombed, and, in a final downpour, transformed into an alpine landscape. Refreshing, like the snowfall Glinda
sends to rouse Dorothy from her poppy field slumber or the dusting that enlivens
Méliès’s dreamers on the moon, the white brightness of snowy screen awakens the
space before it, casting light toward its majestic projector. With this face-off
between these machines, Graham’s work embodies the poetry of obsolescence.
He positions these objects like a couple in their twilight years who bask in one
another’s glow. Their time has passed, as does ours while we watch this curious
enactment of the spell of cinema.
7 Jenkins, “Explosion in a Film Factory: The Cinema of Bruce Conner,” 216–17.
8 XX quoted in ibid, 220.
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Encounters in the Dark
Anthony McCall
9
Anthony McCall cinematizes gallery space. His astonishing cinema effects are as
much about what is between and around the projector and the projection as they
are concerned with what is on screen. The artist invented the term “solid light
films” for his room-scale installations such as You and I, Horizontal, 2005. These
works alter the position of the viewer from a seated observer who faces a screen to
a roving eye, encouraged to move through space, choosing and changing vantage
points. Each film consists of a sequence of lines or geometric diagrams that choreographs the shape and shift of the projected shafts of light as well as the linear trace
of their “footprints” on the wall. A hazer mists the room, emphasizing the path of
the beam through space to dramatic effect.
Several aspects of the solid light films grew out of the artist’s largescale outdoor events in the early 1970s that joined performance, environmental
art, and happenings, such as Landscape for Fire, 1972–73. For these pieces, he
arranged gas pans in a grid across a field and ignited them in predetermined
sequences. They “performed,” changing configurations as they burned, smoked,
and glowed. McCall’s inspiration for his first of the solid light films, Line Describing
a Cone, 1973, came during a transatlantic voyage, when he was moving from
Britain to America and was suspended for days between his past and his future.
His playful work on paper, Found Solid Light Installation, 1973, an actual map indicating lighthouses along the English coastline, suggests a precedent for his moving shafts of light. While these films appear to be starkly intellectual, radically
reductive abstractions, they also invoke irresistible allusions to life and art. The
illumination in religious art, the mystical natural light portrayed in Romantic landand seascapes, and the futuristic rays and beams in science fiction films come to
mind. Art critics and historians focus on the role of concept and process in McCall’s
work, but the sheer immersive beauty of these pieces also accounts for the reason
Line Describing a Cone remained legendary despite the artist’s hiatus from artmaking during the 1980s and 1990s.
9 Branden W. Joseph, “Sparring with the Spectacle (parts 6–10),” in Anthony McCall: the Solid Light Films and Related
Works, ed. by Christopher Eamon (Göttingen: Steidl Publishers; San Francisco, CA : New Art Trust, 2005), 124.
Anthony McCall
You and I, Horizontal, 2005
Installation view at Institut d’Art Contemporain,
Villeurbanne, France, 2006
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In 2001, McCall re-engaged with his practice by re-creating Line Describing a Cone for the first time as an installation rather than a one-off projection. You
and I, Horizontal extends his initial solid light film investigations into more complex
and spectacular derivations, now aided by digital technology. At first glance, this
work does not appear to be a film so much as a spot light; but slowly viewers register the mesmerizing abstract ballet that occurs during its fifty-minute cycle. Viewers
bathed in actual light generate new visual effects by dodging one another’s sightlines, casting shadows and silhouettes, and comparing effects and allusions. Each
audience makes each projection a unique gallery intervention.
Darren Almond
In Geisterbahn, 1999, and in many other of his works, Darren Almond creates various
types of time machines. Throughout his career, the artist’s pieces often sculptures
made from industrially fabricated objects like large-scale digital clocks, aluminum
wall plaques, ceiling fans, and bus shelters, function like their real world counterparts, but also act as props projecting viewers into his subtle dramas about recollection, anticipation, and the visualization of time. Similarly, his performances and
broadcast transmissions investigate time as a measure of duration and endurance.
For example, in The Guest, 1998, a thirty-minute video, the artist jogged round
and round an apartment while his path paralleled the sweep of the second hand of
a clock. H. M. P. Pentonville, 1997, was a twenty-four hour streaming project in
which the camera watched an empty prison cell while ambient sound made time
feel endless.
The artist also equates time with travel. Schwebebahn, 1995, a twelveminute video, is condensed from a three-day-long continuous shot made from
within a suspended monorail as it glided in and above Wuppertal, Germany. The
footage is projected upside down, run backwards, slowed, and looped and edited
into a study in contrasts. Shifting between daylight and dark, color and black and
white, past (as a triumph of turn-of-the century engineering) and future (anticipated by the train’s moderne aesthetic), this trippy souvenir contrasts Almond’s
recent video In Between, 2006, a more straightforward journey on the China-Tibet
railway. Both, however, heighten awareness about the suspensions of time inherent in travel.
Darren Almond,
Bad Timing, 1998
Perpsex, infra-red, sound store, and motor
Geisterbahn is a pretend train. This video initially seems to be a straightforward record of a vintage ghost ride, but this is an oblique documentary as the
trip sends viewers several other invisible places along the way. The running time
approximates how long it would take to experience the actual ride, but the footage,
slightly slowed and shot in grainy black and white, underscores how this is also a
trip to the past, before such amusements were superseded by virtual diversions.
Almond’s camera is mounted on the front of one of the geistercars, and
this vantage point quickly feels like our own. There appear to be neither staff nor
riders here to accompany viewers while they are being transported. The rhythmic
score, an eerie techno bop, adds to the hypnotic effect, incorporating the aural
sparks and crackles that are common sound accretions on worn film footage, into its
smooth, lulling beat. Viewers are drawn into the darkness, though tunnels where
lurking figures and scary faces emerge, yet look quaint, passé, fake. The video
archives but also freezes the pending obsolescence of the Geisterbahn. The only
horror it can now muster is as a marker of aging and our lost capacity to feel the
childlike wonderment that made us more open to such magical experiences.
The artist proposed a race with his own obsolescence in Bad Timing,
1998, one of the his digital-shuffle clocks, considered to be among the artist’s conceptual self-portraits. As each minute flips and is lost, a voice whispers “shit” on
the hour and “fuck” on the hour. The sensation of time lost is not the end game but
the departure point for Geisterbahn, which suggests one way to arrest, preserve, or
savor time is via such sentimental journeys outside of it.
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Darren Almond
Geisterbahn, 1999
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Tony Oursler
Liberated from the framing devices of wall screens or monitors as well as from the
protocols of gallery space, Tony Oursler’s artworks do not behave. His pieces are liberated from the framing devices of wall screens or monitors as well as from the protocols of gallery space. These large and small projections, often skewed faces and
eyes that dart and stare, take the shape of their host surfaces—cylinders, cubes,
orbs, rag dolls, even trees—and infiltrate an area, surprising and confronting those
who walk by them. Switch, 1996, is composed of multiple components that can be
installed throughout an exhibition. Ovoid forms with eyeballs and faces, figures
with cloth bodies and projected faces, and, in some versions, “talking” light bulbs
are placed high and low in unconventional spots and shadows as part of one continuous work that begins and ends nowhere and seems to be everywhere.
10
Oursler’s eyeballs “scan the world upon which they feed.” The permeability of media—what flows through it and how it flows through us—is central to
Oursler’s concerns. The artist describes his work as psychomimetamedia and has
referred to how Multiple Personality Disorder, once thought to be a clinical condition, is now studied as a contemporary form of hysteria caused by media culture.
He has even used the poems and case studies of MPD patients as listening posts for
some of the scripts his wee folk enact.
Oursler’s oeuvre, which sometimes includes large-scale events with live
actors as well as his projected performers, uses old-fashioned smoke and mirrors
stagecraft and conjures the chilly technofuturism imagined by science fiction writers like Philip K. Dick. The big screen adaptation of Dick’s short story “The Minority
Report” (made in 2000) envisioned the year 2054 as an environment consisting of
pervasive visual surfaces, where citizens are relentlessly scanning and scanned so
that their profiles can be collected, analyzed, circulated, and sold. The film’s technical consultants were MIT Media Lab veterans John Underkoffler and Harald Belker.
Among their off-screen endeavors is the development of a camera/projector/light
interface system that can, in real time, intake and replicate holographic versions of
whatever enters a so-called luminous room. Oursler’s human stand-ins already
seem like sentient entities able to record, project, and process passersby—at the
same time able to snub and ignore them in some sort of paradoxical form of surveillance. They hover in the margins like phantasms and feedback from dreams
Tony Oursler
Let’s Switch to Switch, 1996
that haunt the peripheral radar now ever present in waking hours. Like the unnerving omniscient spam that remixes words form what you’ve written and received by
e-mail and appears to “know” you, it seems there’s a conspiracy in the air when
imagination, science, and science fiction converge. Switch ensures that we are
never alone.
Steve McQueen
In his early series of spare, silent, black-and-white short films, Steve McQueen
works both in front of as well as behind the camera. Bear, 1993, is a mesmerizing
composition of two bodies engaged in an ambiguous encounter. Beginning with a
close-up of a man’s face, whose sidelong glance invites viewers into the netherspace of the scene, the face of another man (the artist) emerges from the shadows,
and the camera pulls back to reveal that they are alone and naked in the darkness.
Slowly they circle and size one another up, imitating the footwork of sparring. A
coaxing touch precipitates an embrace that devolves into an altercation. The camera shifts to a vantage point directly below them, emphasizing the vulnerability of
their exposed genitals, the strain of their interlocking arms, and the competitive
grimaces on their faces. As they move, in turns they block or are bleached by a raking light that occasionally reveals the presence of the camera when the lens is
briefly haloed.
Silence intensifies this odd drama. The viewer’s own breathing becomes
the only soundtrack. McQueen uses slowed motion to enhance further how sequences
alternate between tension and release, playfulness and struggle, combat and
camaraderie. Implications ricochet as each hint about the nature of this relationship
is promptly subverted. In one sequence, the men’s legs move across the screen with
waltz-like precision, evoking such historical precedents as classical vase painting,
early photographic studies like Eadweard Muybridge’s Studies of Figures in Motion,
and Hollywood representations of boxing matches. The references shift with the
men’s change of body language and recall slapstick, over-the-top television wrestling
10 Tony Oursler in Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, “The New Generation of Shadows: Mediums, Automatons, and
Liminal Insight in the Work of Tony Oursler,” Tony Oursler: Videotapes, Dummies, Drawings, Photographs,
Viruses, Light, Heads, Eyes, and cd-rom, ed. by Eckhard Schneider (Malmö: Malmö Konsthall, 1998), 56.
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Tony Oursler
Let’s Switch, 1996
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and locker room jousting. In one scene, the artist’s head is thrown back, apparently
in ecstasy, but like Tom Baker’s face in Andy Warhol’s Blow Job, 1963, explicit evidence of erotic encounter is beyond the frame, and the only certainty presented is
the special capability of black-and-white film to caress a face in blissful repose.
McQueen is interested in making cinema a “site for spiritual and intel11
lectual contemplation.” This dreamlike “bout” parallels how we struggle while
waking and sleeping to construct meaning from the conflicts and connections that
define us. Also, Bear, like Warhol’s Sleep, documents the merger of the oldest subject in art, the human body, with one of the most artful aspects of cinema, its
capacity to capture the subtleties of the body’s movement in shadow and light.
Gary Hill
Suspension of Disbelief (for Marine), 1991–92, is to some extent an anomaly within
Gary Hill’s oeuvre. The artist is primarily known for his innovative combinations of
video and sculpture that usually include references to his fascination with text and
language. By contrast, this silent, thirty-monitor installation is a personal document, like Warhol’s Sleep inspired by his own actual and longed-for love life. He
devised the video sculpture to fuse in art what was suspended in life—proximity to
his lover, who had moved across the country to take a new job. He has detailed
how he filmed his own body in Seattle and then, during a visit with her in New York,
12
set up lights and a camera in a hotel room to capture hers. The two bodies, joined
first in real space and time and then in his imagination, were reunited by his studio
equipment and remain together for as long as the artwork survives.
In Suspension, the two figures are compartmentalized, fragmented
across small monitors that flicker as they meet, intersect, and break apart. Embedded in an industrial steel i-beam, the component parts read like frames on a piece
of film. They are housed and looped to imply perpetuation and permanence. The
artist has frozen time, himself, and his love in this electronically pulsing video
11 Horace Brockington, “Logical Anonymity: Lorna Simpson, Steve McQueen, Stan Douglas,” International
Review for African American Art 15, no. 3 (1998): 20–29.
12 Gary Hill, “Gary Hill: In His Own Words,” Making Sense of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
http://www.sfmoma.org/msoma/artists/hill.html
Steve McQueen
Bear, 1993
Gary Hill
Suspension of Disbelief (for Marine), 1991– 92
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need to photogrpah with bleed on right
detail of video monitor TK
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valentine, flashing with desire and frustration, inflected with reality. Even viewers
not privy to the back story might deduce that these are not actors or models and
identify with them as two real people stretching to connect. The artist’s visual
metaphor for a reach across an actual and virtual space is now a commonplace reality for those who rely on internet-relayed video as a means for social interface.
While the images in Hill’s work capture a moment in the lovers’ lives in
the same way that snapshots sometimes can, his title embodies a truism for cinema and now life, that dispatches from cell phones and uploads to websites may
have an instantaneous look and permanent feel but can also be merely illusions
necessitating the suspension of disbelief.
Christoph Girardet
Christoph Girardet is a master re-shuffler. He constructs new films and new meanings from old footage culled from movies and television, adapting them for theatrical, monitor, and installation projections. For Release, 1996, Girardet re-cuts and
reconstitutes a brief segment from Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s
King Kong, 1933, and, along with it, our associations with the cult classic, its offscreen legend, and original on-screen power.
Cinema began as a side show, and King Kong is a film about the making
of a film and how the project devolves into just such a show. On location, actress
Anne Barrow (Fay Wray) is kidnapped by the natives of Skull Island and offered as
a sacrifice to Kong; but, ultimately, it is Kong who is the sacrifice, captured and
transformed into an attraction. Initially the plot featured more graphic evidence of
his desire for Anne, but his longing was softened and censored prior to the film’s
release. Girardet extracts, abstracts, and re-imports the erotic and invents a different kind of thriller.
Lifting four takes from the original film, Girardet digitally divides the
footage into thousands of fragments and reconfigures the imagery. The artist
begins with the first moments Anne sees Kong. We cannot see what fills her with
such terror; instead, we see her from Kong’s perspective, chained and struggling.
Cuts in quick succession move her back and forth in a thrusting rhythm, while the
original music trembles in an ominous tonal holding pattern as her movements
gain momentum.
Christoph Girardet
Release, 1996
Then there is that scream, the frozen moment that “rips a whole in lin13
ear time.” For Girardet, it is the aural equivalent of the money shot, a climax that
will overcome her temporal entrapment and release the film to move forward to
resolution. As for the kinky premise of the film, the artist goes it one better, equating both cinema and sex as activities driven by the tension between frustration
and desire.
The revolution of home video, the rise of sleazy so-called reality television, sexy music videos, and those internet sites that can pop up from the most
innocent of search commands have brought on a desensitization to sexual imagery
14
according to cultural critic Rick Poynor. In Designing Pornotopia, he examines how
media has bred a culture increasingly shock-proof and jaded. The orgasmic thrall of
Girardet’s Release challenges that sensibility, re-tooling a classic to become even
more potent and arresting and, like its peepshow predecessors, served up with
some humor. The artist focuses on the close proximity between expressions of
ecstasy and hysteria, the absurdity of time as it freezes and stutters in ways that
imitate coital rhythms, and the iconic branding power of pop culture. Girardet’s
intervention into mass culture reclaims a cliché, which is selected because it is one
and gets altered until it is not.
13 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 77.
14 Rick Poyner, Desigining Pornotopia: Travels in Visual Culture (New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2006),
132.
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Through the Looking Glass
Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler
Artists Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler, who have collaborated on photographic, installation, and performance work, now focus mostly on short films. They
are cinephiles who emulate the practices and production values of commercial
movies, but these familiar elements get turned on their head in their cryptic scenarios, in which the breach between scenes is as compelling as their vivid tableaux.
Eight, 2001, opens with a close-up, the face of a little girl (actress Anna
Reyes) in a party dress, safe and dry indoors as she watches the rain outside. She is
alone, reflected in the window like Alice sizing up her looking glass. The camera
pans slowly to her left, where the edge of the wall of her inside haven can be seen
simultaneously with the rain-spattered backyard. The camera moves there seamlessly to inspect what remains of an interrupted festive cookout, now inhabited
only by blue and white balloons that bob up like faceless puppets.
She arrives there, like Alice in a new “room.” Soaked, but serious, she peruses the table until she finds a plastic plate and very large knife. With patient
determination, she moves to the next table, pulls a candle off the birthday cake,
and cuts herself a generous portion she shelters daintily with her hand. She looks
up thoughtfully; then she forages in the table wreckage, probably for a fork. The
camera drops to study the glistening, exquisite ruins. Pickles and chips floating in
plastic plates and striped straws bending toward lips now departed are shown in
poetic detail like a vintage still life in which an abandoned feast symbolizes the
fleeting nature of time. The camera lifts, at once framing this outdoor spread in the
foreground and the inside of the house just beyond it. Off-camera voices of other
revelers rise slightly, spilling into what should be her private moment of epiphany—
having her cake and eating it, too. Instead, she is now moving through a dark passage into this same room, cakeless, confounding viewers’ ability to determine
whether this event has “happened” before or after all we have seen.
She proceeds to where she began, stoic and rinsed by the dappled
shadows of her weeping window. Perhaps she is considering how to bear the
drowning of one vestige of childhood, the trust and conviction that nothing can go
wrong, so different from adult life in which parades do get rained on. But no matter
how many times she becomes determined not to let a sodden cake dampen her
spirits, how many times she tells herself you’re only eight once, she is trapped in
the loop. She is forever eight, caught within a temporal and spatial infinity like the
symbol 8, endlessly trudging between shelter and storm, fate and action, disappointment and gratification, childhood and the unpredictable grown-up world, suspended in a scene home movies never show, captured in the big screen way that
mimics the vividness with which we mentally replay dreams and memories.
Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler
Eight, 2001
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Saskia Olde Wolbers
A scavenger, Saskia Olde Wolbers collects tidbits of unfathomable personal calamities from tabloids, hearsay, television documentaries, and overheard conversations
as the basis for her peculiar stories. Her fantastical sets appear to employ the digital tools used to generate imagery for science fiction and video games but are, in
fact, meticulously crafted miniature models hand-built from her horde of plastic,
metal wires, old bottles, and found bits of junk. They are painted with oil-based
paint and, while still wet, submerged in water so that on film they gracefully ooze,
flow, and melt. This morphing is the only on-screen action as the artist’s scenarios
have no human presence, only an off-screen narrator. Olde Wolbers recycles tales
from the margins and cast-off materials, things that surface from the detritus of
everyday living, into pulp fictions that unfold at a glacial pace.
Her narratives do not feel spun from whole cloth, but the self absorption of her characters rings true. Their stories—a woman pregnant with octuplets
obsessed with being commemorated in a float in her village parade (Octet, 1998),
a man who invents a virtual reality theme park in which people access their memories and finds his wife there trysting with a younger version of himself (Day-Glo,
1999)—stem from a familiar corner of filler news that feasts on sensationalized
circumstances. Their confessions have bizarre stories within stories that demand
attention, while, at the same time, the mysterious fluidity of Olde Wolbers’ imagery
feels narcotic.
In Trailer, 2005, a stranger describes wandering into a dilapidated movie
house. Only films from a long-faded Hollywood studio are shown here. He watches a
trailer for a vintage film and is caught off guard when it mentions an extinct
Amazonian moth that shares his unusual name, Alfgar Dalio. The moth was dependent upon a special tree and plant named for the stars of the film. As the elements of
this strange story unfold, on-screen images shift between a vivid red empty theater
and the translucent green plant life of the lush jungle (recalling the film’s reference
to Kinemacolor, a pre-color process based on alternating red and green filters).
Stories from the cinema and jungle merge, but not before an elaborate
unpacking of “facts” and diversions, including the disclosure that the stars of the
films he is watching are the parents he never knew. Although this may seem straight
out of a soap opera, in fact, Olde Wolbers was inspired by a television documentary
Saskia Olde Wolbers
Trailer, 2005
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Chiho Aoshima
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about Judy Lewis, the love child of Loretta Young and Clark Gable, who only knew
her father from his on-screen image. Perhaps the artist’s works are not separated
from the mediascape so much as an intricate reweaving of it. Her narrator describes
a “continuous search for visual peace in the lushly leafed jungle.” The metaphor of
cinema as a jungle may, in the end, be a forecast of things to come—which is after
all what any good trailer provides.
Chiho Aoshima
Chiho Aoshima says her work “feels like strands of my thoughts that have flown
15
around the universe before coming back to materialize.” She generates her whirling, explosive drawings using Adobe Illustrator as her dream machine and creates
digital prints that have been affixed to walls, room environments, and murals. City
Glow, 2005, is the artist’s first animation, an inevitable development in light of the
cinematic dynamism of her compositions, reinforced by their vibrant colors, dramatic shifts of scale, oddball perspectives, and searching eyes on faces that morph
freely into humans, nature, or architecture. Aoshima, whose academic training is in
economics, was a break-out apprentice at Takashi Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki studio.
Her work continues the studio’s Warhol-inspired interest in appropriating imagery
from pop consumer culture, but also updates certain spatial and compositional
devices that acknowledge a debt to traditional Japanese scroll and screen paintings. Aoshima’s thoughts have clearly “flown” through the super-flat graphic styles
of manga (comics) and anime (animated film) as well as the Japanese sensibility
termed kawwaii (fetishization of excessive cuteness), and references the supernatural fantasy world of otaku, the youth subculture obsessed with science fiction and
video games.
City Glow takes the viewer night-tripping in a seven-minute animation
cycle spread across five plasma-screen monitors. Undulating moon-eyed, babyfaced skyscrapers beckon and emerge from a paradisiacal undergrowth of cartoon
flora and fauna. This work is part of a series that appeared in several incarnations,
including two subway commissions: one for London’s Gloucester Road tube stop,
and another below Union Square in Manhattan. The whimsical places the artist depicts are an alluring diversion for some and a nostalgia trip for anyone whose Wizard
of Oz is Spirited Away. To others, her images can seem ominous or overbearingly
Chiho Aoshima
City Glow, 2005
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cutesy in ways that suggest how the appeal of kawwaii infantilia may represent a
regressive or false, force-fed “happy meal” ethos, even more alienating than the
urban environment unadorned.
Aoshima’s riff on the stoic, rigid grid of urban architecture may seem
like a naïve, futuristic dream, but the artist’s vision is coincidentally not far from
what is imagined by the global architectural movement favoring transparent media
façades. led technology embedded in mesh curtains or panels can now enable
super-sized moving-image screens that can make buildings disappear behind them
and appear more like changeable, living veils—programmable, responsive, and
interactive. The proponents of mediatecture, such as architect Christoph Kronhagel,
envision how “the outer layer of the building is enchanted…capable of becoming a
16
place that touches us more deeply.” Whether the urban environment of the
future becomes more personal and cuddly through public space interventions like
Aoshima’s phantasmagorical little brothers or incorporated into the Big Brother
city glow of such structures as the looming Khalifa Tower in Doha, Quaatar, the
omnipresence of cinema effects seems inevitable.
Dreamscapes
Tacita Dean
An adventurer in the Victorian tradition, cultivated and curious, fascinated by overlooked peculiarities and phenomena and a collector of vintage stories and ephemera,
Tacita Dean says her work focuses on “trapping something that is really disappearing.” Her films, photo series, drawings, books, and installations are assembled to
provoke patience and wonderment.
Her projects investigate the passage and ravages of time, including her
trek to Madagascar to behold a green ray, a moment rarely visible at sunset, and
her trip to Cayman Brac to track down an abandoned, once-high-tech ship left
there to rust. Themes of obsolescence emerge. In her film Kodak, 2006, Dean used
15 Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., Chiho Aoshima, Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., 2005, http://english.kaikaikiki.co.jp/artists/list/C6/
(accessed June 21, 2007).
16 Christoph Kronhagel, “The Media Facade as Part of Urban Culture,” ag4: Media Facades (Köln: daab gmbh,
2006), 166.
Khalifa Tower, Quaatar
Tacita Dean
Palast, 2004
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the last reels of double perforated 16mm she was able to obtain to capture the last
days of the French factory where it was manufactured. In her film Fernsehturn,
2001, set in the rotating restaurant atop the old East Berlin television tower, her
camera watches service workers’ and diners’ trip to nowhere. In the end, the sun literally sets on this relic of a faded regime, but the looping mechanism perpetuates it
in an endless present.
For Dean, whose adopted home is Berlin, merely walking through the
streets can inspire her investigative instincts. Her film Palast, 2004, grew out of
something she noticed during her perambulations. The coppery glass façade of an
abandoned building provided a variety of screens on which natural light produced
glorious effects. Oblique silhouettes made the decorative finials of one neighboring
building indistinguishable from the spire of Fernsehturn tower in the distance.
Skies reflected in the faded glazing appeared like the extra vivid skycapes of Romantic and Expressionistic painting. She learned this uncanny found cinema had been
German Democratic Republic headquarters, Palast der Republik, “a contentious
17
place that concealed its history in the opacity of its surface.”
She also discovered the asbestos-ridden structure was slated to be
razed. One faction was lobbying to preserve it as a reminder of a utopian dream
corrupted. Others hoped to restore the building it had replaced, a war-damaged
grand Baroque palace. The artist was drawn to the split screen effects of its architectural skin. Her film is what remains of the controversial edifice, a record of the
peculiar vintage tint of Oz gone bad. But Palast is not a documentary. The full building is never seen.
In a variation on how ancient orators imagined passage through architectural spaces as a mnemonic device, Dean’s up-angled camera passes across
actual architecture to ensnare memories. Her camera is an observatory, patiently
archiving a relationship between fleeting effects and their shadows before this
impromptu lightshow disappears forever.
Kelly Richardson
Exiles of the Shattered Star, 2006, exemplifies Kelly Richardon’s use of digital technology to combine shot and acquired footage into illusions that feel plausible. This
piece follows the course of a real sunrise on June 22, 2006, from about 4 am, as it
gradually illuminates a breathtaking vista the artist shot in Britain’s Lake District.
This landscape, often associated with Romantic poets and painters, is pure Nature,
seemingly without a trace of humanity, and appears so pristine and enthralling
that viewers may presume it is a simulation almost too good to be true. Into this
fixed-camera footage of an actual landscape falls a neat rain of hyper-real fireballs.
As the sun comes up and mystically breaks through the clouds, these subtly crackling flaming bundles gently splash down into the lake. An off-screen chorus of
chirping birds serenades the dawn, adding soothing syncopation to the rhythmic
pacing of this peculiar addition to the otherwise perfect weather. This ballet does
not look mechanical or feel like a staged spectacle so much as it seems a vibrant,
lonely vision.
Backgrounds have been key in several of Richardson’s works, including
a photographic series for which she poached and re-scanned landscapes from bad
horror movies. In her video Wagons Roll, 2003, she used appropriated footage of a
sports car headed off a cliff, but suspended the vehicle aloft, superimposed against
a backdrop of clouds moving by in progressive linear time. For the stars in Exiles,
she bought stock footage from a video supplier and replicated, scaled, layered, and
electronically randomized the descent of the fireballs. They drift downward at a
hypnotic pace while the emerging daylight acts as a visualization of real time. The
artist reports that her only alteration to the backdrop was to darken slightly the
sky in post-production and that the bird sounds are actual ambient noise from that
18
morning.
Has Richardson re-created a commonplace meteor shower, or is something more wily afoot—a visitation, an invasion, an allusion to the Lockerby plane
crash fallout or another kind of off-camera catastrophe, or are these the remnants
of the recently documented super nova? The artist notes that the connection
between the title of the work and a biblical passage from Revelations, Chapter 9,
“the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star from the sky which had fallen to the
19
earth,” was an afterthought rather than a departure point. Her blend of illusion
17 Tacita Dean in Tacita Dean (London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2006), 133.
18 Kelly Richardson, e-mail interview with Kelly Gordon, June 7, 2007.
19 Ibid.
Kelly Richardson
Exiles of the Shattered Star, 2006
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and reality into an oblique documentary is at once engaging and disturbing. Part of
it did happen, and what we are looking at seems like it could happen or could, while
we are here watching, be happening elsewhere. Whether these exiles herald threats,
blessings, or an apocalypse, or simply intensify the passage of time, Richardson’s
sublime vision imparts a tranquil, eerie normalcy.
Michael Bell-Smith
In his short digital films, Michael Bell-Smith combines the graphic qualities of video
games and animated cartoons with a painterly interest in color and composition.
Several of his works adopt aerial perspectives, and most are wall-mounted like
paintings.
For Up and Away, 2005 to 2006, the artist reversed video-game dynamics by removing what is usually foregrounded, characters that embody aggression,
competition, and conflict, in order to focus on the vast horizons, lush skyscapes, and
irradiated landscape colors that are usually ignored or seen as incidental. This gesture recalls a series of Andy Warhol prints in which he re-edited masterworks by
Renaissance painters and sometimes eliminated the foreground and heightened
the effect of the remaining background with outlines and high-pitched color combinations. For both artists, the allure of their stylized landscapes rests equally on
conventionality and unconventionality. Warhol’s strategy was avowedly to rediscover the spiritual in art. Bell-Smith’s appropriations establish a meditative zone.
Images roll up from the bottom like a litany of film credits or the roll
associated with the malfunctions of early television sets. The speed for this vertical
pan varies slightly, confounding the perspective and relative depth of each scene.
Up and Away starts to feels like a flight through these various landscapes, a sensation reinforced by the “natural” wind sound that is part of the soundtrack. This
sense figuratively implies that gaming represents a kind of a flight of fantasy, but
it also literally recalls the whooshing of intergalactic travel associated with such
cinematic gamer-godfathers as 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968, and Star Wars,
19 Michael Bell-Smith, e-mail interview with Kelly Gordon, May 24, 2007.
Andy Warhol
Details of Renaissance Paintings,
XXXXXXXXXXX, 1984
Silkscreen on paper
Courtesy of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts. © 2006 Andy Warhol Foundation
for the Visual Arts / ARS, New York
Michael Bell-Smith
Up and Away, 2006
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1977–2005. Bell-Smith’s score also references Hollywood blockbusters with their
19
melodramatic main theme and brassy “ta-da” chord. His suspense-building musical tactics are as old as silent movie accompaniment.
In Up and Away, drama is driven by the tinny generic music that surges
and ebbs but also lulls like Muzak. Visually, the work may represent a nostalgia trip
for those who spent many childhood hours with a joystick. For non-gamers, BellSmith’s images reveal the unexpected beauty and the intrinsic appeal of landscape
no matter how synthesized. The looping mechanism brings these fantastic scenes
around again and again, and, like cinema, television, gaming, and online diversions,
encourages viewers to lose themselves in a space outside real time.
Wolfgang Staehle
Wolfgang Staehle, founder of the pre-web artists’ forum bulletin board The Thing,
became notorious when his three-site, month-long streaming project For the People
of New York, 2001, caught the attacks of 9/11 within his artwork while transmitting simultaneous images of a medieval monastery in Comburg, Germany, a postcard-like view of Berlin’s Fernsehturm, and a panoramic vista of lower Manhattan.
Staehle’s matter-of-fact footage contrasted the media-formed recollections of that
day. Since then, random acts of journalism have become commonplace as more
people routinely carry photographic devices that extend their capacity to witness,
chronicle, and dispatch “live” postcards, but, at the time, Staehle’s decision not to
suspend the transmission was widely criticized.
An earlier streaming project captured “reality” to comparably estranging affect. The artist’s update/remake of Warhol’s Empire, 1963, titled Empire
24/7, 1999, studied the building overnight, but with the added inference of the
unseen virtual empires that make commerce and entertainment a perpetual, 24/7,
marketplace. In Staehle’s version, the quiescence and continuum of film was lost in
the shadowy, time-coded video transmissions. Each pre-empted the prior component, switching out the obsolete image for a perpetually updated “now.” Beamed
into a gallery near the actual site, critic John Menick observed, “One had difficulty
trusting the work’s fidelity to reality…. The Empire State Building was present but
20
disembodied, abstracted, cropped, a monumental digital double,” quite different
from Warhol’s immutable monument.
Still from Wolgang Staehle’s
For the People of New York, 2001
Staehle’s exploration of how streaming video can suggest but also
resist reality is also part of his large-scale, shot-on-site work Niagara, 2004. The
piece addresses nostalgia—he chose the kind of viewpoint Romantic painters used
to evoke the spiritual connection between mankind and nature and a vista reminiscent of souvenir images for Grand Tour adventurers—but also confronts the
psychology of expectation, for which the perception of reality is conditioned by cinematic imagery and technologies.
In Niagara, the camera focuses on a side view of the falls. Its stillness
seems to be a cinematic signal that we are in the presence of something grand. The
natural wonder is recognizable, even for those who have not been to the site
except as armchair travelers transported by movies, television, photographs, and
postcards. Whatever time of day one enters the gallery, this projection initially
seems oddly “true.” We have been conditioned to sense that this type of largescale projection is streamed, like the jumbo-screen simulcasts that enhance sports
spectatorship. We expect, because video makes it technologically possible to see
imagery while it is being shot, that it is likely this footage “connects” this landmark
site to the gallery in real time; but the connection, it gradually becomes clear, is
supplied not by technology but by our imagination. Niagara is a series of prerecorded images fashioned into a sixty-minute loop.
Staehle’s Niagara Falls is still a captivating, soothing, stupendous star
like its Hollywood counterparts, unchanging on the screen, unaffected by the time
of day or season. Framed here, the natural wonder glows grandly, impervious to
the bustle of daily living, threats of environmental degradation, and the impact of
mass tourism. Timeless and pristine, Staehle has edited reality into a dream.
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Conclusion
Many artists today are responding to the phenomenal velocity with which images
and information are created, transferred, and circulated. In contrast, the artists in
Dreams focus on creating a zone in which the rush of life is slowed, and time is not
accelerated, but intensified. They operate by sculpting time—literally, with sustained fixed camera shots, gradual pans, slowed projection speeds, exacerbated
duration, implications of streaming and looping mechanisms, and, figuratively, with
suggestions of an arrested eternal “now” or references to times lost or past. Most
of the technologies on display are current, but the artists’ concerns often relate to
the traditional quest to create artworks that express Beauty. Figuration, still life,
landscape, and portraiture as well as a sentimentality for the Sublime associated
with Romanticism are part of their electronic shadows. Each explores how the most
banal and knowable aspect of the real world—visual imagery—can also take on
the diffuse psychic contours of the surreal and magical. Like the Wizard’s plea in
Wizard of Oz to “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” these works
often deflect your attention from how they are conjured and are poised to lull, lure,
astonish, shock, bend time, and pique wonderment. They provide ways to dream on
your feet and revel in the enchantments of vision.
And for now, when we are at all turns chased incessantly by the cinema
effect and fifteen minutes of fame are as easy as a blast site upload, what seems
more precious is to have fifteen minutes of privacy and calm. The works in Dreams
provide a time-out. When installed, these films, created with technologies that
make them infinitely reproducible, become unique site-specific movies or can be
experienced as a continuous one in ways that emphasize how the museum as a
mind garden instigates private experiences in public space to enhance our waking
dreams. Even without the benefit of such immersion, they speak to our dreams and
the power of the cinematic image to induce patience, suspense, magic, and thrall.
As a counter and commentary on our media-saturated world, these works seek to
restore and call attention to our capacity to be quietly transfixed.
20 John Menick, “Real-Time Futures: Five Notes on the Work of Wolfgang Staehle.” Parachute 113 (July 2004): xx.
Wolfgang Staehle
Niagara, 2004
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Runa Islam
Tuin, 1998 (detail)
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Man and the Movie Camera
Kristen Hileman
In 1929, Soviet filmmaker and theorist Dziga Vertov forecast a utopian cinematic
society in his avant-garde documentary Man with the Movie Camera. Vertov’s
filmed manifesto suggested that cinema and human reality might have a unique
and affirmative co-existence: cinema expressing the essence of real life without
interfering in its substance. To this end, the purpose of the movie camera and its
operator was to oppose the invention of fictional scenarios, instead capturing and
organizing depictions of regular people’s activities from labor to leisure, and from
birth to death, deploying the technical properties of film recording and editing to
create a richer, more precise and universal language for expressing reality than previously available idioms. In Vertov’s words:
This film is, in itself an experiment. It is a film-communicator of visible
events. A film without the help of written titles (film without intertitles).
Without the help of screenplay (film without script). Without the help
of theater (film without sets, actors, etc). This experimental work is made
with the intention of constructing a genuine international and absolutely
visual language of cinema, on the basis of its total separation from the
language of theater and literature.
1
1 Vertov’s opening titles are reprinted in Vlada Petric, “Dziga Vertov as Theorist,” Cinema Journal, vol. 18, no. 1
(Autumn 1978): 40. See also Vertov, Man with the Movie Camera (Cheloveks kinoapparatom) (1929) produced for dvd by David Shepard, with program content from Film Preservation Associates, Inc. (1996) and distributed by Image Entertainment.
Jeremy Deller
The Battle of Orgreave, 2001 (details)
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Shot in several locations throughout Russia and devoid of dialogue, the
black-and-white movie brims with a variety of formal techniques (including tracking shots, freeze frames, split screens, and fast-paced montage) that emphasize
the dynamism of human and machine production and suggest a revolutionary cel2
ebration, grounded in Soviet ideology, of the human collective as it passes before
the camera’s gaze and then watches the resulting footage in the shared site of a
movie theater. If there is a protagonist here, it is the aggregate of man and movie
camera, which is not only an implied presence shooting the action of the film but is
also an omnipresent character within the movie. Vertov’s writings clarify the necessity of merging man and machine, and he literally depicts this blending in sequences
throughout the film in which eyes are juxtaposed with the camera lens: “We cannot
3
improve the making of our eyes, but we can endlessly perfect the camera.” Among
other feats within the film, this all but fused figure, “…who marches apace with
4
life” and tries to “shoot so that his own work does not hinder that of others, con5
fronts a rushing train head-on to get a thrilling shot of the machine age in action,
Cameraman filming crowd from
Dziga Vertov’s
Man with the Movie Camera
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is hoisted in the air to capture super-human perspectives on city life and its infrastructure, and is superimposed over frames at a skewed scale, materializing as a
monumental being observing but, as much as possible, not disrupting the surrounding crowds. Interestingly, the man with the movie camera seems at once a
model for heroic and artistic behavior, the former in the sense that he is pictured as
an advocate and catalyst for positive social change, the latter in that he is at the
forefront of defining and engaging with the visual language of the moment.
Integral to Vertov’s filmic practice and his own writings were the twin
6
ideas of cinema featuring “life-as-it-is” and “life-caught-unawares,” representing
life neither scripted for nor disturbed by the camera. These principles are perhaps
best exemplified in two vastly different, yet equally moving, scenes from the film—
one in which the camera closes in on the aftermath of an accident, the injured man
and those attending him too absorbed in the immediate tragedy to realize or react
to the camera, and another in which a hidden camera telescopes in on young children’s candid faces alternating between delight and puzzlement as they watch a
magician’s show. When individuals notice his equipment, Vertov’s cameraman
unflinchingly records their reactions as evidence of authentic gestures reflecting
the surprise of being confronted by a camera in an everyday circumstance rather
than coaxing them to change their behavior for or artificially ignore the machine.
From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, this attempt to
catch glimpses of people’s authentic selves “…without masks, without makeup…in
a moment when they are not acting, [and] to read their thoughts, laid bare by the
7
camera…,” seems nearly impossible. Indeed, it appears already to have been a
challenge for Vertov as many of his subjects play to the camera, smiling coyly and
exaggerating their activities under its gaze. But in today’s world, the problem of
catching life unawares, much less definitively and objectively establishing what it
means to document “life-as-it-is,” is more complex. It is not simply that subjects
become self-conscious in front of the camera’s eye, it is that cinema has infiltrated
reality to the extent that many aspects of our individual selves—our behaviors,
expectations, and at times our understanding of the truth—have become informed
(even infected) by the cinematic.
Vertov’s film and theories, however, should be taken for more than
interesting anomalies in the history of filmmaking for many reasons, including his
identification of cinema as a technology-driven and essential language for contemporary reality; his earnest insistence on showing the body and mechanics of the
camera and editing room as if to define the parameters of that language as transparently as possible; and his attempt to make the language of cinema socially rele8
vant, even revolutionary. While his hope of moving pictures operating to structure
and communicate events coherently without changing the very terms of the reality
they represent seems lost, the issues he explored have continued to be of concern,
at times within mainstream film but perhaps more often and more directly within
visual art practice, theory, and criticism.
The artists included in the exhibition Realisms have made works over
the last decade that demonstrate how cinema (now encompassing such related
moving picture media as television, home video, and digital entertainment) continues to exist as a pervasive artistic and social language, yet one that complicates
rather than clarifies the relationship of fiction and reality. At the same time, their
art evidences the spirit of criticality, self-reflexivity, and invention that, considered
2 “The camera is present at the decisive battle between the one and only Land of the Soviets and all the bourgeois nations of the world.” From Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (Visual Symphony) (not dated)
reprinted in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), 289.
3 Dziga Vertov, The Council of Three (1923), reprinted in Kino-Eye, 15.
4 Vertov, The Man with a Movie Camera (Visual Symphony), 287.
5 The scene in which Vertov’s cameraman films a train head-on recalls one of the first films ever made, a fiftysecond shot of a train pulling into a station made by the Lumière brothers in 1895 and first screened to a public audience in 1896. Indeed, the first film made by Auguste and Louis Lumière captured workers leaving their
family’s factory. Many of the everyday scenes shot by these pioneering filmmakers are the same subjects
recorded by Vertov in Man with a Movie Camera. While I am not implying that Vertov was quoting the
Lumières, it is interesting to note that from its inception film had a “documentary” engagement with the dayto-day realities of human life.
6 “The allegation is false that a fact taken from life, when recorded by the camera loses the right to be called a
fact if its name, date, place, and number are not inscribed on the film. Every instant of life shot unstaged, every
individual frame shot just as it is in life with a hidden camera, ‘caught unawares,’ or by some other analogous
technique—represents a fact recorded on film, a film-fact as we call it.” Dziga Vertov, “The Same Thing from
Different Angles” (1926), in Kino-Eye, 57.
For additional explanations of these two principles, see either Petric, “Dziga Vertov as Theorist,” 29–44, or
Yuri Tsivan’s commentary track on Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera (Cheloveks kinoapparatom) (1929),
produced for dvd by David Shepard.
7 Dziga Vertov, “The Birth of Kino-Eye” (1924), reprinted in Kino-Eye, 41.
8 For an extremely insightful alternative reading on how Vertov’s film serves as a catalogue for techniques of
ordering and accessing information in the digital age, see Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media
(Cambridge: mit press, 2001).
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Kristen Hileman Man and the Movie Camera
alongside the work of Vertov, serves as an essential reminder that throughout its
history, cinema has been able to imagine for itself other possible forms, functions,
and correspondences with the world-at-large.
Director Peter Weir’s The Truman Show is a cautionary look at one of
the impending if not already partially realized of these possibilities, serving as both
a foil for Vertov’s vision and a cultural reference point for many of the works in
Realisms. A story of an individual’s search for self-knowledge amidst technological
advances that have enabled fiction and reality to blend seamlessly, this feature
film depicts a world in which cameras define more than reveal an individual’s life.
Released in 1998, The Truman Show (along with The Matrix, which followed in 1999)
seems particularly significant as a marker of a moment in which mainstream media
engaged in critical reflection over the burgeoning phenomenon of reality television
programming and then proceeded to whole-heartedly embrace the phenomenon,
its fascinations, and its flaws. Although in no way a scientific record, but rather a
useful index of popular perception, in late 2006 the Wikipedia website published
an entry on reality television that listed only ten examples of reality programming
between 1989 and 1997, an additional seven shows between 1998 and 2000, and
over 250 more dating from 2000 to 2006, with 2000 seeing the first airing of pro9
ducer Mark Burnett’s highly successful and influential Survivor. The works in Realisms belong to this same era, with the earliest work included in the exhibition made
in 1998 and the majority of works created after 2000.
In The Truman Show, a thirty-year-old man wakes up to the fact that
his entire life has been lived as the subject of one continuous tv reality show. The
hero is now the struggling man in front of the camera, Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey),
while the villain is The Truman Show’s all-powerful creator, the aptly named Christof
(Ed Harris), who directs the activity of an extraordinary 5,000 hidden cameras and
the actors playing Truman’s friends and family from a control room located behind
the false sun of Seahaven (the show’s town-size set). A stage-light that falls from
the sky and a camera camouflaged as a car radio gone haywire are among the first
clues to Truman that his world is a sham, pointing to a cultural paradigm in which,
unlike the brazen presence of Vertov’s celebratory and revolutionary camera, technology must remain surreptitious, voyeuristic, and fallible in order to maintain its
self-interested connection to reality. Through an ensuing series of disruptions in
Merger of man and movie camera from
Dziga Vertov’s
Man with the Movie Camera
Composite portrait of Truman Burbank
from The Truman Show
the simulated environment that he inhabits, Truman comes to realize that everything about him including his occupation, phobias, and personal relationships have
been fabricated for and by Christof’s cameras for the purpose of entertaining and
marketing to others.
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A Language of Excess
…the younger generations have absorbed as elements of their behavior a
series of elements filtered through the mass media.… To tell the truth, it isn’t
even necessary to talk about new generations: If you are barely middle-aged,
you will have learned personally the extent to which experience (love,
9 Wikipedia, ”List of Reality Television Programs,” www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reality_television_
programs (accessed September 23, 2006).
Some chronological reference points for The Truman Show and its examination of contemporary television programming: pbs aired what is widely considered the first or “proto” reality tv show, An American
Family, in 1973. This twelve-episode documentary followed members of the Loud family from Southern
California, including divorcing parents and an openly gay son. Fox Network’s long-running series Cops, in
which police patrols are joined by camera people, originally aired in 1989. mtv’s Real World, a series that
brought attractive young strangers together to live in group houses outfitted with cameras first aired in
1992. First shown in 2000, cbs’s Survivor “strands” a group of diverse contestants in exotic locations and
then has them compete with one another for a cash prize.
10 Umberto Eco, “A Photograph,” in Travels in Hyper Reality, trans. William Weaver. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace
& Co., 1983), 213–14.
fear, or hope) is filtered through ‘already seen’ images. —Umberto Eco,
10
A Photograph, 1977
In artworks that imply a culture situated at the opposite end of the
scale from Vertov’s camera-mediated egalitarianism and idealism, artists Corinna
Schnitt and Paul Chan reference actual people and events to present dystopic
scenarios in which the camera, with its capacity to support consumerism and sensationalism, frames people’s greatest aspirations and fears. In the former’s Living
a Beautiful Life, 2003, an actor and actress deliver monologues comprising the
responses from fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds attending both public and private
schools in Los Angeles who were interviewed by the artist about what constitutes a
beautiful life. Filmed alone and in various rooms of a house, sterile in its unblemished luxury, the man and woman stare into the camera, confidently acknowledging its presence in their “home,” as they list the idyllic qualities of their lives. Several
lines of their speeches reflect straightforward, childlike innocence—such as the
happiness derived from owning dogs and singing. Other statements are poignant
reminders of the modest requirements (yet not assured realities) of physical health
and safety. However, the majority of the items on the teens’ wish lists might well
be the product of media-soaked expectations of contentment. Schnitt’s male character acknowledges that he has a sexy wife, but also notes that he takes mistresses
from time to time, “because it’s nice to have a change.” Almost immediately after
this assertion, we hear the female character make a mantra-like claim that she
does not worry about her husband leaving her as she does not look old and will
never look old, quickly followed by the somehow contradictory declaration that she
is a “self-independent, strong, focused woman.” These rote affirmations, spoken
alongside assurances that wealth and possessions yield well-being, are at once
familiar, troubling, and self-perpetuating. They are expressed in words that could be
influenced directly yet non-specifically by movie dialogue and self-help talk shows,
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and they are filtered through children’s language only again to be given voice by
adults in front of a camera. This slippage in sophistication between content and
delivery, as well as the non-prioritized articulation of basic needs with extreme
wants, makes Schnitt’s video a simultaneously humorous and sobering gauge of
the gap between the expectations and disappointments of a world that still cannot
make good on mass media’s promises.
By way of visual rather than spoken references, Chan’s 1st Light, 2005,
may provide an even bleaker view. His vision is of an apocalypse composed of images
of objects and people, which owing to their resemblance to products and news
images prevalent on film, tv, and computer screens have become signifiers of cultural affluence and tragedy. The artist depicts a scenario that appears to be the
Rapture, a turning point for some Christian denominations when the faithful
are absorbed into heaven while the corrupt earthly world is destroyed. In Chan’s
interpretation, humanity’s beloved material goods including Vespa-like scooters,
cell phones, and iPods ascend into the sky while people drop from above in distressed postures that recall bodies falling from the collapsing World Trade Center in
11
September 2001. This inversion implies that consumer goods, in part because of
their promotion by the media, have acquired a skewed status and that mass-media
sources have emblematized a single event into a symbol of utter devastation and
moral mobilization. The piece also raises the disturbing specter of a cause-andeffect relationship between these two phenomena, made all the more haunting
given the images’ presentation in a loop that relentlessly cycles from dawn to dusk,
calm to catastrophe—producing a continuous closed circuit of dysfunction comparable to that expressed through language in Schnitt’s video. The artist’s exploration
of the impact of mediated imagery is underscored through his use of computergenerated animation to embody this fantasy of destruction and perverse redemption. Although rendered in shadowy silhouettes and unnatural motion, Chan’s
figures and forms can be identified and interpreted by eyes that are more and
more accustomed to deciphering digital approximations of our world.
11 Bennett Simpson, “In the Shadow of Politics,” Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2005. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Momentum 5: Paul Chan, shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
Corinna Schnitt
Living a Beautiful Life, 2003
Paul Chan
1st Light, 2005
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Processing Reality
The equipment-free aspect of reality here [in the age of mechanical
reproduction] has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate
reality has become an orchid in the land of technology. —Walter Benjamin,
12
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1936
As much homage as critique, Runa Islam’s Tuin, 1998, exposes the equipment and
techniques used to fabricate cinema’s spell-binding versions of physical and emotional reality. For her three-screen installation, Islam re-created a complex shot
from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film Martha, in which an unseen camera circles around a man and woman as they first encounter one another, conveying the
dizziness of the fateful meeting and prefiguring the psychological intensity of the
relationship that follows. In the artist’s installation, the re-creation is a central 16mm color film projection that is flanked by two slow-motion, black-and-white video
loops showing a camera, dolly, circular track, and production crew rotating around
the actors. Apart from deconstructing the logistics of the shot, these flanking
videos split the vantage points of the scene into those of the male and female
actors and deliver the events in a contrasting media format. At once, all that was
integrated by the camera into an instance of cinematic romance dissolves into
information shaped by mechanical motion, the physical properties of the chosen
medium, and human perspective. As in the early scenes of Truman’s “awakening,”
Islam locates reality by turning the camera on itself and its trappings to probe the
mechanics of cinematic illusion-building and storytelling, offering an interesting
counterpoint to Vertov’s visualization of the camera as a key tool in a new language of truth.
Mungo Thomson’s New York, New York, New York, New York, 2004, also
engages with the physical components of film and television’s artifice. The artist
recorded footage of the New York sets at Paramount, Fox, Universal, and Culver
studios, alternating images of convincing but empty city streets with shots that
include palm trees, occasional production team members, and camera angles that
expose buildings composed of façades alone and store displays filled with fake
fruits and flowers. In many ways, the work operates as a new order of readymade,
appropriate for today’s cinematic culture. Instead of removing an object or form
from its everyday context and function to prompt questions about the parameters
of art and the mundane, Thomson re-contextualizes a simulation of the everyday
to probe the boundaries between art and artifice. He creates a loop of representations that binds together New York City, its stage-set re-creation, the gallery presentation of the artwork, and the viewer’s mental picture of the city such that life,
cinema, and art ceaselessly reference one another. The artist’s gesture expands the
issue of whether art lies in our ability to represent or re-contextualize the everyday
under controlled circumstances and with monumental scope to whether art lies in
drawing attention to and even disrupting the relationships between an object and
its representations.
This layered and somewhat contrary view of art and image-making
reflects on the aesthetic and conceptual pleasure that contemporary viewers may
find in their reception of cinema and television’s illusions. At best momentarily
seduced by these fictions and claims to present reality, most critical viewers then
step back to assess and appreciate the distortions at play—finding enjoyment in
both the deception and its discovery. This fairly complex mode of engaging with
images is not necessarily unique to our age. Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, written during the first century AD, recounts a tale of artistic rivals Zeuxis and Parrhasius.
Challenged to a contest to determine who was the more skilled painter, Zeuxis
painted a picture of grapes so convincing that birds came and pecked at it. However, when Parrhasius took Zeuxis to see his entry, the latter attempted to pull
away the curtain covering the image only to discover that the curtain was itself the
painting—a painting that demonstrates the processes of illusionism rather than a
concrete aspect of reality, and perhaps introduces the suspicion that behind the
curtain, i.e., behind a culture’s screen of representations, there is never a concrete,
definitive reality. Not by virtue of his skill at verisimilitude, but rather his keener
understanding of the concept of illusion, Parrhasius is the winner of the contest
and a millennia-old model for our fascination with cinema as well as art that exam13
ines the act of representation itself.
Indeed, in The Truman Show, Truman trumps the master-creator Christof
after he becomes aware of the simulation he inhabits, entering a contradictory, existentially heroic state of doubt and empowerment. Over the course of the film, The
Truman Show’s audience, previously compelled by the magnitude and perfection of
Mungo Thomson
New York, New York, New York, New York, 2004
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Runa Islam
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Christof’s world of well-paid professionals, well-tended lawns, well-stocked kitchens,
and well-planned nuclear families, shifts to rooting for Truman as he upsets this
“DeMille-ian” vision of suburban banality. In essence, the audience moves from
rewarding a mastermind creator with rapt attention and high ratings to placing its
sympathies with a person who, like them, occupies the position of an everyman
observer. Truman and his audience, while unable to gain complete independence
from the simulation’s influence, can discern the difference between it and the other
realities it re-configures and attempts to replace. Weir’s late twentieth-century version of a popular hero is not entirely different from Vertov’s conception of an
artist/hero; for both the capacity for self-knowledge and transformation lies with
the person who comes to understand and confront the limitations of the existing
languages used to represent their reality. However, without the conviction of Vertov’s
teleological frame, Truman and contemporary artists such as those in Realisms face
the possibility that there is no single standard of reality to drive and measure its
depictions, only a variety of languages and vantage points from which to upset
existing sensibilities and open up spaces for more informed alternatives. In such a
scenario, the words hero and artist are overstated, and what is really up for discussion is the figure of a critical and activated viewer.
Christian Jankowski’s This I played tomorrow, 2003, provides a kind of
sociological survey of “real”-world moviegoers who are thoughtfully cognizant
of the limitations of cinema, yet remain passionate and fairly optimistic about its
powers. The installation consists of a series of monitors playing back interviews
that the artist taped in front of Cinecittà, the famous film studio founded on the
12 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 233.
13 Although he was writing about how Gustav Flaubert avoids embodying in words yet manages to suggest a
forbidden sexual encounter between Madame Bovary and her lover behind the closed curtain of a coach by
describing at length the details of the city streets through which the carriage passes, it is almost irresistible
to quote Slavoj Žižek, “A Hair of the Dog That Bit You” (first published in 1994, reprinted in Interrogating the
Real, eds. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens [London: Continuum, 2005]), 1661, in regard to Parrhasius’s curtain:
“…one is tempted to propose one of the possible definitions of ‘realism’: a naïve belief that, behind the curtain of representations, there actually exists some full, substantial reality (in the case of Madame Bovary, the
reality of sexual superfluity). ‘Post-realism’ begins when a doubt emerges as to the existence of this reality
‘behind the curtain,’ that is, when the foreboding arises that the very gesture of concealment creates what it
pretends to conceal
Christian Jankowski
This I played tomorrow, 2003
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outskirts of Rome in 1937, which has been used in the production of Fascist political propaganda and popular feature film alike. Jankowski asked a variety of people,
including aspiring actors and star-watchers, questions about cinema ranging from
what role they would like to play in a movie to whether or not cinema can offer salvation. He edited their answers into a script, which was then filmed as a short starring the interviewees themselves costumed as their fantasy characters. Apart from
celebrating the escapist delights of cinema, the work demonstrates the moviedevotees’ incredibly sophisticated understanding of fiction and reality, reiterating
the notion that contemporary audiences are complicit in and amused by mass
media’s deceptions. Moreover, the project presents a mutually affirmative relationship between life and cinema that, while different from that envisioned by Vertov,
seems equally positive, with its non-professional actor-participants expressing the
belief that movies can serve human needs to communicate, teach moral lessons,
and picture ideals that could be translated to the real world, as well as the proposition that cinema’s falsehoods and shortcomings are those of everyday life, rather
than vice versa.
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Authority, Resistance, and Representation
…it would be interesting to see whether the repressive apparatus would
not react more violently to a simulated hold-up than to a real one?
For a real hold-up only upsets the order of things, the right of property,
whereas a simulated hold-up interferes with the very principle of reality.
Transgression and violence are less serious, for they only contest the
distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous since it
always suggests, over and above its object, that law and order themselves
might really be nothing more than a simulation. —Jean Baudrillard,
14
Simulations and Simulacra, 1980
Truman is ultimately able to escape his camera-bound predicament by varying his
routine and confronting the unknown, which here might be translated as life
unmediated by cameras. Demonstrating a facet of the human spirit that is stronger
than the visual regime that envelops it, Truman boards a boat, weathers a “faux”
yet nevertheless life-threatening storm ordered up by Christof, and sails to the
edge of Seahaven, the set that has since birth been his entire universe. This climactic scene recalls French surrealist René Magritte’s painting La Lunette d’approche,
as well as philosopher and critic Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of it as a “post-realist”
15
image in his 1994 essay “A Hair of the Dog that Bit You”: Truman’s sailboat punctures the sky, an incident that defines the construct of reality through incongruence and has a less dramatic but no less effective equivalent in Thomson’s artwork
in which a small motorized cart zips through an otherwise deserted New York
street. Truman disembarks from the boat, mounts a staircase, painted to blend in
with the sky backdrop, and opens a door onto a black emptiness. Struggling to
keep his creation on air, Christof reminds Truman that until now he has led the perfect life, free from substantial fears and worries. Truman, with a final bow to the
cameras and his audience, turns his back on the at once paternalistic and self-inter16
ested director who promises on-screen certainty to pass through the doorway.
This confrontation between control and freedom in a cinematic age is
also explored in works by Michèle Magema, Jeremy Deller, and Artur Zmijewski. Like
Jankowski, these artists enable non-actors to interfere with and/or take control of
cinema’s processes of storytelling and simulation; yet their objective seems to be a
Truman at the door to the “real” world
from The Truman Show
René Magritte
La lunette d’approche (The Telescope), 1963
The Menil Collection, Houston. © 2000 Charly
Herscovici, Brussels / Artists Rights Society
(ars), New York
98
99
more direct and politically engaged critique of authority and mass media’s filtering
of events. In Magema’s Oyé, Oyé, 2002, television clips of celebratory dancing for
Mobuto Sese Seko, the dictator who ruled Zaire (now Congo) from the mid-1960s
to the late 1990s, are juxtaposed with an image of a faceless woman—the artist—
swinging her arms to the same rhythm as the dancers. Her movements are forced
and mechanical, framing the vintage clips as evidence of political propaganda
rather than praise. This deliberate manipulating of public perceptions—Mobuto
appeared at the start of his country’s evening news program in footage that had
17
him descend from the clouds as if he were a god —is a chilling deployment of
moving pictures’ ability to fabricate reality in support of absolute power.
Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave, 2001, tackles similar issues of
the news media’s distortion of recent history. Working with historical re-enactment
expert Howard Giles and filmmaker Mike Figgis, Deller re-staged and recorded the
explosive 1984 confrontation between striking miners and police near the
Orgreave coking plant. The clash was considered a turning point that marked the
decline of organized labor in Britain, in part because the bbc misrepresented the
striking miners as initiating the violence that broke out, swaying popular opinion
against the union. Deller invited men who had participated in the actual strike to
14 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations (originally published 1980; trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and
Philip Beitchman, 1983), reprinted in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 2nd edition, ed. David Lodge
with Nigel Wood (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), 408.
15 Žižek discusses Magritte’s La Lunette d’approche in “A Hair of the Dog That Bit You”, a meditation on the
terms of the symbolic and the real as used in Lacanian psychoanalysis. While not adhering to a Lacanian
analysis, my reading of The Truman Show was influenced by Žižek’s writing. See Interrogating the Real, 152–
82 (especially 161–62).
16 In an almost uncanny way, Weir’s final scenes make use of the same metaphors as Vertov did in his written
manifesto, The Man with a Movie Camera (Visual Symphony)—see Vertov, “The Man with the Movie
Camera,” in Kino-Eye, 283–87, which I will quote here at length: According to your strict schedule, people
fight and embrace. Marry and divorce. Are born and die. Die and come to life. Die again and again come to
life. Or kiss endlessly in front of the camera until the director is satisfied.
We are at a film studio where a man with a megaphone and script directs the life of a fake land.… High
above this little fake world with its mercury lamps and electric suns, high in the real sky burns a real sun over
real life. The film-factory is a miniature island in the stormy sea of life.… A little man, armed with a movie
camera, leaves the little fake world of the film-factory and heads for life. Life tosses him to and fro like a
straw. He’s like a frail canoe on a stormy sea.… Unlike the film-factory where the camera is almost stationary,
where the whole of ‘life’ is aimed at the camera’s lens in a strictly determined order of shots and scenes, life
here does not wait for the film director or obey his instructions.
17 Craig Timberg, “Some in Congo Long for the Order of Late Dictator,” Washington Post (July 30, 2006), A16.
Michèle Magema
Oyé Oyé, 2002
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join practiced historical re-enactors, assigning them the roles of both miners and
police. Through the repetition of past events, the televised project was meant to
foster greater recognition and understanding of suppressed history. This simulation, guided by organizers who were sympathetic to the miners, returned control,
at least temporarily, to those who had lost it, with Figgis’s documentary giving
voice to the complex motivations and emotions of its participants. Significantly,
here the camera and simulated reality served to present a new perspective on a
complicated truth by destabilizing a previously mediated story; suggesting that to
some extent power can shift along with control of the camera.
Artur Zmijewski’s Repetition, 2005, also puts cameras at the service of
re-staging an infamous event—Professor Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison
Experiment—to test whether a second simulation leads to the same results as the
first. In both manifestations of the experiment, participants were recruited through
an advertisement and then randomly assigned the roles of prisoners and guards in
a facsimile prison. Zimbardo’s research on American and Canadian students was
intended to last two weeks, but was stopped after six days because the “guards”
aggressively carried out their roles, psychologically abusing the “prisoners,” who
18
responded with substantial emotional distress. This 1971 iteration can be seen as
an indicator of how human behavior can be shaped by manufactured circumstances.
Although containing some instances of conflict between prisoners and guards,
Zmijewski’s re-creation ultimately resolved itself with its participants uniting to
end the project after determining that it was a dehumanizing experience for all
involved. Not unexpectedly given the self-conscious culture that emerges in most
of these artworks, Zmijewski’s subjects were aware of the original Stanford Prison
Experiment, as well as the manned and stationary cameras filming their own activ19
ities. Resistance ultimately brought together “prisoners” and “guards” as subjects and was directed at the organizers of the project, in other words those behind
the cameras, rather than the authority figures designated by the simulation. As
with Deller’s project, a byproduct of the filmed re-simulation was a sense of self-
18 Philip G. Zimbardo, “The Stanford Prison Experiement,” www.prisonexp.org/ (accessed November 28, 2006).
19 Joanna Mytkowska, “The Limits of an Experiment,” brochure for Polish Pavilion, 51st International Biennale,
Venice, 2005.
Artur Zmijewski
Repetition, 2005
Professor Philip Zimbardo’s
Stanford Prison Experiment, 1971
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awareness among those involved that might offer a partial antidote to a previous
darker experience. Perhaps this effect demonstrates a larger cultural potentiality,
that the camera’s capacity for shaping and structuring reality makes it a tool for
resistance, rebalancing power, and recording alternative histories as well as a
device of surveillance and manipulation.
Aftermath and Alternatives
The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality
is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
—Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
20
Reproduction,” 1936
Truman’s fate remains an open question at the end of Weir’s film—it is uncertain
whether he will be able to reconcile his experience of life lived under the camera’s
eye with emotions developed outside of its control. Although there have been hints
that Truman’s “true” love, a former Truman Show cast member, awaits his escape,
the primary visualization of the world outside the television program has been
scenes of people watching Truman to the exclusion of any other activity. So the
prospects for Truman’s quest for a “real” or “authentic” life as he exchanges the
realm of actors for the realm of viewers are, if not pessimistic, then simply inconceivable in the terms that Weir has established. As actors and viewers are equally
under the spell of the camera, the notion of a completely unmediated, “Vertovian”
reality co-existing with but unspoiled by the cinematic impulses to entertain,
comfort, control, and sell seems impossible. The similarity of the climactic scene to
Magritte’s painting seems particularly appropriate. The only place where Truman
might be free from both disillusionment and manipulation is alone on the threshold
of imagined and anticipated freedom—an undefined moment before life (or a
screen) crystallizes into another conventional scenario, be it of complacency or conflict. In the context of this discussion, one is tempted to call this space either pre- or
post-cinematic, while Žižek might describe it, employing the same terms from
Lacanian psychoanalysis that he used to identify the void behind the sky-paned
windows in Magritte’s painting, as a “crack” within the “fantasy frame that consti21
tutes reality” through which “we get an insight into the ‘impossible’ Real.…”
Francesco Vezzoli’s Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story!, 2006, and
Phil Collins’s The Return of the Real (Gercegin Geri Donusu), 2005, suggest what
might happen after the cameras stop rolling or at least when they turn unsympathetic to their subjects. In the former, Vezzoli presents a humorous self-portrait in
the format of a mock cable television biography. The artist emerges as a celebrityobsessed eccentric, enamored both of famous people and the prospect of gaining
fame himself, who ultimately commits suicide as a result of the impossibly glamorous expectations generated by the media’s spotlight. Vezzoli’s self-satirizing
death has an unsettling and at moments tragic counterpart in Collins’s epic collection of interviews with a group of people living in Turkey that document the motivations for and impact of their appearances on that country’s reality television
programs. In this demonstration of the global appeal of encountering the stories of
“real” people on television, there seems a consistent hope among the interviewees
that their involvement in the shows would financially or psychologically redress
problems in their lives. While some participants expressed gratitude to the programs for the attention they received, the overwhelming impression left by the artwork is that after their appearance on television these people still had to deal with
such basic needs as steady employment and/or with personal tragedies, now magnified by being aired before an audience. Collins’s project, which includes footage of
a joint press conference of these transitory celebrities held in a decidedly unglamorous hotel and recorded on amateurish video along with several hours of one-onone interviews presented as double-screen projections, underscores the point that
the lives of individuals are far more intricate than the format of a single-episode
television program could reveal.
20 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 223.
21 Žižek’s full description of La Lunette d’approche is as follows: “Yet perhaps there is another of Magritte’s
paintings that can serve even more appropriately [than Ceci n’est pas une pipe] to establish the elementary
matrix that generates the uncanny effects that pertain to his work: La Lunette d’approche from 1963, the
painting of a half-open window where, through the windowpane, we see the external reality (blue sky with
some dispersed white clouds). Yet what we see in the narrow opening that gives direct access to the reality
beyond the pane is nothing, just a nondescript black mass. The translation of this painting into Lacanese goes
by itself: The frame of the windowpane is the fantasy frame that constitutes reality whereas through the crack
we get an insight into the ‘impossible’ Real, the Thing-in-itself.” “A Hair of the Dog That Bit You,” 161–62.
104
105
vezzoli stills
vezzoli stills
vezzoli stills
vezzoli stills
vezzoli stills
Francesco Vezzoli
Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story!, 2006
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Isaac Julien’s Fantôme Créole, 2005, is an unorthodox and poetic model
for cinema that also focuses on identity and the multiple layers (some fed by media
and some not), that constitute it. If Vezzoli’s and Collins’s works suggest the crises
of individuals who are unable to adjust reality as they wish or adapt to the reality
they live in, then Julien presents the possibility of expanding the way reality is
depicted to better fit and celebrate the complexities of individuals, populations, and
places. In the artist’s four-screen installation, linear narrative is replaced by a montage of footage shot in Burkina Faso and northern Scandinavia, as well as clips from
Western ethnographic and Burkinabé film. Specifically, the piece includes images of
a movie being made in a city in Burkina Faso, and scenes of an open-air theater and
a sculptural monument to cinema there. Through a series of carefully paced juxtapositions, Julien makes colonial visions of Africa collide with these shots, which
relate to a post-colonial Burkinabé film industry created as a vehicle for education,
22
economic production, and formation of ties to other developing countries. In
addition to providing this visual overview of the different currents feeding a country’s cinematic history, the work follows two figures who elude specific characterization—a shaman-like male dancer who appears and disappears in several of the
African scenes, his “magical” materiality the result of special effects, and a graceful
black female who is featured in both the northern and southern footage. Moving
through frozen terrain, the woman is on some level an evocation of Matthew A.
Henson, a black male assistant who accompanied Robert E. Peary on his expedition
to discover the North Pole but has been forgotten in most historical accounts.
Within the Burkina Faso landscape, she is an ambiguous yet regal presence. Beautifully composed and often dream-like, Julien’s work presents an alternative for cinema
in which the medium’s powers of invention and seduction synthesize constructed,
suppressed, and fantasized realities into a manner of realism in which subjecthood
is multifaceted, irreducible, and beyond convention.
beautiful film with her little father’s camcorder. And for once, the so-called
professionalism about movies will be destroyed forever…and it will really
become an art form. That’s my opinion. —Francis Ford Coppola, Hearts of
23
Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, 1991
Like Vertov, Julien relies heavily on montage rather than linear plot to introduce
complexity and avoid the constraints of narrative cinema. Essential to the delivery
of Julien’s montage is its unfolding in three-dimensional space over four screens.
Many of the works in the exhibition similarly use multiple screens, in other words, a
type of “spatial montage,” to enfold viewers in a cinematic environment and, perhaps more germane to the topic of alternative models for moving pictures, to confront the viewer with a complex range of images and information with which they
can choose to engage visually and aurally. This phenomenon of proliferating screens
is, of course, occurring outside of gallery spaces as well, as moving-picture content
is delivered not only on movie screens and televisions, but also on computers, cell
phones, and other portable devices. Together these constitute a “virtual montage”
of visual material, including the crude and the critical, and available in an ongoing,
on-demand way. In this increasingly decentralized distribution of movies, often the
viewing screen equally functions as the site of the production of content, as digital
cameras and editing software become financially and technically accessible to a
wide public. These technological advancements could mean the realization of
Vertov’s dreams of a ubiquitous camera; albeit with an emphasis on non-specialists
wielding the camera to produce their own representations of the world rather than
non-actors being documented by the camera (or, for that matter, non-actors like
Truman being manipulated by the camera). In such an incarnation of a cinematic
society populated by people who simultaneously operate in the roles of producer
and consumer, it is difficult not to believe that conceptualizations of reality will
continue to multiply and be challenged.
A Proliferation of Screens
To me, the great hope is that now these little 8-millimeter video recorders
and stuff have come out, some…just people who normally wouldn’t make
movies, are going to be making them. And, you know, that suddenly one
day, some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart…and make a
Phil Collins
Return of the Real (Gercegin Geri Donusu), 2005
22 Mark Nash, “Expeditions: True North and Fantôme Afrique” in Isaac Julien: True North, Fantôme Afrique
(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006), 54–60. See also Christine van Assache, ed., Isaac Julien: Collection Espace
315 (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2005).
23 Spoken by Francis Ford Coppola in the 1991 film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (directed by
Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper and using Eleanor Coppola’s documentary footage).
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Isaac Julien
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Character Driven: Subjectivity and the Cinematic1
Anne Ellegood
Roland (husband): Can’t you see they are only imaginary characters?
Corinne (wife): We’re little more than that ourselves. —Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend
In Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film Weekend, he tracks a young French bourgeois couple,
Roland and Corinne, from their apartment in Paris into the countryside. During the
course of the fictional protagonists’ increasingly bizarre journey, Godard enacts a
social and cultural critique by depicting their gradual self-awareness. Like his nouvelle vague peers of the period—François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, and their predecessors Roberto Rossellini and Jean Renoir—Godard has no intention of creating a
dreamy escape for his audiences, but rather seeks structurally to interrupt the conventional viewing process in order to insert a political commentary and, ultimately,
to keep viewers aware that they are, in fact, watching a film. Godard uses unconventional techniques of filmmaking—including a ten-minute-long, visually enticing
panning shot of a circus-like traffic jam as the combative couple struggles to get out
of the city; the insertion of bold graphic text in saturated red, white, and blue at
unexpected moments throughout the film; and segments in which the actors either
speak about the film directly to the camera or engage in prolonged monologues
outside the basic narrative structure—to demonstrate how the moving image is
1 Sincere gratitude goes to John Cochran for his insight during our numerous conversations on the topics addressed,
which were enormously helpful in the development of this text.
Kerry Tribe
Double, 2001 (details)
Jean-Luc Godard
Weekend, 1967
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uniquely situated to explore the relationship between what we perceive to be reality and what we acknowledge as fiction or fantasy.
Godard notoriously saw no distinction between film and life, claiming,
“Cinema is not a dream or a fantasy. It is life. I see no difference between the movies
2
and life. They are the same.” Certainly the presumed dialectic between real and
simulated experience within the realm of the moving image has become so intertwined and interdependent that we have now accepted that they no longer constitute distinct categories. In other words, a Godardian commitment to breaking apart
the false opposition between lived life and the cinema has now been completely
absorbed in contemporary culture. We might even argue that the real and the cinematic are increasingly one and the same. Evidence of the collapse between these
categories is abundant. Reality television is not real. Documentary film is not purely
truthful, presenting its arguments through cinematic techniques of dramatization
and editing that mediate, if not manipulate, the footage. We have avatars who act
as our alternate selves in virtual environments. We have entire relationships online
through sites such as My Space, Friendster, or Nerve.com in which we may never
meet the actual, as in physical, person. Simulations abound—parodies, homages,
remakes, and re-creations are rampant on the Internet. Just go to YouTube.com to
discover such surprises as young artists doing their versions of seminal performances like Chris Burden’s 1971 Shoot and Bruce Nauman’s 1968 Bouncing in the
Corner and a slew of spoofs of pop culture moments like Justin Timberlake’s skit
“Dick in a Box,” which emerged immediately following its broadcast on Saturday
3
Night Live.
In short, how can we characterize fictional, or synthetic, or mediated
experience as “unreal” or “untrue” when it comprises so much of our daily experience? Perhaps we have officially entered what Jean Baudrillard describes as the
“third order of simulacrum,” whereby the original and the copy are indistinguishable, the copy simply replacing the original. But whereas Baudrillard sees the image
as equivalent to the thing it represents, our society’s highly sophisticated relationship to images—to representations of “the real” in many forms—suggests we
have simply redefined our relationship to the image to acknowledge it as a space
where we construct ourselves, not in a false or fantastical way, but rather, in a way
that reflects how representation, simulation, and re-enactment have become fully
integrated and axiomatic in our culture, not ersatz substitution but authentic components of our contemporary epistemologies.
In Weekend, the surreal yet self-conscious moments (such as the sudden appearance of an Italian stage troupe) coupled with the numerous horrific acts
perpetrated by human beings upon one another (from the emotional bitterness
apparent in the marriage to the more egregious and shocking incidents of rape,
murder, and cannibalism) slowly lead Roland and Corinne to become self-aware
enough to proclaim, “We are totally ignorant of ourselves,” as if speaking for the
privileged classes in all of western society. Their journey is a struggle, full of the
obstacles and pain so abundant in the world, and although they start out completely oblivious to the advantages of their own privilege, these two utterly unlikable characters do begin to understand something about themselves. For the works
in Realisms, subjectivity, too, is at the heart of the matter, and the artists approach
the subject specifically by problematizing the real. Their works propose that the
foregrounding of an autonomous, individualized, idealized self has been permanently complicated, if not utterly obliterated. Today, subjectivity might more accurately be described as multiple, interconnected, partially simulated, and even
schizophrenic. Moreover, the individuals portrayed within the artists’ works are
defiantly anti-stereotype. Rather, what is put before viewers are truly complicated
characters, driven by curiosity and a pronounced engagement with the world.
The role of mass media and popular culture in relationship to subjectivity
is taken up with perspicacious insight by these artists. Through their examinations
of the enormous impact of the film industry, news sources, and cultural institutions
on identity, they reveal how the mainstream media has often disallowed genuine
4
public participation and the possibility of criticality. The works in Realisms reflect
upon what Baudrillard calls the “intransitive” and “non-communication” of the
mass media and underscore his call for a true exchange wherein ideas are not simply received and swallowed whole but are given a platform upon which they can be
5
debated: “…revolution…lies in restoring this possibility of response.” Likewise, the
pieces share Gilles Deleuze’s concern for the dogmatism of what he calls “the image
of thought,” whereby ideas are distilled into numbing sound bites, taking the form
of an “everybody knows” that teach us nothing, and, rather, deflect true, creative
6
thought. These artists argue for a complex and complicating reflection upon our
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relationship to media, one that allows us to consider how the very notion of self
adapts to our age. Using avant-garde cinematic techniques such as editing, deconstructing, repeating, slow motion, and narrative play, the works in Realisms
increase our awareness of how moving images are often manipulated effectively
for propaganda or public relations while returning their (often appropriated, reenacted, or severely edited) imagery to a realm where, as Deleuze would say, we
7
can “make thought something active and affirmative.” They recognize what Godard
perceived as so fundamental to film: how the reflectivity specific to its medium can
translate into self-reflexivity on the part of its viewers.
The artists’ critique of popular media does not, however, denounce it
outright, nor are their analyses reactionary. Rather, they come from a generation
weaned on the media, so to speak, which provides them with an almost innate
understanding of it, and, moreover, allows them to see its potential as a space for
collective action where transformation and knowledge can occur. The artworks in
Realisms importantly acknowledge what Jacques Rancière has called the “capacity
of the spectator.” As Rancière has argued, the spectator is not passive. The very act
of viewing demands engagement and encourages interpretation and reaction.
These works speak to our capacity for visual literacy and for the role spectatorship
can play in the acquisition of knowledge. In tune with a Brechtian ideology, a participatory quality marked by an awareness of the ability to extend beyond a now
antiquated belief in a strictly autonomous subjectivity into the realm of a collective
subject permeates these films and videos. Rancière speaks of the spaces created by
artists—where numerous roles are played, layers of space enacted, and an element
of play embraced—as spheres of political actions. He writes, “Emancipation…begins
when we dismiss the opposition between looking and acting.… It starts when we
realize that looking is also an action…and that ‘interpreting the world’ is already a
means of transforming it, of reconfiguring it. The spectator is active.… He observes,
8
he selects, he compares, he interprets.” Likewise, this work, through the example
of the artists’ processes of appropriation and interpretation, asks us not only to
translate what we see in the films and videos themselves, but to carry those powers of interpretation into the world.
I do not wish to put forth a generalized new theory of the subject here,
but rather to focus on the specifics of how these artists make visible, each in a
different way, the shifting processes and influences upon defining subjecthood
that are occurring everywhere in our culture. The artists frame their explorations
within two basic categories: the influence of the film industry and the ways in
which historical events and sites are documented, circulated, and understood. The
discussions below are divided into these two distinct approaches, and while each
work is discussed separately in an attempt to focus on the nuances and complexity
of the individual piece, their connections, informed by a network of shared experience, will be evident.
The Stuff of Hollywood
Julian Rosefeldt
A man walks through a desert. He seems familiar. He wears a T-shirt bearing an
image of the Hindu god Shiva, cargo pants, and flip-flops. A red bandana covers his
hair, and a pair of plastic sunglasses conceals his eyes. He carries a large backpack
with a sticker of Argentinean revolutionary Che Guevara adhered to the back. The
sound of communal chanting echoes through the landscape. We are in India. The
mood is serene. The man walks alone. Like so many westerners in eastern lands,
surely this man seeks enlightenment.
The journey we are watching is Julian Rosefeldt’s Lonely Planet, 2006.
For a moment, the tranquility of the chanting is broken by the jarring guitar and
2 In David Sterritt, ed., “1968 Interview with Gene Youngblood,” Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1998), 13.
3 What might be most meaningful about the various outlets made possible through technologies, such as
YouTube, MySpace, and Second Life, is their enormous capacity for self-expression. The self being expressed
here may be (in fact, is likely to be) some combination of true aspects of a person’s daily existence and constructed elements that speak to fantasy or the potentiality of what a person desires in life. Our increasing
comfort with these types of virtual experiences are clearly informing how we constitute self.
4 Even the democratic potential for a participatory media in the space of the Internet has been revealed to have
an intact structure of hierarchies and a methodology of control. See Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control
Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).
5 Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” in The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick
Montfort (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 281. Originally in Pour une critique de l’economie politique du signe
(Paris: Gallimard, 1972) and translated into English in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans.
Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981).
6 See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
7 Ibid., 109–10.
8 Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,” Artforum, vol. 45, no. 7 (March 2007): 277.
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drumming of American punk band Green Day, and we hear the popular lyrics, “Don’t
want to be an American idiot.” Although only this opening line is included, it is
worth remembering the emphatic words that follow: “Don’t want a nation under
the new media. And can you hear the sound of hysteria? The subliminal mind fuck
America.” Taking the title of the popular travel guide series, Rosefeldt’s piece considers what it means to be a citizen of the world in the age of new media. It asks
whether the enlightened self—Descartes’ thinking, rational self; the “reasoning
being” Kant describes; or the complete self-consciousness that Hegel believed
could lead to transcendence—we sought in the past is possible, or even desirable,
today. From Freud to Heidegger to Deleuze, many have challenged the presumed
totality, unity, and rational consciousness of the individual espoused by earlier
philosophers. Likewise, Rosefeldt’s depiction of his subject examines media’s role in
leading us toward a subjectivity that is not singular, but heterogeneous, and exists
simultaneously in more than one space.
Throughout Lonely Planet, this proverbial traveler whose course of action
we assume will be straightforward and predictable becomes more nuanced and
complex. He is a man of today: part fact—a physical being moving through space—
and part fiction—a fabrication, an actor. He journeys through a globalized world,
caught somewhere between the ritualized bathing in the Ganges and the offices of
the new middle class giving technical advice over the phone to customers around
the world. At times, he wanders through various sites unnoticed, like a specter,
nearly oblivious to his surroundings, and, at other moments, he draws considerable
attention, the crowds heckling and applauding him like a celebrity.
This lonely traveler is a mediated man, a man formed by the media.
Footage of his travels becomes the content on the screen in a packed Indian movie
house, and our protagonist suddenly walks out of the picture screen, up through
the aisles of the theater itself, and into the city streets. Eventually, he finds his way
onto a Bollywood movie set, as if his seemingly open-ended journey had a destination all along. While the costume and make-up crew spruce him up, others members of the film crew suddenly stop working and break into a catchy music
video-like dance number. As he joins the dancers, the focus shifts from a methodical attention on the subject to multiple cameras seductively panning the lively
action and shooting from an omniscient bird’s-eye view.
Julian Rosefeldt
Lonely Planet, 2006
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For Lonely Planet, Rosefeldt puts himself in the starring role, expanding
his exploration into this character to include questions about the role of the artist,
or filmmaker, as an outsider in another land. Can the artist offer “truthful” insights
into a place for those viewers who have never been there? Can he speak for, or represent, the “other”? Will the artist’s interpretation of this place always be misleading or inadequate in comparison to one’s direct experience? Or is a virtual journey
through a site just as good as “the real thing”? Rosefeldt’s lonely traveler takes us
on a mesmerizing journey, posing all these questions along the way.
Candice Breitz
“You are so self-involved, you couldn’t be a mother.” “It’s no good feeling sorry for
yourself.” “I’ve always tried to be a good mother to you.” “Daddy’s gotta bring
home the bacon.”
These are just some of the clichés and platitudes uttered by such recognizable
Hollywood mainstays as Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon, Shirley MacLaine, Dustin
Hoffman, Donald Sutherland, and Jon Voigt in Candice Breitz’s video installation
Mother + Father, 2005. Taking mainstream “tearjerker” dramas like Kramer vs.
Kramer, Postcards from the Edge, and Ordinary People, Breitz extracts dialogue (as
well as sighs, groans, and even screams) from the characters during moments
when they speak about parenting. She situates each character on a single plasma
screen and puts them into lively conversation with one another. Divided along gender lines and displayed in separate rooms, the work examines the role of popular
media in generating and dispensing ideas about the “mother” and the “father.” At
times, there is an uncanny sense of connection between the characters’ pronouncements, and, at others, their interaction is seemingly wholly disassociated and
absurd, like the characters in a Brecht or Beckett play. What becomes immediately
apparent is how portrayals of mothers and fathers in these films—and by extension, most characters in popular culture—exacerbate common stereotypes.
This is no great surprise. But what complicates this finding are the
compelling questions Breitz poses about the relationship between life and media.
Knowing that Hollywood borrows actively from daily life (consider how frequently
“real life” stories serve as fodder for film narratives), it is likely that the action or
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Mother + Father, 2005
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the dialogue spoken feels familiar to viewers, even relevant, to the extent that we
may acknowledge we have had similar experiences to the ones being acted out on
screen. If Hollywood is increasingly taking up the role of parent by doling out
advice and values, then whose values are being expressed to us? Do they exist in
the culture, and the film industry is simply reflecting the world around it—a mirror
held up to ourselves? Or are these values being conjured up within the power structures of the industry and being sold to us as if they were mutually agreed upon?
Much of Breitz’s work has examined questions of subjectivity and its
relationship to the mainstream media that has saturated the global market. She
participates in rather aggressive exercises in decontextualization and deconstruc9
tion so that she can then re-animate the footage. Her acts of simultaneous erasure
and spotlighting encourage viewers not to interact with these perpetual, and
unavoidable, cultural sources as passive observers—blithely accepting the characterizations and ideologies put before us—but to be active and engaged viewers,
questioning everything and taking note of that which has been purposefully left
on the editing floor. The editing for Mother + Father is Breitz’s most complex and
ambitious to date. She borrows extensively from existing footage of the actors to
write her own screenplay of sorts, in which the adults emote, in jerky and stilted
blurts of language, on such topics as devotion, responsibility, discipline, independence, respect, and rejection.
It is impossible to observe the familiar portrayals of these mothers and
fathers and not feel the insidiousness of the increasing homogeneity of representation and the hegemony that the entertainment industry wields. However, as
active participants in the global economy of cultural production, we can reclaim a
10
sense of ownership over these representations. Considering the relationship
between “Operator” (photographer) and the subject, Roland Barthes fears that the
9 “Re-animate” is a term Breitz prefers to “animate” in order to move away from defining her role as sole “lifegiving” author of the work and to acknowledge the interplay between the power of the found footage she
uses and her manipulation of it. See interview with Louise Neri, “Candice Breitz and Louise Neri: Eternal
Return,” in Candice Breitz, exhibition catalogue, Jay Jopling/White Cube, Francesca Kaufmann and Sonnabend
Gallery (London: White Cube, 2005), 6.
10 Sampling, editing, and manipulation have become one primary means to this end and have lead to other
kinds of representation—in the form of “user-generated” content—that put authorship even more in the
hands of the individual.
Candice Breitz
Mother + Father, 2005
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process by which the photograph turns a subject into an object is akin to a small
11
death and proclaims, “It is my political right to be a subject which I must protect.”
Likewise, Breitz’s work argues it is our political right to be engaged participants in
mass media and to find ways to reassert and make visible the many complexities
that constitute subjecthood.
Pierre Huyghe
At the beginning of Sidney Lumet’s 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, a short text
flashes up on the screen that ends with, “…and what you are about to see is true.”
The advertisement for the film proclaimed that the event it depicts—the 1972
attempted, and failed, bank robbery in Brooklyn by John Wojtowicz—should only
have taken ten minutes but was now the stuff of history. This intriguing mix of
truth, time, and history is the inspiration for Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory,
1999. Judging from the publicity and disclaimer at the beginning of the film, clearly
Warner Bros. considered it a selling point that, indeed, there is a John Wojtowicz
whose intended quick foray into a life of crime transformed into a protracted
12
stand-off with the police replete with media frenzy. But, although Wojtowicz was
alive and well in a state penitentiary at the time of the shooting, Lumet never
attempted to contact him to get “his side of the story.” Without this first-person
account, how “truthful” can Lumet’s depiction be? But Dog Day Afternoon is not
conceived or marketed as a documentary, so, we might ask, what difference does it
make that he never interviewed the bank robber? In fact, Wojtowicz, who had a
wife and two kids at home, wanted the extra cash so that his boyfriend could get
the sex change he desperately desired. This is a great story. All the better that it
actually happened. We love to be shocked by reality, and we love Hollywood, so it
seems the two, here, made a perfect match.
So, there’s the event itself. There’s the “truthful” retelling of the event
13
in Dog Day Afternoon. Then there’s Huyghe’s third layer, in which he brings
Wojtowicz, who was released on parole in 1979, back into the picture, so to speak,
to re-create the crime. In The Third Memory, the set is a simulacrum of the small
Brooklyn bank, and a now fifty-something Wojtowicz walks us through the action
of that summer day, directing the actors to move and speak in the manner of the
original event. Wojtowicz is clearly the director here, taking charge of the action
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The Third Memory, 1999
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with the naturally flamboyant personality of a “true” Hollywood celebrity, and we
feel that ownership of his own subjectivity, of his representation, has been restored
14
by Huyghe.
Finally, after twenty-eight years, Wojtowicz is allowed to tell his story.
But the retelling and its attendant notions of self are more complicated than one
might think. Is he now genuinely in control of his own representation? Has our
knowledge of Wojtowicz and the events that changed his life increased and become
more accurate now that we’ve seen The Third Memory? At the beginning of the
work, Wojtowicz declares, “I’m the real Sonny Wortzik,” the character’s name in
Lumet’s film, so we quickly know that the fictional persona and the real person
have become somewhat conflated. But when Wojtowicz refers to the actual bank
robbery as “the real movie,” we realize things are really messy. Testifying to the
broad accessibility and popularity of Hollywood films, Dog Day Afternoon’s version
of events has become, in some fundamental way, the first memory. Huyghe
includes a few moments of television news footage in which the energetic bank
robber instigates the throngs of observers outside the bank to rally to his cause,
reminding us that the second memory resides in the recorded news documentation
of the robbery. After so many years, Wojtowicz’s retelling of his own story becomes
suspicious not only because we question whether he can remember with such clarity and assuredness something that happened so long ago, but also because we are
aware that he, too, is willingly being influenced by the film version of himself—
“the real movie.” Before heading out to the van provided by the hostage negotiators to take Wojtowicz, his partner Sal, and the bank employee hostages to jfk
airport, he remarks that they are going to “make history.” But when your life
becomes history, what happens to your life? Wojtowicz’s comment about his fight
with Warner Bros. to “get my movie back” speaks volumes: the movie is his life,
11 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 15.
12 The live news coverage of the twelve-hour event proved so popular that several channels interrupted coverage
of the Republican National Convention where Nixon was to accept the nomination in order to broadcast it.
13 Lumet’s film starred Al Pacino, and in another strange twist, news coverage of Wojtowicz during the robbery
claimed he had the good looks “of an Al Pacino.”
14 Not incidentally, Wojtowicz has been fighting Warner Bros. for several years for the rights to his story. The
fact of this litigation only serves to underscore the very delicate relationship between filmmaker, or artist,
and subject and to pose even more questions about authorship and ownership.
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and his life is the movie. The two are now inextricable. Is he a real person, or a character in a movie, or is it simply possible for him to be both?
Kerry Tribe
We’ve all heard that if you live in Los Angeles, you can’t escape the influence of
Hollywood. The industry is said to color everything there. Disparagers would say
la is superficial, full of “wanna-be” actors injected with botox and augmented with
saline breasts all trying to climb over each other to get to the next audition. Optimists and dreamers would say it is a place of glamour, of creativity, and of the
always alluring potential of “being discovered.” In a city filled with people who
make a living acting like other people, how does one present or, more accurately,
represent oneself? When the focus is on mainstream films, where does a visual
artist fascinated both by the documentary format and the notion of self-expression fit in? In Kerry Tribe’s Double, 2001, she adopts aspects of all three—fiction,
documentary, and self-expression—to address critically these very questions.
Double consists of what Tribe calls “an experiment in five parts.” She
placed an advertisement in film industry publications to receive headshots from
actors she could hire to play herself. After reviewing countless interested and eager
actors, she selected five women to play “the part” of her and engaged in long conversations with each in which they could ask her anything about herself that could
later become the content, or dialogue, for the video. The five women—Jazmine,
Alyssa, Iris, Eva, and Kerry—share Tribe’s general physical attributes, and each
arrives for her role dressed and made up like the artist to the best of her recollection. Small details that differentiate them become acutely noticeable, but what is
far more interesting than whether these actors actually look like Tribe is how they
verbally recount their understanding—their memory—of who she is.
The multiple constructed Kerrys describe the actual Kerry in terms of
typology or demographic information (“I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts”;
“My dad teaches law at Harvard”) from a more personal, self-reflexive perspective
(“I’ve been accused of having masculine gestures”; “My lips are too sexual, too
pouty”), and even with a tinge of existential struggle (“You start to feel like there’s
no me”). There are moments of disconnect, in which the actor fails to articulate
precisely details of Tribe’s life—like when Eva mentions the way that she paints,
Kerry Tribe
Double, 2001
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forgetting that Tribe is not a painter and pointing to the assumption that “artist”
automatically translates into “painter.” These are small misdemeanors in the
scheme of memory play, but they pack a jarring punch when you hear them expressed by these strange, but invited, imposters by heightening our awareness of
how easily those characteristics we find fundamental to who we are can be misinterpreted by others.
The representation of Tribe has its most poignant moments during the
final “experiment,” when Kerry, the actor, talks about one of the pitfalls of being an
actor—when you allow yourself to be taped, you have to recognize that people will
view it, and they will judge you. We begin to question whether Kerry is recounting
something Tribe actually expressed or whether she has momentarily lapsed into
discussing her own career. Either way, she is involved in the very act she is deconstructing—being taped—and, therefore, some level of self-awareness seems to be
at play. She follows this with a reflection upon the question of whether hiring someone to play herself (as, of course, Tribe has done) would somehow enhance her life
and ponders whether she would get to know herself “a little better.” It’s a good
question, and one that is left unanswered.
Double creates not only a literal doubling of the artist (five times over)
but also participates in active dualities—our desire to have someone “play” us out
of some strange curiosity versus our anxiety over the notion of being misrepresented, and, thus, misunderstood. One wonders whether Tribe actually described
her own lips as “too pouty” and whether, if she did not, her decision to leave this
misstatement in regardless of whether she said it reflects the inevitability that
however we may think we present ourselves to others, it is impossible for us to
control their “reading” of us. Iris says, as Tribe, that she is a “control freak,” and
perhaps Double is the artist’s attempt to release hold of the notion that her “self”
can be navigated and interpreted solely from within.
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Ian Charlesworth
At the beginning of Ian Charlesworth’s John, 2005, the screen is dark, and we hear
a voice say, “John.” A moment later, a figure stands before us—an adolescent boy
dressed in a tracksuit, a striped sweater, and sneakers—spotlighted before a black
background. The off-camera voice persists, and we determine that this is the voice
of a director as he instructs John to act out certain situations—fighting with his
girlfriend; instigating a riot in his volatile neighborhood; dealing with a drunken
and disruptive parent. We are witnessing an audition, and like Andy Warhol’s
screen tests from the 1960s, although dramatically different in its aesthetic sensibility, Charlesworth’s subject is essentially playing himself.
John is a working-class kid from Northern Ireland, identified in the local
vernacular as a “spidey.” In recent years, filmmakers and television and advertising executives have been recruiting “spideys” to portray the youth of Belfast.
Although the director proclaims, “We don’t know anything about your real life,” it
becomes clear that John represents a type, and he is expected to “act” like this
type (or enact the stereotype)—disaffected, aggressive, abused, somewhere
between a victim of social malaise and injustice and a hopeful youth. John is encouraged to find inspiration in his real-life experiences—“I’m looking for the last
argument you had”; “We found you in a boxing club; let’s go back to that boxing
club”—but as the scenarios are provided, we start to question whether John is
being asked to recall his own life or if this background information is context for
the character he is supposed to develop. There is a confusion of subjectivity, of
which the viewer becomes aware, but which is also embodied within John himself.
Uttering, “I can’t do it,” there are moments in the course of the audition when John
simply has nothing to say, when he seems to lose his sense of self completely,
whether fabricated or real. Caught between the knowledge that the director is
looking for some kind of (false) authenticity rooted in the notion that he can just
“play himself” and the actuality of being isolated on a stage, decontextualized
from the world, and asked to re-create an experience or event, there is a profound
disconnection from self.
As John repeatedly uses the real as fodder for his simulated character,
the difference between the two begins to disappear. Where, then, does representation begin and subjectivity end? What we are faced with when watching John in
Ian Charlesworth
John, 2005
the moments when the void opens up and he cannot assimilate past with present
is an awareness of what Jean Baudrillard would call the impossibility of the real:
We can never exactly present to ourselves, or to others. Thus we are not
exactly real for one another, nor are we quite real even to ourselves. And this
radical alterity is our best chance.… Put simply, our chance at life.
15
While Baudrillard, here, embraces this state of being other to ourselves as a way to
resist the very notion that there can be a single “truth,” he nonetheless suggests
that the proliferation of images and the continuous mediation of experience are
antagonistic, even violent, asserting that we have “murdered” the real. Similarly,
16
Susan Sontag repeatedly characterizes photography as aggressive. And yet both
acknowledge that the representation—the simulation—has become inherent to
the thing itself. If, for Sontag, we cannot truly experience important events in our
lives without the lens of the video camera, for example, then does John’s contemporary screen test somehow make him more “real”? Put before the camera and the
gaze of the director, John nonetheless is the tool of his own mediation. He is the
camera’s lens through which we understand him.
This sense of aggression or violence that Baudrillard and Sontag describe
is activated in Charlesworth’s work. The voraciousness (as Sontag would call it) of
photography operates within the increasingly influential and dominant force of the
mass media. Advertising and other popular media co-opt anything perceived to be
marginal, unusual, or transgressive, thereby stripping it of its power and its position outside the mainstream. We see this all the time in fashion, as transgressive
styles of, say, Punk’s ripped jeans and studded belts are donned by soccer moms as
soon as Gucci deems it appropriate. John’s culture, background, language, and, yes,
style are being cannibalized by the media. His value now resides in whether he can
participate in the global economy as a type. No longer about finding value within
the individual, John has become like any other type we see on television or in the
movies, somewhat confused by what he is being asked to do and yet aware that no
one can play him better than himself.
15 Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 71.
16 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York, Picador, 2001).
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Historical Re-enactments
Omer Fast
In the three video portraits that comprise Omer Fast’s Godville, 2005, the urge to
traverse historical time triggers a collapse between the subjecthood of the characters portrayed by actors and what we might traditionally think of as the “authentic self.” Shot in Colonial Williamsburg—a “living history museum” where residents
are paid to be historical re-enactors who dress in eighteenth-century costumes
and engage in the activities of colonial times—Fast adopts the interview format
like a practiced documentarian and then deconstructs it before our eyes. Skillful
editing has often added a staccato-like rhythm and conceptual thrust to Fast’s
video works, and in Godville he has gone so far as to paste together consonants
in order to create a word he wants. Complete sentences expressing countless opinions and containing charged meanings come out of his subjects’ mouths, and we
become utterly absorbed in what they are saying. And yet, there is a profound
discomfort that accompanies watching and listening to these interviews. The
artist’s trenchant manipulation of the footage is patently obvious, and we become
acutely attuned to how much is cut out or reconfigured within the format of the
interview in cultural production at large. Fast’s original questions are not made
available to us, and the camera locks onto its subjects from a single perspective as
we watch monologues in which the characters—a housewife, a militiaman, and
a slave—discuss their dual lives. The absence of the interviewer, the artist, only
makes his presence more conspicuous and his power over their representation
undeniable.
These portraits reveal and emphasize a dramatized and mutually consensual conflation of past and present, which occurs not just on the part of the
“actors” but also of the visitors to Colonial Williamsburg, who interact with the residents as if they truly are magical time-travelers and participate fully in the “living”
facsimile. Urged on by Fast’s questions, a kind of double portrait emerges. The line
between performer and self is obliterated, and the astoundingly complex subject of
each interview is revealed to be an amalgam of historical fact, subjective interpretation, the vagaries of memory, and performative flourish. Fast’s characters
become a fascinating combination of reductive stereotype and a nearly fractured,
expansive multiplicity.
Re-enactors at Colonial Williamsburg
Omer Fast
Godville, 2005
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In each of the interviews, we are rapt by the content of what the characters are saying but, moreover, by the way they are saying it. The incongruities
between language and intended meaning become spotlighted to a nearly disorienting effect. The housewife continuously brings up the notion of time—making
statements like, “outside of time,” “time falls away,” “turn back time”—to describe
her experience of trying to live as if in an earlier era. More than once, she proclaims
that she “feels like a schizophrenic,” and we recognize the break with linear consistency as a state of mind that increasingly constitutes our experience of the world.
The militiaman, dressed in a Revolutionary War uniform, speaks of resisting modernization as if he is fighting for independence. His ebullient proclamations
vacillate between past and present, and his personal ideology seems to be the glue
that helps him connect the two periods. For example, he links his understanding of
his character’s role in the Revolutionary Army to defend “our way of life” with his
experience in the Gulf War and repeatedly argues that “fear” defines our lives.
Opinionated and incredulous, the militiaman’s discussion moves from analyzing the
ills of modern life to criticizing the museum as an institution that trades in “fashion
and fear,” and ultimately to questioning the intentions of Fast, who, he concludes,
doesn’t “have any interest in your subject at all.” Of course, his tirade has been
woven together extensively by Fast. And we slowly become aware that the militiaman’s queries into the intentions of the documentary filmmaker, the responsibility
of the artist to his sitter, and the struggle for autonomy in how we are represented,
are, indeed, profoundly legitimate and difficult questions being posed to us by the
artist himself and, perhaps more specifically, to himself.
Matthew Buckingham
Matthew Buckingham pursues history. With great intention but with a quiet surreptitiousness, he re-imagines particular events, consequential sites, and cultural
artifacts with a poetic detachment that carries affinities with the documentary format—objective narrator voice-over, black-and-white footage, didactic details—
and yet participates in the subjective interpretation that colors all renderings or
re-enactments of the past. “Cultural follower,” a phrase borrowed from a 1999
work by the artist, seems to be an apt description of Buckingham, whose methodology, as Tacita Dean writes, involves using, “…the rich pickings of history to generate
17
new narrative possibilities.”
Omer Fast
Godville, 2005
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Buckingham’s decision to create a moving-image version of Edgar Allan
Poe’s provocative 1840 short story “The Man of the Crowd” is particularly compelling for it continues an ongoing line of inquiry shared by other “cultural followers” into the historical relevance (and resonance) of the story. It is not just that
Poe’s story of a man who, feeling particularly absorbed by the crowds and activity
in the city after a long convalescence, identifies an older man through a café window and follows him for twenty-four hours around the streets and underbelly of
London is a richly descriptive account of the simultaneous seductive stimulation
and repellence of the modern city. It is also noteworthy that Charles Baudelaire pro18
nounced Poe as “the best writer I know,” translated the story into French, and
made his passion for it abundantly clear. Walter Benjamin subsequently analyzed
19
Poe’s story and wrote of Baudelaire’s fascination with it. Both Baudelaire and
Benjamin were intrigued by the modern city dweller as a flâneur who navigates
urban spaces and embodies the fundamental tension between the individual
20
and the crowd, anonymity and citizenship. Moreover, Buckingham’s The Man of
the Crowd, 2003, shares Benjamin’s self-consciousness over the process of translation, which can never duplicate the original, but rather, by definition, changes it,
21
both masking certain aspects and revealing things not previously visible. Like
Benjamin, the artist is obsessed, to use Benjamin’s term, with the structure of history and with acknowledging how the past comes into the present and the present
frames our representations of the past.
For his The Man of the Crowd, Buckingham must translate the form of the
short story into the language of film. The result is that language—or, specifically,
17 Tacita Dean, “Historical Fiction,” Artforum, vol. 42, no. 7 (March 2004), 148.
18 Charles Baudelaire, “Edgar Allan Poe, his Life and Works,” in Selected Writings on Art and Literature (London:
Penguin Books, Ltd 1972), 185. He also describes Poe’s story in his famous essay “The Painter of Modern
Life,” published in this same volume.
19 See Walter Benjamin’s extensive writing on Baudelaire in Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays
on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings, trans. Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2006).
20 Walter Benjamin’s unfinished and posthumously published The Arcades Project, which he first conceived in
1927, was a collection of writings on Paris in the nineteenth century, its street life enabled by its roofed outdoor arcades, which helped create a culture of flânerie. See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University,
1999).
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133
Matthew Buckingham
The Man of the Crowd, 2003
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text—is replaced with images that (literally) reflect (or project) the limitations of
language and how language, in some fundamental way, has been usurped by the
image—the screen, the reflection, the mirror—in modern life. The opening line of
Poe’s story contains an apt description of a “certain German book” that, “does not
permit itself to be read.” Buckingham’s follower utters these provocative words
into his cell phone, and the remainder of the film includes no spoken word—no dialogue, no narrative voice-over, no ambient conversation to overhear.
While Buckingham’s work has a fundamental connection to its nineteenth-century source, he immediately distorts a sense of historical accuracy by
displacing time and place—moving the action from London to Vienna and shooting
the film in the present day. What seems particularly relevant about Buckingham’s
choice of the film medium is its ability to double—or reproduce—a person or an
event. Roland Barthes writes, “Yet the cinema has a power which at first glance the
Photograph does not have; the screen…is not a frame but a hideout; the man or
woman who emerges from it continues living: a ‘blind field’ constantly doubles our
22
partial vision.”
If the artist offers a doubling, or a retelling, of Poe’s seductive foray
into voyeurism, it is with an awareness that the story itself is, in large part, about
the very act of doubling—the inescapable aspect of reflection—both physically
and psychologically. The artist underscores this further with the installation of the
work in which he projects the film onto a two-way mirror, doubling the image
while also reflecting the viewer. As our protagonist follows this older man whom
he finds so compellingly enigmatic, we start to sense he is somehow following
himself. Baudelaire suggested Poe’s character was based upon the author himself.
Buckingham’s translation of Poe’s short story seems to suggest we are all “the
man of the crowd.”
Kota Ezawa
The 1995 O. J. Simpson trial not only shed a veritable forensic light on the evercomplicated dynamics of race, gender, and class in American society, but it prompted
a media spectacle that would change the course of television news. Beginning with
the June 17, 1994 slow-speed car chase on California’s Interstate 405 after Simpson
failed to turn himself into the police and threatened suicide, every aspect of the
alleged crime, arrest, trial, verdict, and aftermath has been aggressively covered and
scrutinized by the mass media. Spawned by the public’s astonishing consumption
of the now infamous, yet utterly banal, news footage of the white Bronco being
chased by the police and the subsequent stand-off in the driveway of Simpson’s
Brentwood home, the media frenzy that followed was unrelenting. So many reporters and journalists were positioned outside the Los Angeles Criminal Courts
building during the more than nine-month trial that it was dubbed “Camp O. J.”
Reflecting the power of the media, Judge Lance Ito broke with established precedent
and even allowed news cameras into the courtroom.
The approximately three-minute-long verdict announcement—in which,
needless to say, Simpson was acquitted of the charges that he murdered Nicole
Brown Simpson, his former wife, and Ronald Goldman—was viewed by so many
people around the world it cannot be described as anything but a cultural phenomenon. It is estimated that 150 million people tuned in to observe the fate of
Simpson, and it is the footage of the courtroom during the reading of the verdict
that Kota Ezawa takes as the starting point for his 2002 work The Simpson Verdict.
Ezawa uses simple “paper cut-out” graphic animation as a kind of skin,
or surface, over the original footage, further flattening out and chromatically reducing the images. Extraneous visual details are superseded by the focused attention on the figures being recorded, and their gestures—the flicker of movement in
Simpson’s eyes, the brief smile that crosses his face as the second verdict is read
aloud, Johnnie Cochran’s impulse to grab Simpson’s arm—come into pronounced
relief. We are once again witnessing the moment, albeit years after the fact and in
an appropriated and manipulated form, when Simpson’s subjectivity has been irreversibly cannibalized by society, enabled in large part by the mass media, and turned
into a web of stereotypes rooted in his position as a black heterosexual male athlete who had been married to a white woman in a country with a relatively recent
history of lynching black men for so much as glancing at a white woman. As Ezawa
physically reduces the footage to a mise-en-abyme, Simpson’s persona is likewise
distilled to icon status.
The transformation in The Simpson Verdict removes us even further from
the subject of our fascination. We cannot know, truly know, this person, for he has
become a sort of facsimile, even a façade, of himself. Beyond all the roles ascribed
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to Simpson in the social debate that ensued after the verdict, perhaps the one that
had the largest impact on the phenomenon we can now simply refer to as “O. J.”
without any question as to the referent, is celebrity. His attorney Johnnie Cochran
knew this well and used the American obsession with celebrity to leverage support
for Simpson in the form of massive amounts of publicity for the trial. The more
attention the trial garnered in a media notorious for its lack of nuance and propen23
sity to present complex situations in black-and-white terms, the more impossible
it would become for justice to be determined exclusively in relationship to the
crime at issue. Rather, in a city still reeling from the repercussions of Rodney King’s
documented beating at the hands of four police officers who were subsequently
acquitted, creating a literal firestorm of riot and protest, the entire judicial system
was on trial. Moreover, Simpson’s position as a celebrity not only meant that he
would be of interest, without question, to the media, it also meant that he was
already an enigma to us. Because of their public personas, we are led to believe
that we somehow know celebrities when all we really know of them is their work—
News footage of O. J. Simpson’s
slow-speed car chase, June 17, 1994
Camp O. J.
in Simpson’s case, his athletic successes, short-lived film career, and his role helping
to sell rental cars. Ezawa’s simple but masterful presentation of the Simpson trial
further shatters the myths associated with Simpson’s icon celebrity status and
reinforces his position as a nearly schizophrenic figure provided the superficial skin
of the television screen to appear whole.
21 See Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New
York: Schocken Books, 1986), 69–82. This text was written as an introduction to his translation of
Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens.
22 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 55–56.
23 Black and white, in this case, can be taken quite literally as the race question usurped all other discussions
around gender and class that, too, constitute the social structure that serves as context here; using “the race
card” was a repeated accusation against Simpson’s legal team.
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Kota Ezawa
The Simpson Verdict, 2002
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Merger of man and movie camera from
Dziga Vertov’s
Man with the Movie Camera (detail)
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TimeStream
1
Tony Oursler
I hate the dark.
As a result of being locked into physical sense perception,
I love the light.
they are doomed to view only shadows of truth on the
wall of the cave. In Plato’s metaphor, an unseen fire
Iris is thought to be derived from the Greek word for
behind the shackled illuminates a marionette or puppet
speaker or messenger.
show taking place above and behind their heads; the
puppets’ movements represent the interactions of true
Fifth century BC Chinese philosopher Mo Ti, in the first
contemplation, visible to the masses only as indecipher-
description of the camera obscura, refers to the pinhole
able shadows projected on the cold stone before them.
as “collection place” and “locked treasure room.”
Homer equates the rainbow/Iris with a serpent, a
Diamonds and other clear crystals have three important
sentiment shared in African mythology, in which the
characteristics that come together and foreshadow
colors materialize as a giant consuming snake attack-
future technologies:
ing the unsuspecting. In the tribal myths of South
1. transparency of optical quality, allowing one to
America, we find the rainbow personified in evil figures,
peer into, as in a crystal ball, or through the stone
and in Eastern Europe the colored light sometimes sucks
2. refraction of light into its spectral colors
up water and children.
3. possession of mystical or occult powers
The prophet Zoroaster of Persia describes a character
Lumière Bros. first manufactured
camera (details)
Plato’s Cave depicts the dilemma of the uneducated in
similar to the Christian Devil. He teaches that Ahura
a graphic tableau of light and shadow. The shackled
Mazda, the god of light, is in battle with the evil Angra
masses are kept in shadow, unable to move their heads.
Mainyu. A dualist, Zoroaster believes the world is
All they can see is the wall of the cave in front of them.
divided between dark and light.
1 This chronology was originally published in Introjection: Tony Oursler,
Mid-career Survey, 1976–1999 (Williamstown, Williams College
Museum of Art, 1999).
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“And now there is no longer any difficulty in understanding
During an eclipse, Aristotle notices many images of a
The gemstone diamond was often associated with
children, are born of a negative aperture, from an evil
Seth, the Egyptian god most associated with evil, is
The Devil’s Arc
the images in mirrors and in all smooth and bright surfaces.
crescent sun on the ground below a tree. He later dis-
lightning and was sometimes believed to owe its origin
supernatural chamber. They are reflections of the Dark
depicted in many guises: a black pig, a tall, double-
Iris
The fires from within and from without communicate about the
covers that whatever the shape of the aperture, jagged
to the thunderbolt. It was also believed that the elec-
Light, disguised as human beings delivered to our world
headed figure with a snout, and a serpent. Sometimes
Arco Iris
smooth surface, and from one image which is variously
or smooth, the images projected are the same. The
tronic current that created the stone could dissolve it.
to operate as corrupting agents: out.
he is black, a positive color for the Egyptians, symbolic
God’s Sword
refracted. All which phenomena necessarily arise by reason of
riddle is known as Aristotle’s Problem.
of the deep tones of fertile river deposits; at other times
A person who crosses or passes directly below will change sex.
the fire or the light about the eye combining with the fire or ray
“I have seen Satan fall like lightning from heaven.”
“The association of farting and shitting with the
he is red, a negative color reflected by the parched
One who points at it will be struck by lightning.
of light about the smooth bright surfaces. Or if the mirror be
Circa 300 bc, Euclid publishes Optics, in which he isolates
(Luke 10:18–20)
Antichrist was part of a conscious program of insult by
turned vertically, the face appears upside down and the upper
the concept of a beam of light, suggests the eye sends out
visual rays to the object that the viewer wishes to see.
Red
(Rainbow:?)
sands that encroach upon the crops. Jeffrey Burton
Russell suggests that “it is possible that the redness of
Teufelsregenbogen, the dim outer rainbow, is an
part of the rays are driven downwards, and the lower upwards.”
Seth helped make red the second most common color,
unsuccessful attempt by Satan to compete with the
—From Timaeus, by Plato (427–327 BC), translation by B.
after black, of the Christian Devil.”
glorious original.
Jowett in the Dialogues of Plato (Oxford, 1875)
Black
First reference to the persistence of vision:
Aristotle (384–322 bc) writes Meteorologica. His
inversion of values, meant to unmask the ultimate
Green
human evil found in the Antichrist.” —Bernard McGinn
In the Book of Revelations it is stated, “There is a need
Archimedes (c. 287–212 bc) is said to have used a
for shrewdness here: if anyone is clever enough he may
Ibn al-Haytham (a.k.a. Alhazen), a tenth-century
large magnifying lens or burning glass, which focused
interpret the number of the beast: it is the number of
Arabian scholar, publishes Optics, which is the basis of
the sun’s rays, to set fire to Roman ships off Syracuse.
a man, the number is 666.” One theory of the number’s
Europe’s knowledge on the subject until the sixteenth
puzzling origin has anti-Roman groups giving letters
century. In it he describes the camera obscura. He also
Darkness becomes a palpable mass that occupies the
“This [perception of motion] is to be explained in the following
treatise devotes a substantial amount of space to a
room completely. It expands to fill every void within the
way: that when the first image passes off and the second is
penetrating discussion on the causes of the rainbow,
Day and Night, Day and Night, Day and Night, Day and
numerical significance so that coded messages could be
expands on the optical understanding of the Greeks,
chamber, including our eyes. Perhaps there is something
afterwards produced in another position, the former is seen to
luminous halos, northern lights. This section may in fact
Night. Over and over again the same things happen.
passed among themselves. By obscure calculation, the
explaining that light spreads out in all directions from
there that can see us and take advantage of our
have changed its gesture.” —Titus Lucretius Carus (98–55 bc)
be taken as the first truly systematic theory of the
Storm comes and then sunshine. Colors appear in the
number 666 has the letter value of Nero, who ruled ad
an object. In addition, he describes the linearity of light
rainbow that has come down to us:
sky, always in the same order—red, orange, yellow,
54–68. Nero is known to have enjoyed peering through
through the use of three candles and one pinhole,
blinded, confused position. Gone is the steady stream of
images absorbed into the eyes. All stimulation is halted
The One = Perfection = Infinite Good
“Why is it that the voice which is air that has taken a
green, blue, indigo, violet. You think the same thoughts.
a rudimentary lens crafted of the gemstone emerald,
proving that we see objects by viewing light reflected
as blood, nerves, and retinas self-animate—sparks
Unformed Matter = Total Imperfection = Infinite Evil
certain form and is carried along often loses its form by
You feel the same feelings. You breathe in and out. Your
which has the property of enlargement. This is one of
from them.
dissolution, but an echo which is caused by such air striking on
heart beats and beats and beats. A voice comes out of
the first records of the use of a lens. As no records exist
fly, points of false light deceive us. In the dark, the eye
or brain or chemical state or electricity makes things up.
Symyaz leads the fallen angels. According to Enoch,
something hard does not become dissolved and we hear it
your mouth and soon it returns, repeating in your ears.
past the bare facts, one can only imagine the joy the
Shen Kua (1031–95), Chinese astronomer, mathemati-
Sensory deprivation is not lack of information, colors,
they came to earth of their own free will at Mount
distinctly? Is it because in an echo refraction takes place and
In a pool, your reflection floats and you are happy.
emperor must have felt.
cian, and poet, expresses the first moral equivalent of
and shapes. No, it is fear of constructing the void. Fear
Hermon, descending like stars. This description gives
not dispersion? This being so the whole continues to exist
of the dark.
rise to the name Lucifer, “giver of light.”
and there are two parts of it of similar form; for refraction
“Your own hands shaped me, modeled me; and would
Aperture
an analogy between the camera obscura’s image
takes place at the same angle. So the voice of the echo is simi-
you now have second thoughts and destroy me? You
in: The gates of hell are often depicted as the gaping
inversion and the nature of man’s vision, which can be
lar to the original voice.”
modeled me, remember; as clay is modeled, and would
mouth of the Devil, while at other times Satan gives
so polluted as to see right as wrong.
you reduce me now to dust?” (Job 10:8–9)
birth through the rectum. These entities, Satan’s
“Get behind me Satan! You are an obstacle in my
path….” (Matthew 16:23)
Fig. 1 The Dual Horus-Seth god, Egypt
the inherent qualities of the camera obscura. He makes
Fig. 2 Balinese Shadow Puppet
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Christians link the colors of the rainbow to the seven
arranged, can show two objects instead of three, eight instead
viewer imbue the image with a magical quality at once
and the result will be that all things which outside are
1585
judgment; and I could not have avoided having scruples about
sacraments.
of four.”—Jean de Meun, Roman de la Rose
distant and intimate. Thus, a new space is created, one
illuminated by the sun you will see inside, you will see those
Tulio Caesare Aranzi focuses sunlight through a flask of
following these opinions, if I had not hoped to take every
of activated viewing, which will later incorporate many
walking in the streets with their heads downwards, as if at the
water and projects it into the nasal cavity. He is the first
opportunity to discover better ones, in case there were any.”
The Comic Devil appears in popular medieval dramas.
“Vision is of three kinds: direct in those who are perfect,
forms of cultural production—a space of collaborative
antipodes, and the things on the right will appear on the left
person known to use a light source for an endoscopic
—from Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting
His role is slapstick—screaming oaths, making obscene
refracted in those who are imperfect, and reflected in evildoers
creativity between darkness and light.
and all things turned over and the further they are from the
procedure.
One’s Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences, by René
gestures, and executing pratfalls. Like hell, the character
and those who ignore God’s commandments.”—Roger
was an inversion of norms of the day.
Bacon (1214–1292)
hole the larger they will appear.
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) illustrated two drawing
I will not conceal at last a thing that is full of wonder and
Descartes, first published anonymously in 1637
1604
aids: one involving a grid through which to view images,
mirth, because I am faln upon this discourse, that by night an
The astronomer Johannes Kepler writes Ad Vitellionem
“I will suppose therefore that not God, who is supremely good
Robert Grosseteste (c. 1175–1253) translates the
French astronomer Guillaume de Saint-Cloud suggests
and another using a ground glass pane to trace images
image may seem to hang in the chamber. In a tempestuous
paralipomena, in which light and the physiology of the
and the source of truth, but rather some malicious demon of
works of Alhazen into Latin.
in an almanac of 1290 that viewers of an eclipse use
from life.
night anything may be represented hanging in the middle of
eye are explored in depth. He coins the term camera
the utmost power and cunning, has employed all his energies in
the chamber, that will terrify beholders. Fit the image before
obscura, which had been known variously as conclave
order to deceive me.” —from Meditations on First Philosophy,
1638–1640, by René Descartes, 1641
a hole in their roof and a board as projection screen to
c. 1200
avoid blindness from staring directly at the sun.
Buddhists associate the colors of the rainbow with the
the hole that you desire to make seem hanging in the air in
obscurum, cubiculum tenebricosum, and camera clausa.
Alhazen, who was no fool, wrote his Treatise on Aspects:
It should be noted that a colorless lunar rainbow is
seven regions of the earth and the seven planets.
another chamber, that is dark; let there be many torches
By using this device, he is able to measure the diame-
“The wise naturalist who would learn about the rainbow must
widely considered to be an ill omen.
consult this book and must also possess notions of geometry to
lighted around about. In the middle of the dark chamber place a
ters of the sun and moon. He also demonstrates how
“All Knowledge is light and all proceeds from the First, Infinite
Formula for a Homunculus
white sheet, or some solid thing that may receive the image
the focal distance of a lens can be reduced by interpos-
Light Who is God.” —Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680)
understand the demonstrations in this treatise. He will then be
In the thirteenth century, Arnaud de Villeneuve,
“Place human semen in a glass vial and nourish with
sent in; for the spectators will not see the sheet, will see the
ing a negative concave lens; this may be the first
able to find the causes and the potency of glasses which pos-
showman and magician, utilized the camera obscura to
blood for forty days and forty nights, keeping it at the
image hanging in the middle of the air, very clear, not without
description of a telephoto lens. As imperial mathemati-
1646
sess marvelous qualities: the smallest things, the most minute
stage presentations somewhere between shadow
temperature of a horse’s belly: and from it will be born a
fear or terror, especially if the artificer be ingenious.… you may
cian, Kepler used a portable tent camera obscura to
Athanasius Kircher, a German professor of philosophy,
lettering, tiny grains of sand, are seen so big and thick that
play and cinema: players performed warlike or murder-
genius, a nymph, or a giant” —Philippus Aureolus
see hunting, battles of enemies and other delusions, and ani-
survey Upper Austria.
mathematics, and Oriental languages at a Jesuit college
they can be exactly distinguished and even counted from afar,
ous episodes outside in the bright sunlight, while inside
Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541)
mals that are really so, or made by art of wood or some other
which seems incredible to one who has not seen them or does
the audience was shocked and delighted by sound
matter. You must frame the little children in them, as we used
1610
the earliest known illustrations of magic lantern slides
not know the causes thereof.
effects linked to the dramatic gestures of the projected
1558
to bring them in when comedies are acted; and you must coun-
Achilles Landenbucher, a watchmaker, devises musical
and the first descriptions of lantern shows and other
images. The fact that the audience would stay inside
Giovanni Battista della Porta publishes details of
terfeit stags, boars, rhinoceros.…
instruments that play themselves.
devices such as dioptrics, lenses of pantoscopes, and tel-
the rays of the sun which strike them are cunningly made to
and watch such a mediated event when they could have
construction and use of the camera obscura in the
converge.…
gone outside and viewed the event directly points to a
widely distributed and popular Magiae naturalis:
Others burn and consume things placed before them if
Others cause different images to appear, straight, oblique,
or reversed. So that mirrors, according to how they are
Fig. 3 Alhazen’s ideas of the formation of the halo
in Rome, publishes Ars magna lucis et umbrae. It includes
escopes, in “which little known powers of light and
Later he discovers that by adding a lens to the enlarged
“For since God has given each of us a light to distinguish truth
shadow are put to diverse uses.” Two lenses can be put
hole, images can be sharpened.
from falsehood, I should not have thought myself obliged to
together to create a microscope, “which will amplify a
fly into a camel.”
victory of the virtual image over reality. The disembodi-
“First of all you must close the windows in the room; you will
ment of the moving image and its removal from the rec-
make a round hole the size of one’s little finger and opposite
rest content with the opinions of others for a single moment if I
ognizable physical laws that bind the body of the
you will stretch pieces of white sheets or white cloths or paper;
had not intended in due course to examine them using my
Fig. 4 Giovanni Battista della Porta’s model of the
camera obscura, 1558
Fig. 5 Anonymous engraving, The Soul of Man, 1629
Fig. 6 Giovanni da Fontana, 1620
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Kircher also describes a portable camera obscura
of the light striking the object. For example, an apple
The Devil’s Chord (a tritone)
with two apertures and an inner cube. The outer box has
tends to reflect red in a full spectrum of light. As
a hole on one side facing another hole on the opposite
Newton points out, it is useless to think of an apple as
Etienne de Silhouette (1709–1767), French controller
side. Inside is another box or frame covered with translu-
red, for “any body may be made to appear any color”
general of finances, cuts out profiles of his contempo-
cent paper. The draughtsman within is able to see an
by controlling the reflected light. Newton is also the
raries in black paper.
image on two sides of the little paper-walled room.
first person in history to unlock the riddle of the rain-
Kircher describes persistence of vision, likening
the change of color in an after-image to the glow of a
flutter its wings, swim in water, eat, drink, and, finally,
a Roman tomb with the bones of a child within, are
I would apply myself to creating Devils, and I would
pass the food as amorphous matter.
aesthetically arranged. The towers and stained glass are
have only to wave my wand, to create all the infernal
not in themselves designed to evoke fear; the setting
cortege to be seen in the light. My habitation became
1745
is meant to stimulate visitors to feel a bygone era when
true Pandemonium.”
Pieter van Musschenbroek invents the Leyden jar, a
our predecessors believed dwellings to be haunted.
storage container for a continuous flow of relatively
This influential building may be seen as the origin of a
By the 1790s, he shifts his exploration from the occult
bow when he applies his understanding of refraction to
1717
large amounts of electricity, considered the first
resurgence of Gothic and the camp/pop cultural inter-
to the science of optics and, finally, to a new theatrical
the water droplets in the air.
Richard Bradly describes the kaleidoscope in a work on
battery. Previously, experimental scientists were forced
pretation of the past that is so prevalent today in theme
form. In 1794, Robertson founds the Phantasmagoria,
garden design.
to rely on unpredictable, spontaneous electrical phe-
parks, architecture, and media.
an influential sound and light show in Paris, which
phosphorous stone when placed in darkness after
exposure to light.
147
makes use of his own graphic designs and innovations
nomena such as static electricity or attracting lightning
1675
The spectrum and depth of one’s emotions are a preoc-
in the magic lantern projection system. He combines
cupation of the time, as represented in the introspective
performers, props, and sound effects produced by the
1746
“theater of the mind.” Any emotion can generate pleas-
Musical Glass (and a robotic trumpet player) and
also a corresponding color produced by transparent
Abbé Nollet conducts electricity from a Leyden jar
ure, regardless of the circumstances; real or fictional,
projects moving images on clouds of smoke and layers
colored gels.
through the bodies of Carthusian monks holding iron
unpleasant or pleasant, an emotion can be indulged,
of gauze curtains. In the area of slide projection, he
wire. The monks form a circle 5,400 feet in circumfer-
gauged, and amplified to this end. False feelings are
introduces the idea of painting images on an opaque
thought to be more pleasurable.
black background rather than on clear glass—so the
Jean Picard, the French astronomer, is walking home
1720
1647
late one night from the Paris Observatory, swinging his
Louis-Bertrand Castel invents the clavecin oculaire or
Johannes Hevelius, an astronomer, designs a lathe that
barometer by his side. To his great surprise, the glass
optical harpsichord. The keys trigger not only sound but
can produce large-scale telescope lenses.
tube emanates a faint glow; the more he shakes it the
more it glows: “the glow of life.”
1666
to a metal pole, for example.
Sir Isaac Newton studies the phenomena of colors, lay-
1706
1725–27
ence. The simultaneously shocked contortions that the
ing the groundwork for the modern physical theory of
Francis Hauksbee, an English student of Sir Isaac
James Graham establishes the Temple of Health in
monks display, when the circuit is closed, proves that
color. To begin, he creates a camera obscura with a tri-
Newton, invents a machine that produces “the glow of
London. He invites childless couples to indulge in sexual
electricity is felt throughout the entire circuit and that
1763
abandoned chapel” dressed up with elaborate “Gothic”
angular glass prism at its “entrance,” which he ground
life” at will. Hauksbee’s Influence Machine consists of a
intercourse in his celestial or magneticoelectro bed
electricity travels very quickly.
Edward Gaspard Robertson, showman-scientist-
decor, is the first permanent auditorium (he performs
himself, focusing and refracting the sun’s rays through
hand-cranked device that spins a glass vacuum globe,
within a therapeutic electric field created by Hauksbee’s
occultist, is born in Liège. In his memoirs, Robertson
the Phantasmagoria for six years) for projected audio-
the dark room onto the opposite wall. There it is “a very
half full of air. The mysterious luminosity can be pro-
Influence Machine.
1749
writes of his fascination with “Father Kircher” and of the
visual shows. So convincing are his illusions that “gen-
pleasing divertissement [diversion] to view the vivid
duced by touching the surface of the glass as it spins;
Horace Walpole, a young British socialite, begins to con-
early motivations that he shared: “Who has not
tlemen drew their swords, ladies fainted.” He insists
colors” of the spectrum. These experiments culminate in
also produced is a crackling sound that reminds the
1738
vert his home, Strawberry Hill, into “a little Gothic cas-
believed in the Devil and werewolves in his early years?
that his aim is not to deceive the public but to arm them
his letter of February 6, 1672 to the Royal Society of
inventor of lightning.
Jacques de Vaucanson amazes the world by exhibiting
tle.” The interior is to become a repository of everything
I admit frankly that I believed in the Devil, in raising the
against irrational superstition. His themes are culled
London, which outlines his discovery of the properties of
in Paris a number of automata, including a life-size Flute
antique; when he can’t find an object he desires, he
dead, in enchantments…. Since the Devil refused to
from popular lore, historic and religious: The Apparition
light rays. Newton also notes that the relative color or
Player and the celebrated Duck, which is reported to
employs artisans to build a replica for him. His random
communicate to me the science of creating prodigies,
of the Bleeding Nun, Chinese Tamtam, The Death of Lord
collection of oddities from throughout the ages, such as
perceived color of objects is determined by the quality
Fig. 7 Newton’s measurement of refractions of light passing
through a camera obscura in conjunction with a prism
Fig. 8 Hauksbee’s Influence Machine
images seem to float free in the air. His theater, a “vast
Littleton, and Preparation for the Sabbath.
Fig. 9 Robertson’s re-design of Archimedes’ legendary
burning glass for the French government
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149
1766
1802
At night artificial light is needed to illuminate the
1833–38
his theory, electrified metal letters could be scanned
Katie: “Here Mr. Split-foot, do as I do.” Katie claps her
Jean-Jacques Rousseau coins the word melodrama to
Thomas Holcroft’s play A Tale of Mystery: A Melodrama
chamber. The open fire gave way to more controlled
Michael Faraday investigates electrical discharges of
by a pendulum and duplicated on chemical paper at the
hands three times, the spirit knocks three times. Mother
describe a drama in which words and music, instead of
is innovative in its use of music and calls for intensifying
forms of light: oil lamps, candles, and, finally, in cities,
gases using vacuum tubes in which a current is passed
other end of the telegraph wire by a synchronized
Margaret tests the spirit by asking the ages of her
proceeding together, are heard in succession, and in
dramatic moments by the sonic expression of “discon-
systematically supplied gas.
from a negative electrode to a positive electrode, pro-
pendulum.
daughters, and the spirit responds correctly. Word of
which spoken phrases are to some degree announced
tent and alarm,” “chattering contention,” and “pain and
and prepared for by musical phrases.
disorder.” Over the next forty years, stage music evolves
Swedish Baron Jöns Jakob Berzelius isolates the element
into a modular system of repeatable phrases known as
selenium.
1773
of the tube.
1834
melos, each identified with a different emotion.
Jean Pierre and Henri-Louis Droz produce The Scrivener,
the “new telegraph line that connects to the spirit
ducing a glow on the inner surface of the opposite end
1825
William George Horner patents an image-animation
1843
world” spreads rapidly, thus the New American Spiritu-
Rogues’ Gallery: The first index of photographed
alist Movement begins. Katie Fox recalls a séance: “
criminals is organized by the police of Brussels.
…the voice of Benjamin Franklin was heard, in raps. The
medium was a member of the family where the test
a robotic writing figure who dips his pen into an inkwell
1806
Peter Mark Roget of thesaurus fame demonstrates the
device, the daedalum, “Wheel of the Devil.” Later,
Fox Talbot makes first instantaneous photographs using
occurred. After a silence of one or two minutes, a violent
and writes a limited number of words.
Bozzini employs an aluminum tube to visualize the
persistence of vision with his Thaumatrope.
around 1864, French inventor Pierre Desvignes refines
electric spark illumination.
shock of her person induced one hastily to say:
the device for the home market under the name
genitourinary tract. The tube, illuminated by candle light,
A. No, you wanted a signal, and I told him, if it was
1844
Dr. Franklin, he might electrize me, and he did it.
Simon von Stampfer invents the stroboscope, a device
Samuel Morse sends the first message by electric tele-
Q. Has it injured you?
1832
using variable-speed, extremely bright flashing light to
graph from the Supreme Court in Washington, dc, to
A. No, I feel better; my head is clearer—I can see plainer.”
has fitted mirrors to reflect images. Bozzini’s invention,
1831
Friedrich Anton Mesmer, an Austrian physician, is legally
“a magic lantern in the human body,” is ridiculed at
Joseph Henry’s single-wire telegraph is introduced.
forbidden to practice in France. His treatments involve
the time.
groups of patients conducting the current known as
Q. What is the matter? Are you waking up?
Telecommunications
1784
zoetrope, “wheel of life.”
animal magnetism through chambers, huge vats, or meta-
1814–26
Charles Wheatstone invents a nonphotographic “stereo-
create the optical effect of capturing motion in a series
Baltimore. Miss Elsworth, the daughter of the commis-
—(W. G. Langworthy Taylor, Katie Fox and the
phorical “batteries” of mysterious solutions. The treat-
Joseph Nicéphore Niepce achieves his first photographic
scopic viewing device.”
of frozen images.
sioner of patents, composes the message: “What hath
Fox-Taylor Record, compiled 1869)
ments, accompanied by shouts, hysterical laughter, and
images with a camera obscura.
God wrought.”
Electric currents can travel rapidly along wires of infinite
1841
1817
length. Samuel Morse interrupts the current and shapes
Frederick de Moleyn first uses vacuum for electric light
1848
In a lawsuit against Thomas Edison, Heinrich Gobel, an
What is the normal state of a room? One could say
it into combinations of dots and dashes to represent the
bulbs.
On March 31, the Fox family—John, Margaret, and
American of German descent, is ruled to have made “a
1800
that a dark room is a more natural and normative state
twenty-six letters of the alphabet, the ten numerals,
daughters Kate, Leah, and Margaretta—of Hydesville,
truly serviceable, practical incandescent lamp and exhib-
Humphry Davy, English electro-chemist, is the first to
than a lighted room. As with the cave before it, the
and all punctuation marks. The Morse code foreshadows
1842
New York, retire for the evening. As usual, their slumber
ited it publicly twenty or thirty years before Edison.”
observe the light produced by the discharge of electric
room is enclosed and inherently cut off from natural
the on/off nature of binary code—a series of zeros and
Alexander Bain elaborates on Edmond Becquerel’s
is interrupted by violent knocking sounds. Comfortable
current between two carbon electrodes. The arc light is
light. Windows can be employed to let light and air into
ones—used in modern computers.
research into the electromechanical effects of light and
with the inexplicable knocks by now, the girls playfully
1851
produced.
a room, but daylight is limited by the cycles of the sun.
proposes the idea of scanning an image so that it can
personify the invisible mysterious generator of sound.
The Fox sisters gave public demonstrations of their
music, end in mattress-lined rooms for the patients’
decompressions.
1850s
be divided into small, transmittable parts. According to
Fig. 11 Magic Lantern, 1795
communication with the sprit world. As their fame grew,
Fig. 12 The Fox House in Lily Dale, New York
Fig. 13 Katie Fox
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151
so did the controversy around their unique physical
either end. Electrons moving through the tube are visi-
criminals, victims, and sometimes Jesus Christ. Folklorist
at the point of death, the retina freezes the last frame
converted back into vocal sounds by a receiver at the
Artificial lighting during theatrical performances causes
phenomena. Charges of demonic possession and fraud
ble as patterns of light, varying according to the shape
Barbara Allen suggests that popular misunderstanding
of one’s life and retains the image until decomposition
other end of the wire” —Christos J. P. Moschovitis, Hilary
audience discomfort; viewers are subjected to extremes
were leveled at the girls, and they submitted to trau-
of the tube or the type of gas introduced into the vac-
of the new technology such as the photographic plate
of the body. The forensic implications of the theory
Poole, Tami Schuyler, Theresa M. Senft, History of the Internet: A
of temperature (the ceiling goes from 60 to 100 degrees)
matic examinations. Some doctors conclude that the
uum. This invention will lead to the discovery in 1890 of
spawned such lore, and with the introduction of flexible
are explored by surgically removing the retinas of mur-
Chronology (1999)
and suffer headaches due to the fact that gaslight
Fox sisters produce the rappings themselves with their
cathode rays, a basic principle of video technology.
film, the glass plate legends decline.
der victims and examining them under a microscope.
big toes and knees, which were said to be doublejointed. Leah Fox describes the invasive medical exami-
1859
1864
1872
nation of the three sisters in Buffalo, New York:
Establishing an important principle for the future of
Lewis Morris Rutherford pioneers astrophotography.
Joseph May, a worker at Telegraph Construction and
“Major Rains was an educated chemist and fine electrician. He
electronics, the German mathematician and physicist
arranged a swing, which was fastened to iron or steel chains,
Julius Plücker discovers that cathode rays (electrons)
sustained by tackles and pullies attached to the ceiling. I sat in
are deflected by a magnetic field.
consumes large amounts of oxygen, while its exhaust
1878
includes ammonia, carbon dioxide, and sulfur. In Berlin,
Eadweard Muybridge publishes The Horse in Motion.
the effects of gaslight on luxurious public decor and
architecture are noted: “The gas flames began their
Maintenance Co., tests transatlantic transmissions using
Dennis Redmond develops “electric telescope” to
destructive work…blackening the ceilings…. most sur-
Pigeons are used to carry microphotographed messages
rods made of selenium as resistors. He finds the
produce moving images.
faces turned yellow…and the oil paintings almost
across enemy lines.
resistance to be inexplicably variable; his lab desk is
the swing, and over my head was a large glass of circular form,
disappeared or were darkened by smoke.”
near a window, and he notices that when a ray of
1879 General Electric introduces the first Edison carbon
filament electric light bulb.
about two and a half feet in diameter, and beneath my feet
Alexandre Edmond Becquerel, a member of the noted
Sincere Acting
sunlight strikes the test rods, current flows freely
(which were about four feet from the floor) was a steel circular
family of French physicists, uses a Geissler discharge
“This woman’s nature was one in which all…experience
through it, while in the dark the electricity crawls. The
disk about three feet in diameter. The whole arrangement was
tube filled with fluorescent material to create the first
immediately passed into drama, and she acted her own
company’s head electrician, Willoughby Smith, later
1880 The first articles written about early models of
device, which looks very much like a machine gun. He
suspended by the tackles. Major Rains brought his electrome-
fluorescent lamp.
emotions.…It would not be true to say that she felt less
takes credit for the discovery. Recognizing the implica-
television are published in Nature, English Mechanic,
successfully exposes a number of photographic images
because of this double consciousness.” —George Eliot
tions of the phenomenon, he follows up with extensive
and Scientific American.
in quick succession, thus capturing exact details of
describing Princess Halm-Eberstien in Daniel Deronda (1868)
experimentation and soon proposes “visual telegraphy.”
ter, and made every experiment that their ingenuity could
invent or suggest. They suspended the table; each person in the
1860
room standing on horseshoe magnets provided for that occa-
Oliver Wendell Holmes invents popular stereoscope
sion. The physicians were provided with stethoscopes, and
viewer.
placed them on different parts of my person....” —Anne Leah
1884
Etienne-Jules Marey develops the chronophotography
motion that have never before been seen. One of his
He states at the time, “Selenium’s sensibility to light is
1881 Rudge and Friese-Greene use a lantern with
first motion studies is of a flying bird, which he then
The Final Camera Obscura: The Corpse
extraordinary… a mere Lucifer match being sufficient to
a scissors shutter to animate consecutive images of a
presents on an electric zoetrope. Marey, a scientist, is
1869
effect its conductive powers.”
man removing his own head.
interested in using his devices only for speeding things
1860–80
Edward Everett Hale’s “The Brick Moon” is published
Photographic lightning is believed to be a flash of light-
in Atlantic Monthly. Hale describes an artificial moon, or
1876
Brit Shelford Bidwell transmits silhouettes using both
the replication of real time, stating that the absurdity of
1858
ning that creates the image of a person on an ordinary
satellite, that he thought could be used as a military post.
Alexander Graham Bell, trained in speech therapy for
selenium and a scanning system. He dubs the device the
such an undertaking “would be attended by all the
Heinrich Geissler, a German glass blower and maker of
windowpane or mirror. In American folklore, the legend
deaf people, patents the telephone. “The telephone
“scanning phototelegraph.”
uncertainties that embarrass the observation of the
scientific instruments, creates the Geissler tube. A vacuum
encompasses the possibility that sick, dying, or dead
1870
operates by translating vocal sounds into a fluctuating
is created in a glass container sealed with electrodes at
people leave images of themselves on glass surfaces in
Dr. Vernois of the Society of Legal Medicine of Paris pub-
electric current, which passes through a wire and is
the building of their confinement. The subjects are
lishes his theory of the optigramme. He believes that
Underhill, The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism (1885)
up or down to study locomotion. He shies away from
actual movement.”
Fig. 14 Etienne-Jules Marey, photographic gun, 1884
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German scientist Paul Gottlieb Nipkow patents an
George Eastman markets the Kodak, a roll-film camera
1890
Red Shift
1896
1904
image-scanning machine made up of a spinning disk
capable of taking 100 separate pictures without reload-
German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun invents the
The systematic increase of the wavelength of all light
Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi invents a system that
Alfred Korn announces facsimile telegraphy.
placed between a scene and a selenium element.
ing. Eastman provides developing and printing facilities:
Braun tube, an adaptation of a Lenard cathode-ray tube,
received from a celestial object is observed in all seg-
allows electric waves to relay Morse code messages.
Nipkow argues that if the disk is turned fast enough,
“You press the button, we do the rest.” Amateur pho-
which is the forerunner of the tv picture tube.
ments of the spectrum to shift toward the higher or red
it can show a moving picture.
tographers come into being.
Heinrich R. Hertz develops electromagnetic radiation.
1886–89
Frederick Eugene Ives files patent for taking color
German physicist Heinrich R. Hertz produces radio
photographs.
Alfred Maul, an engineer in Dresden, Germany, sends
end. This is mostly caused by the Doppler effect on
1897
the light of the heavenly body as it travels across vast
Albert Allis Hopkins publishes the book Magic, Stage
distances of space.
Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick
1907
Photography, which describes the techniques of pho-
English inventor A. A. Campbell-Swinton and Russian
The us government undertakes the census of 1890, two
cameras up in rockets.
thousand clerks are hired to run Herman Hollerith’s
Inside Out Inside Outside
tography on a black ground, spirit photography,
Boris Rosing independently suggest using a cathode-
Dr. Roth and Professor Reuss of Vienna use bent glass
mechanized tabulating system. This marks the birth of
1895
and duplex photography.
ray tube, instead of the Nipkow disk, to reproduce a tel-
rods to illuminate body cavities.
the now-ubiquitous office-machine as well as ibm
1. Inside/Out. German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen dis-
(International Business Machines). Clerks translate each
covers X-rays; slide makers publish long lists from which to
1889
citizen’s age, sex, and ethnicity into a pattern of holes
choose interesting and macabre examples ranging from coins in
A. Pumphery (uk) invents and markets the
punched on a card; Hollerith’s electromechanical machine
a purse to a bullet lodged in a cranium.
Electricity + Soviet Power = Communism – Lenin
cycloidotrope or Invisible Drawing Master, a machine
totals the information. Each machine processes one
2. Inside. George Méliès works as a magician/artist at the
1900
1909
that will “trace an infinite variety of geometric designs”
thousand cards an hour. The census takes two and a half
Robert-Houdin Theater, which regularly combines lantern
Max Planck introduces the quantum theory in physics.
“Phantom Rides,” films shot from the front of a boat or
happen if they were to break? Would it still give out
upon smoked or darkened glass slides for the magic
years. —Christos J. P. Moschovitis, Hilary Poole, Tami Schuyler,
shows with performances. On April 4, Méliès shows his first film
light? Would it leak out into the auditorium? Wouldn’t
lantern. By turning a hand crank, one produces a rudi-
Theresa M. Senft, History of the Internet: A Chronology (1999)
at the theater, along with Edison’s kinetoscope films. Also on
that be dangerous for the audience?”
mentary animation of white or tinted lines on the
waves.
1887
“Look,” said the lady, “the gas flames are upside
down.”
“You are mistaken my dear,” replied her husband.
“They are electric lamps!”
“That’s nice,” said the lady, “but what would
“My dear wife,” said her husband, “one can breathe
screen.
electricity without the least danger. And in any case, it
would rise and collect under the ceiling at once, so we
First commercial transparent roll film makes possible
would have nothing to fear.”
the development of the movie camera.
evision picture on a phosphorous-coated screen. The
German Karl Braun invents the cathode-ray tube.
vacuum tube can both amplify electrical signals and act
as a switch for routing electrical pulses through a circuit.
train, are distributed. Audiences find the simulated
First mass-marketed camera, the Brownie, is released.
motion intriguing and disorienting.
the bill are boxing kangaroos, serpentine dancers, seascapes,
1892
and white silhouettes on black. He founds first production com-
1901
ge introduces the Mazda trademark on Edison light
Arsène d’Arsonval studies the psychological effect of
pany, Star Film, which produces 500 films from 1896 to 1912;
Marconi transmits the first transatlantic radio signals—
bulbs.
electrical current on humans.
fewer than 90 survive. Méliès himself plays the Devil in a num-
the Morse code signal for ssssss.
1910
ber of his own films.
1893
3. Outside. On December 28, in front of the Grand Café in Paris,
1902
Portable (home) high-frequency electrotherapy devices
Thomas Edison patents the kinetoscope.
thirty people watch Auguste and Louis Lumières’ Workers
Otto von Bronk applies for German patent on color
are marketed as health aids. These machines send
On February 27, Eadweard Muybridge meets Thomas
Leaving the Lumière Factory, as the Lumières and Edison demon-
television.
electrical charges through shaped vacuum tubes filled
Edison and suggests the combination of the respective
strate motion picture cameras and projectors.
1888
with various gases to send rays into the body. The tubes
inventions—the zoöpraxiscope and the phonograph.
Fig. 15 Cycloidotrope, 1889
Fig. 16 Hollerith’s Tabulator and Sorter
Fig. 17 Lumière Bros. first manufactured camera
Fig. 18 Méliès as Satan in The Devil and the Statue, 1902
Fig. 19 A spirit picture
Fig. 20 Electric Extraction of Poisons, US Patent Office.
Application filed 5 October 1896
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are held against the skin or eyes or inserted into the
to be the shutter of the camera taking her picture.
blance to Mephistopheles. In this pastoral setting, he
1926
signal and decoding it back into an image at another
1928
nose, mouth, ear, urethra, vagina, or anus. The violet or
Freud analyzes the aural hallucinations as originating
decides to try to construct a television. The world’s first
usa Radio Act declares public ownership of the
location is within reach. Baird, unable to build a photo-
Panchromatic film that registers all light in the visible
ultraviolet ray machines are said to cure everything
within the woman’s body, and the clicks to be an aural
working television was to “grow to fill my bedroom,”
airwaves.
cell that works, is aware that the light sensitivity of
spectrum is developed. So is infrared film that is
from pain to cancer. The following is a chart of the pos-
displacement of the throb of her excited clitoris.
which he shared with Mephy: “It became a nightmare
the human eye resides in the purple fluid found in the
designed to pick up light that is below red on the spec-
sible discharges at various vacuums:
cobweb of… junk…. At last to my great joy I was able to
Sigmund Freud, rejecting concepts of good and evil,
retina called visual purple. He decides to experiment
trum, light that is invisible to the unaided human eye, or
1. Normal red vacuum level
1920
show the shadow of a little cross transmitted over a few
looks upon the Devil as a symbol of the dark, repressed
with a real human eye. He goes to Charing Cross
even an object in no light, just from the heat the object
2. Slightly higher violet vacuum level
Albert Abrams, md, invents a “radionics” system, which
feet.” Some of the objects used in the invention: card-
abyss of the unconscious: “The Devil is clearly nothing
Ophthalmic Hospital, is taken for a doctor, receives a
gives off.
3. Higher yet white vacuum level (note phosphorescence
uses the crystals of dried blood from a patient to per-
board cross, wires, old hat box, electric batteries, bicycle
other than the personification of repressed, unconscious
fresh eye wrapped in a cotton wool, and returns to his
of glass)
form as do the crystal detectors of homemade radio and
lamp lenses, used tea chest, sealing wax, glue, scissors,
drives.” The historical association of the Devil with
lab in the attic at 22 Frith Street, London. There he
1929
4. Highest Crookes vacuum level (note yellow-green phospho-
transmit the patient’s disease.
lamp bulbs, darning needles, neon lamp, Nipkow disk,
anal imagery leads Freud to locate him in repressed anal
dissects the eye with a razor, and unable to put it to
On July 17, Dr. Robert Goddard, the American rocketry
wireless valves, transformers, selenium cells, and electric
eroticism. Carl Jung, on the other hand, interprets religion
use, throws it into a local canal.
pioneer, launches the first liquid-fueled rocket equipped
motors.
as a necessary expression of the collective unconscious,
rescence of glass from cathode-ray/X-ray formed inside tube)
1920–21
1912
Ernst Belin works on and introduces wireless transmis-
Alfred Maul sends a gyroscope-stabilized camera up to
sion of photographs.
two thousand feet. It returns to earth in a parachute.
1921
1915
At fourteen, Philo T. Farnsworth devises electronic televi-
What is that sound? Where is that voice coming from?
sion scanning. He tells his friends and teachers about it.
I don’t see anybody, yet I clearly hear a voice speaking
to me. It is not inside my head. Could it be God or the
First radio network established by at & t.
1927
1923
system. Jung thinks of the Devil as a union of mythical
On September 7, Farnsworth transmits a straight line,
Psychic and paranormal researcher Joseph Dunninger
Vladimir Zworykin applies for patents for a television
and psychological repression, which he sometimes
the first image ever to be transmitted electronically.
hosts the radio show The Ghost Hour for nbc. Dunninger
picture tube.
likens to the Shadow. For the individual, the Shadow is
a highly personalized, unintegrated collection of
silently communicates three thoughts across the airGeneral Electric invents the modern flashbulb.
image of a small house consisting of four windows, one
repressed elements. The Shadow can manifest collec-
On October 30, John Baird transmits his first decipher-
tively in groups or in society as a whole, unleashing
Bell Laboratories performs the first mechanical televi-
door, a triangle roof, and a chimney. Two thousand let-
able moving picture: the head of a dummy.
mass phenomena such as racism, rioting, and war with
sion transmission in the United States.
ters arrive at nbc that confirm his success—the writers
received the messages.
great destructive force.
Warner Bros., faced with bankruptcy, launches sound
American Charles F. Jenkins engineers a mechanical
Dinshah P. Ghadiali is jailed for fraud. He is founder of a
television system based on the Nipkow disk.
nationwide cult in the United States that uses his
Purple
Spectrochrome. His machine, based on a theatrical spot-
Television is conceived with the advent of photoconduc-
light, generates and focuses colored light to heal people.
tivity and the further refinement of the photoelectric
Radio changes from a two-way communication device
A case of paranoia. Freud analyzes a young woman who
waves: the name Lincoln, the number 379, and the
1925
Devil? No, it is from inside the machine. Ray Kellogg
invents the electric moving-coil speaker.
with a camera.
and God and the Devil as essential archetypes of that
film (The Jazz Singer).
1934
Philo T. Farnsworth publicly demonstrates
is convinced that someone is following, watching, and
John Baird sells his soap business, moves for health
photographing her. She has detected this surveillance
reasons from London to the seaside town of Hastings.
cell. The notion of translating or coding the bright and
to a one-way broadcasting device thanks to commercial
by hearing clicking or knocking sounds that she believes
There he shares a flat with his boyhood friend Guy
dark areas of images into a corresponding electrical
interests and their representatives in Congress (Radio
electronic television.
Electron microscope developed in Germany.
Act of 1927).
“Mephy” Robertson, nicknamed for his seeming resem-
Fig. 21 John Baird’s Nipkow disk
Fig. 22 Baird and dummies in his laboratory
Fig. 23 Philo T. Farnsworth
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1936
1942–43
1945
John von Neumann publishes a report on edvac
ate spirit. The resultant child would be human in the
1948
Alan Turing conceives of a punch card system that can
btl works under direction of A. B. Clar (who later led
Arthur C. Clark proposes a geosynchronous satellite.
(Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer). Von
commonplace biological sense but for all pragmatic
Ampex Corporation markets first commercial videotape
do more than add. The theoretical Turing Machine
R&D activities of nsa from 1954 to 1955) to develop
Neuman outlines “stored-program-computing” for
occult purposes would function as a homunculus. After
recorder.
mechanically scans a virtually endless tape that is
vocoder that emphasizes the preservation of voice qual-
Engineer John Bardeen, with Walter Brittain and William
the first time: the computer’s storage device houses the
the appropriate chants, intonations, and gestures,
punched with coded instructions or digital sequences
ity via twelve-channel system. This system becomes
Shockley, attempts to apply semiconductors to elec-
program’s instructions along with the imput data. Thus,
Parsons and Marjorie Cameron commence sex magick
1950
of zeros and ones. Turing proves that you can translate
known as sigsaly (Secure Digital Voice Communications).
tronics. Semiconductors, such as silicon, are materials
more memory is available. Von Neumann also coins
congress in the presence of L. Ron Hubbard, who
First us cable television system appears.
all sorts of complex problems into these strings of
btl invents the fundamentals and transmission of digi-
whose conductivity can be deliberately or predictably
the now-universal computing terms: memory, input and
describes the activity taking place on the astral plane.
simple—elemental—operations.
tal, encrypted voice. The Institute of Electrical and
altered using electricity.
Electronic Engineers (ieee) credits eight “firsts” to
Bell Telephone Co. (btl) starts exploring a technique to
sigsaly:
Vannevar Bush describes Memex, the first personal
output, organs, and gates. —Christos J. P. Moschovitis, Hilary
Tragically, on June 20, 1952, Parsons is blown apart
evp (electronic voice phenomena) Latvian psychologist
Poole, Tami Schuyler, Theresa M. Senft, History of the Internet:
by an explosion in his garage. Bloody body parts are
Konstantin Raudive experiments with electronic com-
A Chronology (1999).
visible in the rubble. Today Parsons is credited with aid-
munication with the dead. Raudive sits alone and asks
ing in the creation of solid rocket fuel, which is com-
questions of departed friends and loved ones, while an
monly used in space exploration. A crater on the moon
ordinary audio tape recorder is used to record the ses-
is named after him, honoring his achievements in this
sion. He lets the tape machine record sounds in his labo-
transform voice signals into digital data, which can then
1. first realization of enciphered telephony
computer (in theory), in the Atlantic Monthly. The arti-
be reconstructed (or synthesized) into intelligible voice,
2. first quantized speech transmission
cle later reappears in the widely distributed Life maga-
the “vocoder” (short for voice coder). The research is
3. first transmission of speech by Pulse Code Moduation (pcm)
zine. Memex is a desk that contains large amounts of
developed by the National Security Agency (nsa).
4. first use of companded pcm
information compressed onto microfilm. The user sits at
1946
field. —compiled from Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of
ratory for several hours, monitoring it. After repeatedly
5. first example of multilevel Frequency Shift Keying (fsk)
the desk, swiftly accessing information by operating a
cbs demonstrates color tv to journalists and the fcc in
Kenneth Anger, by Bill Landis (New York: Harper Collins, 1995)
listening to the tapes he is able to discern responses to
1937
6. first useful realization of speech bandwidth compression
board of levers and buttons. The desired information
the Tappan Zee Inn at Nyack-on-the-Hudson,
Chester Carlson invents xerography.
7. first use of fsk-fdm (Frequency Division Multiplex) as a
appears on translucent screens propped on the desktop.
New York.
viable transmission method over a fading medium
—Christos J. P. Moschovitis, Hilary Poole, Tami Schuyler, Theresa M.
1941
8. first use of a multilevel “eye pattern” to adjust the
Senft, History of the Internet: A Chronology (1999).
fcc authorizes commercial tv in the United States. J.
sampling intervals
Gilbert Wright, a researcher at General Electric, is con-
Introduction of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, Japan.
his questions from the dead. The dead explain that
1947
they can modulate sound waves with their thoughts to
Dennis Gabor describes principles of holography.
simulate voice patterns. They tell him to turn on a radio
Whiteside Parsons, a devotee of Aleister Crowley’s
in the laboratory and tune it between stations, where
magick and a brilliant scientist at the Jet Propulsion
Walter Brattain and John Bardeen of Bell Telephone
static or white noise is present. They then use the vibra-
eniac (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) is
Laboratory in Pasadena, California, attempts to create a
Laboratories devise the transistor, an electronic switch-
tions of the white noise, which contains the full spec-
ing mechanism and amplifier (to replace vacuum tubes).
trum of audible sounds, to create words. They also say
tacted by Thomas Edison’s spirit by way of the medium
The British Foreign Service’s Department of Communi-
unveiled in a basement room at the University of
homunculus, literally an artificially conceived person
Mary Olson. Spirit directs Wright and his partner,
cations constructs Colossus, the first fully operational,
Pennsylvania. It covers 650 square feet and contains
occupied by a preterhuman spirit. Among the oldest of
“The first transistor, the point-contact transistor, stands ten
they have developed an apparatus that helps them to
Gardner, to the blueprints of the machine for contacting
fully electronic computing device. A powerful crypto-
300 neon lights, 10,000 vacuum tubes; 220 fans
alchemical legends, Crowley’s Moonchild suggests that a
centimeters high—contains a semiconducting crystal of germa-
make the voice patterns audible.
the dead that Edison had supposedly been working
analysis tool, Colossus operates in binary, reads incom-
are required. The massive computer can carry out 5,000
homunculus could be created when both parents were
nium, which serves as the amplifier, connected to 3 wire
on at the time of his death. They faithfully construct
ing data from punched tape, and is controlled by
operations per second. eniac can calculate the speed
Crowleyan initiates who performed the required sex
probes. A current entering one probe is amplified when it
1952
this device, which consists of a sound box, a microphone,
hundreds of vacuum tubes that serve as switches.
of a flying object faster than the object can fly.
magick rituals. The embryo created by their congress
passes through the crystal and out through another probe.”
Alan Turing is convicted for indecency (participating
and a loud speaker, under Edison’s supervision.
—Christos J. P. Moschovitis, Hilary Poole, Tami Schuyler, Theresa M.
would act as a “butterfly net” to capture the appropri-
—Christos J. P. Moschovitis, Hilary Poole, Tami Schuyler,
in homosexual activity) and is sentenced to take large
Theresa M. Senft, History of the Internet: A Chronology (1999)
doses of estrogen.
Senft, History of the Internet: A Chronology (1999).
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1953
1957
Pope Pius xii declares Saint Clare of Assisi the patron
1962
characters. A translation process is required. ascii
1966
The film Meet Mr. Lucifer features a moralizing tale of
A conversation between Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam
saint of television.
Computer engineer Paul Baran, in the paper “On
assigns a particular binary number to each character of
The first video game is created by engineers at Sanders
television as “an instrument of the devil, a mechanical
Phillips, owner of Sun Records:
Distributed Communication Networks,” describes what
the alphabet (a = 1000001).
Associates, a New Hampshire-based defense contractor.
Ralph Baer conceives the design. He recalls: “I’m … think-
SP: You can save souls!
Researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories invent the
later becomes known as packet switching, in which
JLL: No! No! No! No!
modem, short for modulator-demodulator. The device
digital data are sent over a distributed network in small
1965
ing about what you can do with a tv set other than
1954
SP: Yes!
converts data from the computer format (digital) to
units and reassembled into a whole message at the
Early Bird (Intelsat I), the first telecommunications
tuning in channels you don’t want.” The first toy Baer
Alan Turing eats half of an apple dipped in cyanide
JLL: How can the Devil save souls? What are you talkin’ about?
the telephone-line format (analog) and back again.
receiving end. The network is designed to improve the
satellite, is launched; live video feeds from all over the
and Bill Harrison make consists of a lever that players
and dies.
I have the devil in me! If I didn’t, I’d be Christian!
Modems make computer networks possible. —Christos J.
security of strategic weapons communications systems
world begin.
pump furiously to change the color of a box on a televi-
SP: Well you may have him–
P. Moschovitis, Hilary Poole, Tami Schuyler, Theresa M. Senft, History
that are vulnerable to nuclear attack. The new systems
Clarence Kelly Johnson, designer for Lockheed Aircraft,
JLL: JESUS! Heal this man! He cast the Devil out, the Devil says,
of the Internet: A Chronology (1999)
would function even if some of its subcomponents
Larry Roberts, a young computer scientist at Lincoln
two-person games in which players control every object
designs the Utility-2 (u-2) Jet and privately dubs it “The
“Where can I go?” He says, “Can I go into this swine?” He says,
were destroyed:
Laboratory in Boston, creates the first long-distance
on the screen.
Angel.” The Hyon Corporation develops the “b-camera”
“Yeah, go into him. Didn’t he go into him?”
device to make the human race utterly miserable.”
sion screen from red to blue. The first games are all
1959
1. Instead of a common decentralized network (telephone
computer connection, a rudimentary telephone link
Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor and Jack Kilby
system), several interconnected main centers are linked like a
between his computer and one in Santa Monica,
nasa launches five Lunar Orbiter satellites. Together
(conceived by Dr. James Baker of Harvard) can photo-
Release of The Three Faces of Eve, the first movie about
of Texas Instruments simultaneously design the inte-
net, each location connected only to its immediate neighbors;
California.
they photograph the entire moon.
gragh the entire us in just twelve flights and can resolve
multiple personality disorder, based on the best-selling
grated circuit, later known as the microchip. The transis-
messages have multiple pathways by which to reach their
a 2 x 2 ft. object from a thirteen-mile altitude.
book of the same name.
tor is miniaturized into a tiny pattern etched onto a
destinations and can always be rerouted.
Psychologist Tom Marill proposes that arpa fund a
1967
slice of silicon, becoming the integrated circuit. This
2. The system chops up the message and sends each piece by
long-distance computer between mit’s Lincoln
Sony introduces the Portapak, first portable video
a different route.
Laboratory’s tx-2 computer and System Development
recording system.
for the u-2. Its revolutionary mylar film and lens
Lawrence Curtiss, an undergraduate physics student,
Sputnik, first satellite, launched by the Soviet Union
development makes it possible to create much smaller
invents a process by which fine glass fibers can be
[Union of Soviet Socialist Republics]. The satellite, a
versions of electronic devices, eventually including
coherently bundled in order to convey an entire image:
metallic object the size of a beach ball, rotates around
the microprocessor and personal computer.
the Fiberscope.
the earth for three months and then falls—it burns
up when it hits the atmosphere.
1956
Emmett Norman Leith develops the data processing
1958
system that allows holography to work. Holography is
Color is synthesized from a monochrome television set
the recording and reconstruction of a wavefront. The
in the first “flicker color” broadcast.
reconstructed hologram wavefront is identical to that
which issued from the object.
Corporation’s q-32 in ca. The link allows the machines to
1963
send messages to one another. The device that con-
1969
The American National Standards Institute renders the
nects the computers to phone lines works badly, but it
First manned landing on the moon Apollo 11 mission is
1960
ascii character table as the standard character repre-
works.
transmitted and broadcast live from the moon.
First ruby laser built by Theodore Maiman.
sentation system for the computer industry. Computers
First successful hologram produced.
use the binary system, in which numbers are repre-
Ted Nelson introduces the terms hypertext and hyper-
Glenn McKay creates psychedelic light shows for rock
sented by sequences of ones and zeros, to store, process,
link, thematic links between documents, to refer to the
bands that combine the live manipulation of pigmented
and exchange information. Programmers use other
structure of a theoretical computerized information
liquids and film projection systems.
1961
First manned space flight.
system called Xanadu that would be organized associatively, not sequentially.
Kukla, Fran and Ollie, a children’s show, begins color
arpanet prototype of the Internet is initiated.
television broadcast.
Fig. 24 Anthony Pelissier, Meet Mr. Lucifer, 1953
Fig. 25 The Three Faces of Eve, 1957
Fig. 26 The Dataphone, the first commercial modem,
designed by Bell Labs
Fig. 27 A sketch of the original arpanet was structure as
outlined by Larry Roberts
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1971
guidance Beacon Data Link during the day, and an
1980
1986
1988
of the gbu-15 smart bombs, which features views of
Latvian psychologist Konstantin Raudive publishes the
Imaging Infrared Seeker via Beacon Data Link during the
Publication of Michelle Remembers, in which Michelle
On October 4, the Transcommunication Study Circle of
Red-eye reduction is used in cameras.
their rapid decent to their target, is released to the
English translation of his book Break Through: Electronic
night. Live images from a camera in the bomb are sent to
Smith and her psychiatrist, later her husband, tell of her
Luxembourg (cetl) receives its first video image of its
Communication with the Dead May Be Possible. Raudive
a remote operator, who uses them to guide the bomb
escape from a cult and of the extreme satanic ritual
spirit partners. Jules and Maggy Harsch-Fischbach record
1989
era) or infrared and is generated in the nose of the
chronicles his own research conducted in the 1950s.
to a target.
abuse she suffered at its hands. The book sparks a flood
it on a vhs recorder with a Panasonic a-2 video camera.
Parents Music Resource Center (pmrc) is set up by
weapon. The laser guidance system can bring the bomb
of similar accounts, which increases over the next
The image of a man, Pierre K, appeared on the tv screen
Tipper Gore, the wife of future Vice President Al Gore, to
within four yards of the target.
media. Weapon video is either electro-optical (tv cam-
1973
1975
decade. A template narrative of ritual abuse is repeated
for a duration of 4/50ths of a second. “Using high-tech
lobby the us government for the censoring of the music
The Exorcist is one of the top-grossing films of the year.
It is now estimated that by the time a person reaches
under hypnosis to psychiatrists from coast to coast. The
communication the dead are now transmitting informa-
industry. At congressional hearings she states that
Procter & Gamble announces that it will change its
It is said to be based on the true story of the demonic
eighteen years of age, he or she has, on average,
narrative involves these repeated elements: satanic
tion to our scientists in pictures, text, and voice via tele-
heavy metal and rap music is “dangerous to the children
logo. The graphic man-in-the-moon with thirteen stars
possession of a fourteen-year-old boy. Set in the
attended school for 10,800 hours and watched televi-
rites, rape, kidnapping, and forcing the victim to kill an
vision screens, computers, and telephones. Technology
of America.” The music industry agrees to self-regula-
is to be redesigned in response to years of protest
Georgetown district of Washington, dc, the film uses
sion for 20,000 hours.
infant. Law enforcement finds no evidence to support
allows people without bodies to communicate” (Jules
tion and adopts a sticker system to warn of offensive
that the logo was a satanic symbol. Since the early
the claims.
and Maggy Harsch-Fischbach of cetl). cetl suggests
content.
1980s, the image has been said to involve the
graphic, violent scenes including special effects to
depict the exorcism of a young girl. The film is terrifying
1977
to audiences, and there are reports of fainting. More
Rumors surface that accuse McDonald’s fast-food
serious are accounts of cinematic neuroses, as previously
restaurant of donating a percentage of its profits to the
unidentified psychiatric patients claim to be possessed.
Church of Satan. The corporate logo of golden arches is
Classic symptoms and disabilities are observed in
that there is a parallel communications lab in the spirit
Antichrist: when looked at from certain angles it looks
world: Timestream Space Lab. The facilities are located
1990
like a 666; the man-in-the-moon’s hair forms the
in the third plane of the astral world on a planet named
Judas Priest, a heavy metal band, is cleared of charges
devil’s horns; his beard when viewed in a mirror reveals
1980–85
Marduk. The Sprit-side technicians state; “We have a
that their music contains subliminal messages inserted
666; the stars when connected by three curved lines
said to be a symbol of the gates of hell. People are said
Scitex, Hell, and Crosfield introduce computer-imaging
body like yours. It consists of finer matter and vibration
through the technique of backward masking (messages
form 666. The following is a recording of a conversation
audiences after viewing the movie. Psychiatrist Bozzuto
to have seen and heard Ray Kroc, company founder,
systems.
than your dense, coarse physical bodies. There is no
recorded in reverse embedded in songs). Allegedly,
from the Procter & Gamble product information phone
suggests that the loss of impulse control depicted in
admit to the truth of these charges on a popular tv pro-
sickness here. Missing limbs regenerate. Bodies that are
these messages have provoked the tragic suicide of two
line in 1989:
some scenes may threaten people with similar problems
gram, although no factual record is ever found.
1981
disfigured on Earth become perfect. We live in comfort-
young fans.
mtv begins broadcasting.
ably furnished houses. We soak up noise, such as hiss
by exceeding their “stimulus barrier.”
Sony demonstrates first consumer camcorder.
between radio stations, and turn it into artificial voices.”
smte (Society of Motion Picture and Television
Customer: What about the logo, I’m worried about it.…
Procter & Gamble: Oh, that’s just a cute little logo.
Ritual abuse causes a total reassessment of psychiatric
C: Where did it come from?
technique and casts great doubt on the field of dissocia-
P&G: Over one hundred years ago it was used on the docks to
tive identity disorders.
identify our products, it was stamped on the crates,…
1974
Engineers) recommends the use of the color bar for reg-
1982
us Air Force Development Test Center, Eglin Air Force
istration of color on tv.
The film Poltergeist features a television set as a portal
1987
from which evil spirits are able to enter a suburban
fbi creates Carnivore, a clandestine system for sifting
home and destroy the family.
through e-mail on the Internet. Carnivore software runs
1991
P&G: No, there’s nothing satanic or evil about it, it’s just, like,
Base, Florida, begins developing the weapon system to
C: Was there…is there anything…?
be popularly known as the Smart Bomb. The bomb is
Apple introduces home computer; the company logo
guided by a television Electro Optical tv via Mid-course
depicts a rainbow-colored apple with one bite taken out
a packet sifting program, which notes all messages
Gulf War news coverage is highly controlled by the
a cute little symbol, like a smiley face or something, it’s
of it.
inside the isp network by origin and destination. Thus
us government. Video footage from cameras in the tips
just a symbol.…
the fbi can extract and read messages of interest.
Fig. 28 The Unix operating system, 1972
Fig. 29 The Exorcist, robotic figure of actress, 1973
Fig. 30 Apple Computer logo
Fig. 31 “Hijacking the Net” front cover of Newsweek (February 2000)
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Page 162
Tony Oursler TimeStream
162
163
1992–94
Dildo Cam is a ubiquitous feature of pornographic Web
New York Civil Liberties Union volunteers walk the streets
inside the body to a portable recorder strapped to the
Black metal rock groups in Norway, aligned with Finland’s
sites. Short videos, usually available by subscription
of Manhattan in search of every video surveillance cam-
patient’s waist. The pill camera is eventually excreted.
pagan past and Satan worship, incite the burning of
only, allow the viewer literal access, via video, into the
era, public or private, which records people in public
twenty churches, and rival band members commit mur-
vaginas and rectums of porn stars.
spaces. Volunteers produce a comprehensive map of all
Ensormatics, a leading manufacturer of surveillance
2,397 surveillance cameras.
cameras that built its $1 billion international business
der and suicide.
1997
on anti-shoplifting technology, estimates that 62
CU-SeeMe, a live video streaming program for the
Six hundred Japanese children and a few adults are
Voyeurdom.com, a “reality based” Web site goes online.
percent of middle and high schools will implement some
Internet, is developed at Cornell University. The program
rushed to emergency rooms after watching the televi-
“Six ‘students’ live in a house with 40 webcams. For
form of electronic security by 2002.
allows anyone to broadcast in cyberspace.
sion program Pocket Monster (Pokémon). The flashing
$34 a month, you can watch their daily activities: smok-
red eyes of the cartoon monster cause some viewers to
ing, sleeping, urinating, bathing. The rules: no sex, but
Fluorescent Green Jellyfish/Monkey Embryo is created in
1995
fall into convulsions. One person in 200 suffers from
masturbation is okay; no drugs, but booze is allowed;
a lab. Scientist Gerald Schatten of the Oregon Primate
An atm camera records a Ryder truck outside Oklahoma
epilepsy, and of those, 5 percent have photic seizures,
absolutely no moving the cameras away from you; no
Research Center at Oregon Health Sciences University
City’s federal office building just before the blast that
which may be provoked by frequencies of 5 to 30
skipping out on the daily chat sessions; no boyfriends
introduces jellyfish genes into the developing embryos
kills 167 people. That image helps police track down
flashes per second. Other triggers may be: tv and com-
after 11 p.m.; and most importantly, no leaving the
of Rhesus monkeys. The gene encodes instructions for a
bomber Timothy McVeigh.
puter screens, video games, faulty screens and lights
house without consent, except for the two nights a week
protein that gives the jellyfish a green glow. When fluo-
that flicker, sun shining through a row of trees viewed
each resident has off” —Mark Boal, “Behind the Cams at
rescent light is shined on the embryos “more than a
1996
from a passing car, looking out of a train window, sun-
Voyeurdom: Surveillance Sorority” (The Village Voice, August 4, 1999)
third of embryos fluoresced.” Although the genes are
Jennicam. A 23-year-old exhibitionist launches a Web
shine on water, stroboscopic lights, and geometric
site featuring real-time video of her mundane daily
shapes or patterns.
not found in the monkeys after birth, scientists say it is
2000
just a matter of time before the procedure will work for
Sikorsky helicopter company constructs a remote-con-
primates, including humans. The technique also works
1999
trolled, pilotless helicopter drone called the Cypher. It
with mice. Ryuzo Yanagimachi and his colleagues at the
Cookie: a piece of information generated by a Web
Live slow motion. Lene Vestergaard Hau slows down a
looks like a flying saucer and uses commercially avail-
University of Hawaii mix the same jellyfish gene with
server about the user’s preferences are secretly stored
light pulse from 300 million meters per second to 17
able people-tracking software to find human targets in
mouse sperm, injected the sperm into mouse eggs and
in the user’s computer. Cookies are swapped back and
meters per second by passing it through a cloud of laser-
urban riot situations.
created embryos. After the birth of the mice,
forth between the Web servers and the user’s computer
tuned sodium atoms chilled to less than 50 nanokelvins.
without the user’s consent or knowledge. As a result
Optical properties of materials can be altered with this
Professor Paul Swain invents the endoscope: a camera in
personal information of all sorts can be transmitted to
process, she states; “It’s really opened up a lot of new
a pill or capsule 11 mm by 30 mm, it includes a tiny
Web servers.
exciting things that you can start doing.”
light source and transmitter. It radios images from
activities. She develops a large following.
Fig. 32 Dildo Cam advertised on website
Yanagimachi detects a green glow in the tails of the
mice under a fluorescent light.
Fig. 33 Endoscope, pill camera
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Page 164
Exhibition Checklist
Exhibition Checklist
Dreams
Darren Almond
Geisterbahn, 1999
Video transferred to dvd
Black and white. Sound
9 minute, loop
Soundtrack: Music composed by Stefan Betke
Courtesy White Cube, London
Chiho Aoshima
City Glow, 2005
Digital animation
Color. Sound
7 minutes, loop
Courtesy Blum and Poe Gallery, Los Angeles
Michael Bell-Smith
Up and Away, 2006
Digital animation
Color. Sound
6:40 minutes, loop
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Museum purchase through the contributions
of members of the Contemporary
Acquisitions Council and the Joseph H.
Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2007
Bruce Conner
Take the 5:10 to Dreamland, 1977
16 mm film transferred to dvd
Black and white with sepia tone. Sound
5:10 minutes
Soundtrack: Music composed by
Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley
Courtesy of the artist and Walker Art Center
Archives: Sound and Moving Image Collections
164
Valse Triste, 1979
16 mm film transferred to dvd
Black and white with sepia tone. Sound
5 minutes
Soundtrack: Jean Sibelius, Valse Triste,
Opus 44, from Kuolema.
Courtesy of the artist and Walker Art Center
Archives: Sound and Moving Image Collections
Tacita Dean
Palast, 2004
16 mm film
Color. Sound
10:30 minutes
Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery
Stan Douglas
Overture, 1986
16 mm film transferred to dvd
Black and white. Sound
7:16 minutes, loop
Courtesy TBD
Harun Farocki
Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven
Decades, 1995
Multichannel video installation
Black and white. Sound
35:41 minutes, loop
Courtesy Greene Naftali Gallery
Christoph Girardet
Release, 1996
Video transferred to dvd
Black and white. Sound
9:30 minutes, loop
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2006
Douglas Gordon
Off-Screen, 1998
Video with curtain
Color. Silent
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Rodney Graham
Rheinmetall/Victoria 8, 2003
35 mm film and Cinemeccania Victoria
8 projector
Black and white. Silent
10:50 minutes, loop
Courtesy TBD
Gary Hill
Suspension of Disbelief (for Marine), 1991–92
Four-channel video installation
Black and white. Silent
From the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, dc (Joseph H. Hirshhorn
Purchase Fund, 2005) and the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art (Purchase through
a gift of the Agnes E. Meyer and Elise Stern
Haas Fund, and the Accessions Committee
Fund: gift of Patricia and Raoul Kennedy,
Pamela and Richard Kramlich, Lisa and John
Miller, Chara Schreyer and Gordon Freund,
Norah and Norman Stone, and Robin Wright)
Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler
Eight, 2001
High Definition video transferred to dvd
Color. Sound
3:35 minutes, loop
Courtesy Collection of Aaron and Barbara
Levine, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York,
and Galerie Barbara Thumm
Anthony McCall
Title, Date
Medium
30 minutes, loop
Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery
Steve McQueen
Bear, 1993
16 mm film transferred to dvd and video
Black and white. Silent
9:02 minutes, loop
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Holenia Purchase Fund, in memory of Joseph
H. Hirshhorn, 2006
Saskia Olde Wolbers
Trailer, 2005
Video transferred to dvd
Color. Sound
10 minutes, loop
Courtesy Maureen Paley
Tony Oursler
Let’s Switch, 1996
Mixed media
Color. Sound
Courtesy of the artist
Kelly Richardson
Exiles of the Shattered Star, 2006
High Definition video transferred to dvd
Color. Sound
29:51 minutes, loop
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2007
Wolfgang Staehle
Niagara, 2004
Video transferred to dvd
Color. Sound
60 minutes
Courtesy Postmasters
Siebren Versteeg
Neither Here Nor There, 2005
Video transferred to dvd
Color. Sound
Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery
165
Andy Warhol
Sleep, 1963
16 mm film transferred to dvd
Black and white. Sound.
Courtesy of the Andy Warhol Foundation
for the Visual Arts
Phil Collins
Return of the Real (Gercegin Geri
Donusu), 2005
Multiple two-channel projections and
photographs
Color. Sound
Time
Courtesy TBD
Realisms
Jeremy Deller
The Battle of Orgreave, 2001
XX mm film
Color. Sound
63 minutes
Co-commissioned by Artangel and Channel 4
Candice Breitz
Mother + Father, 2005
Medium
Color. Sound
Time
Courtesy Francesca Kaufmann, Milan
Matthew Buckingham
The Man of the Crowd, 2003
16mm film transferred to dvd
Black and white. Sound
20 minutes, loop
Courtesy Murray Guy
Paul Chan
1st Light, 2005
Projected digital animation
Color. Silent.
14 minutes
Credit Line
Ian Charlesworth
John, 2005
Medium
Color. Sound
Time
Courtesy TBD
Kota Ezawa
The Simpson Verdict, 2002
Single-channel video transferred to dvd
Time
Courtesy Murray Guy
Omer Fast
Godville, 2005
Video transferred to dvd
Color. Sound
50 minutes
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Holenia Purchase Fund, in memory of Joseph
H. Hirshhorn, and Joseph H. Hirshhorn
Bequest Fund, 2006
Pierre Huyghe
The Third Memory, 1999
Medium
Color. Sound
9:46 minutes
Co-production: Centre Georges Pompidou,
Musee National d’art Moderne, Service
Nouveaux Medias/ The Renaissance Society
at the University of Chicago. With the
participation of: the Marian Goodman Gallery/
Myriam and Jacques Salomon/Le Fresnoy,
Studio national des arts contemporains
Runa Islam
Tuin, 1998
16 mm film and video
Color. Sound
6 minutes, loop
Courtesy
Corinna Schnitt
Living a Beautiful Life, 2003
Video transferred to dvd
Color. Sound
13 minutes
Courtesy Galerie Olaf Stüber
Christian Jankowski
This I played tomorrow, 2003
Video transferred to dvd
Color. Sound
Time
Courtesy TBD
Mungo Thomson
New York, New York, New York, New York, 2004
Video transferred to dvd??
Color. Sound
Time
Courtesy John Connelly Presents
Isaac Julien
Fantôme Créole, 2005
16mm film transferred to dvd
Color, sound
23 minutes
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2005
Kerry Tribe
Double, 2001
Video transferred to dvd
Color. Sound
10:25 minutes
Courtesy TBD
Michèle Magema
Oyé Oyé, 2002
Video transferred to dvd
Color and black and white. Sound
Time
Courtesy of the artist
Francesco Vezzoli
Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story!,
2006
XX film
Color. Sound
Time
Courtesy François Pinault Collection
Julian Rosefeldt
Lonely Planet, 2006
Super 35 mm film transferred to dvd
Color. Sound
16:18 minutes, loop
Courtesy Max Wigram Gallery
Artur Zmijewski
Repetition, 2005
Medium
Color. Sound
75 minutes
Courtesy TBD
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Page 166
Artist Biographies
166
167
Artist Biographies
Dreams
Michael Bell-Smith
American, b. East Corinth, Maine, 1978; lives in Philadelphia
The Sixth Benesse Prize, Benesse Prize, 2005; Hugo Boss Prize,
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2006.
Harun Farocki
Czech, b. Nový Jicin, 1944; lives in Berlin
Darren Almond
British, b. Wigan, England, 1971; lives in London
Michael Bell-Smith received his ba in Art Semiotics from Brown
University, Providence, 2001.
Harun Farocki studied at Deutsche Film and Fernsehakademie,
Berlin, 1966–68.
Darren Almond received his bfa from Winchester School of Art,
Southampton, 1993. His awards include the Toshiba Art and
Innovations Prize, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1996.
Solo exhibitions include those at Eyebeam Gallery, New York,
2002; University of Washington Center for Digital Arts and
Experimental Media, Seattle, 2003; Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery,
Sydney; liste, Basel, both 2007. Group exhibitions include fact,
Liverpool; Art Basel, both 2003; Tate Liverpool, 2005; projekt
0047, Berlin, 2005; Bankart, Yokohama, 2006; Museum of
Modern Art, New York; Galeri f15, Moss; Threshold Artspace,
Perth; Dallas Center for Contemporary Art, all 2007.
Solo exhibitions include those at the Tate Gallery, London,
1996; the De Pont Foundation, Tilburg, 1998; Museum
für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Tate Britain, London, both 2000;
Melbourne International Biennial; Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, Washington, dc; Museu d’Art Contemporani
de Barcelona; daad Gallery, Berlin, all 2001; Musée des BeauxArts de Nantes, 2003; Tate St. Ives, 2005; National Gallery of
Contemporary Art, Oslo; Schaulager, Munchenstein, both 2006;
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2007. Group exhibitions include Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 1997; Moderna
Museet, Stockholm, 1998; Fondation Cartier, Paris, 1999; Tate
Britain, London; Seoul Metropolitan Museum, both 2000;
Tate Britain, London; Tate Liverpool; National Gallery of Canada,
Ottawa; Yokohama International Triennale of Contemporary
Art, all 2001; Venice Biennale, 2003 and 2005; Contemporary
Arts Museum, Houston; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Museu
Serralves, Porto, all 2004; Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art,
2006; Castle Museum, Norwich; Fundacion Santander Central
Hispano, Madrid, both 2007.
Solo exhibitions include Great Western Studios, London, 1995;
White Cube, London; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London,
both 1997; The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago,
1999; Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; The Approach, London,
both 2000; Kunsthalle, Zurich; Tate Britain, London; Galerie
Max Hetzler, Berlin, all 2001; National Theatre, London, 2002;
Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; Galleri K, Oslo; Fondazione
Nicola Trussardi, Milan, all 2003; Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz,
2004; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2005;
Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal; site Santa Fe, both
2007. Group exhibitions include Institute of Contemporary Arts,
London, 1996; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Hamburger
Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Brooklyn Museum, all
1997; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1999; Palm Beach
Institute of Contemporary Art, 2000; Freud Museum, London;
Kunstverein, Hamburg; Zacheta Gallery, Warsaw, all 2002;
Venice Biennale; marco, Vigo; p.s.1 Contemporary Art Center,
New York, all 2003; White Cube, London, 2004; the Hayward
Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,
both 2005; Moscow Biennale, Former Lenin Museum, Moscow;
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, both 2007.
Chiho Aoshima
Japanese, b. Tokyo, 1974; lives in Tokyo
Chiho Aoshima received her ba in Economics from Hosei
University, Tokyo, 1995.
Aoshima is a member of Takahashi Murakami’s Hiropon Factory
in Tokyo, and her major public commissions include murals in
Union Square subway station, New York, 2005; Gloucester Road
underground station, London, 2006. Aoshima was awarded
artist-in-residence at Art Pace, San Antonio, 2006.
Solo exhibitions include those at Blum & Poe, Santa Monica,
2002; University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific
Film Archive, 2003; Starkwhite, Auckland; Musée d’Art
Contemporain, Lyons, both 2006; Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin,
Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, both 2007. Group exhibitions include the Seattle Art Museum; Glass Curtain Gallery,
Columbia College, Chicago, both 2003; Art Tower Mito, Mito;
Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, both
2004; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2005; Museum
of Contemporary Art, Denver; Institute of Contemporary Art,
Boston, both 2006; Mercosur Biennial, Porto Alegre; Museum of
Contemporary Art, Chicago, both 2007.
Bruce Conner
American, b. McPherson, Kansas, 1933; lives in San Francisco
Bruce Conner earned his BFA from Nebraska University, 1956.
His awards include the Neallie Sullivan Award, San Francisco Art
Association, 1963.
Conner has had numerous solo exhibitions at San Francisco Art
Institute, 1963; Fine Arts Gallery, University of British Columbia,
Vancouver; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham,
both 1965; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1967; M. H. deYoung Memorial Museum,
San Francisco, 1974; Madison Art Center, 1984; University Art
Museum, UC Berkeley, 1986; San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, 1992; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1999; Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2000; International Biennial
Exhibition, Santa Fe, 2004; Susan Inglett Gallery, New York,
2007. His many group exhibitions include the Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York, 1962, 1964, 1966, 1969, 1979,
1980, 1983, 1989, 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2004; Art Institute
of Chicago, 1963; San Francisco Art Institute, 1972; Museum of
Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1975; Centre Pompidou, Museé
National d’Art Moderne, Paris, 1977; Museum of Modern Art, New
York, 1984; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1996;
National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1997; Fondation Cartier
pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, 2002; p.s.1 Contemporary Art
Center, New York, 2003; somArts, San Francisco, 2004; Norton
Simon Museum, Pasadena; Fresno Art Museum, both 2005;
nrw-Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft Dusseldorf, 2006; Gallery Joe,
Philadelphia, 2007.
Tacita Dean
British, b. Canterbury, England, 1965; lives in Berlin and London
Tacita Dean attended Falmouth School of Art, Falmouth, 1985–
88; Supreme School of Fine Art, Athens, 1989–90; and The
Slade School of Fine Art, London, 1990–92. Her numerous
awards include a Turner Prize nomination, Tate Gallery, London,
1998; Artist in Residence, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus,
1999; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2004;
Stan Douglas
Canadian, b. Vancouver, 1960; lives in Vancouver
Stan Douglas studied at Emily Carr College of Art in Vancouver,
1979–82. He received the Hugo Boss Prize, Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1997; award from the
Hnatyshyn Foundation, Vancouver, 2007.
Douglas’s work has been shown internationally in numerous
solo exhibitions at the Western Front, Vancouver, 1986; Optica:
un centre d’art contemporain, Montreal, 1988; Centre Pompidou,
Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; Kunsthalle Zürich, both
1994; Vancouver Art Gallery; Edmonton Art Gallery; The Power
Plant, Toronto; De Pont Museum, Tilburg; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; dia Center for the Arts, New York, all
1999; The Art Institute of Chicago, 2000; Kunsthalle Basel,
Winnipeg Art Gallery; and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, all 2001;
The Serpentine Gallery, London, 2002; Art Gallery of York
University, Toronto; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York,
both 2005; 100 Tonson Gallery, Bangkok; David Zwirner,
New York, both 2007. Group exhibitions, include Documenta,
Kassel, 1992; Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of
Art, Pittsburgh; Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American
Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York, all 1995;
Documenta, Kassel, 1997; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts,
Montreal, 2006; List Visual Art Center, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Cambridge, 2007.
Farocki was editor and author of the magazine Filmkritik,
1974–83. He also served as lecturer, University of California,
Berkeley, 1993–99, and as Professor of Media Studies at
Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, 2000–01.
Solo exhibitions include the Cinemateca Portugesa, Lisbon,
1990; ucla Film and Television Archive, Los Angeles, 1992;
Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1995; Stadtkino
Wien, Vienna, 1996; International Film festival, Locarno, 1998;
Danish Film Institute, Copenhagen; Swedish Film Institute,
Stockholm, both 1999; Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart; Frankfurter
Kunstverein, Frankfurt; Singapore International Film Festival;
Westfälischer Kunstverein, Munster; Museum of Modern Art,
New York, all 2001; La Cinémathèque française, Paris; Stedelijk
Museum voor Actuele Kunst (smak), Ghent, both 2002; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2003; macba, Barcelona;
Video Lisboa, Lisbon, both 2004; FilmMuseum, Vienna, 2006;
Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, 2007. Group exhibitions
include the Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne,
Paris, 1996; Documenta, Kassel, 1997; Media City Seoul, 2000;
Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2001; Art
Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2003; The Swedish Contemporary
Art Foundation, Stockholm; Institute of Contemporary Art,
Boston, both 2006; Tbilisi History Museum, Karvasla, 2007.
Christoph Girardet
German, b. Langanhagen, 1966; lives in Hanover and New York
Christoph Girardet earned his mfa from the Braunschweig
School of Art, 1994. His numerous awards include a stipend
from the Nachwuchspreis der Stadt Braunschweig, 1992;
Hofbrauhaus Wolters Kunstpreis, Braunschweig, 1994; Preis
des Kunstvereins Hannover “Schlaglicht”—Kunstpreis,
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 1995; Niedersächsisches KünstlerJahresstipendium, 1997; International Studio and Curatorial
Program, New York; Preis der Deutschen Filmkritik für den
besten Experimentalfilm; and Best International Film and Video,
Images Festival, Toronto, both 2000; Preis für den besten
deutschen Beitrag, 2002; Internationale Kurzfilmtage,
Oberhausen, 2003; Villa Massimo stipend, Rome, 2004; the
Grand Prix Canal+ du meilleur court métrage, Semaine de
la Critique, Cannes, 2006.
Solo exhibitions include those at Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 1999;
Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, 2000; Sprengel Museum, Hanover,
2006; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Palais des Beaux-Arts,
Brussels, both 2007. Group exhibitions include Stedelijk Van
Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary
Art Center, both 1999; p.s.1 Contemporary Art Center, New
York, 2000; Goethe Institut, New York, 2001; New Museum of
Contemporary Art, 2002; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2004;
Kunstverein Hannover, 2005; Büro Friedrich, Berlin; Sprengel
Museum, Hanover; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Washington, dc, all 2007.
Douglas Gordon
Scottish, b. Glasgow, 1966; lives in New York
Douglas Gordon earned his ba from Glasgow School of Art,
1984–1988, and his ma from Slade School of Art London,
1990. His awards include the Turner Prize, Tate Gallery, London,
1996; Premio 2000 award at the Venice Biennale, 1997; Hugo
Boss Prize, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1998.
Solo exhibitions include those at the Lisson Gallery, London,
1994; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1995; Galerie
Yvon Lambert, Paris, 1997; Kunstverein Hannover, 1998; The
Power Plant, Toronto, 2000; Museum of Contemporary Art at the
Geffen Contemporary, Los Angeles, 2001; Hayward Gallery,
London, 2002; Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2003; Fundació
Joan Miró, Barcelona; Museum of Modern Art, New York, both
2006; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2007. Group exhibitions
include Serpentine Gallery, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, both 1995; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,
1996; Venice Biennale, 1997; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden, Washington, dc, 1999; Tate Modern, London, 2000;
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002; Vancouver Art Gallery,
2005; Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2007.
Rodney Graham
Canadian, b. Vancouver, 1949; lives in Vancouver
Rodney Graham attended the University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, 1968–71. His awards include the Kurt Schwitters
Prize, Sprengel Museum, Hanover, 2006.
His numerous solo exhibitions include Vancouver Art Gallery,
1988; Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1989; Fundacio
Espai Poblenou, Barcelona, 1994; The Renaissance Society,
University of Chicago, 1996; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, 1998; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Kunsthalle
Wien, Vienna, 1999; Mikwaukee Art Museum; Hamburger
Bahnhof, both 2001; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Vancouver Art Gallery;
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, all 2004–05. Group
exhibitions include Munster Sculpture Project, 1987; p.s.1
Contemporary Art Center, New York, 1988; Museum Moderner
Kunst, Vienna, 1989; Centre International d’Art Contemporain,
Montreal, 1990; Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1991,
1992; Documenta, Kassel, 1992; Venice Biennale, 1993, 1997,
2003; Art Institute of Chicago, 1995; Vancouver Art Gallery,
1996; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Wexner Center for
the Arts, Columbus; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover,
all 1998; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington,
dc, 1999; Kunstmuseum Bern; Centre pour l’image
Contemporaine and Musée d’art Modern et Contemporain,
Geneva, both 2001; Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New
South Wales, 2002; Musée du Québec; Museum of Modern Art,
New York, Biennale de Lyon, all 2003; Bronx Museum of the
Arts, New York; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Centre Pompidou,
Museé National d’Art Moderne, Paris, all 2004; Kunsthalle
Vienna and Kunstforum, Vienna, 2005.
Gary Hill
American, b. Santa Monica, California, 1951; lives in Seattle,
Washington
Gary Hill has received numerous awards, including the
Rockefeller Video Artist Fellowship, 1981–82; Grand Prix
(shared), Tokyo International Video Biennale, 1985; Rockefeller
Intercultural Media Arts Fellowship, 1989; Guggenheim
Fellowship, 1990; Leone d’Oro, Prize for Sculpture, Venice
Biennale, 1995; caa Artist Award, College Art Association, New
York, 1996; Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship at the
American Academy in Rome, 2000–01; Skowhegan Medal for
Video Installation, 2003.
His solo exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, New
York, 1980; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,
1986, 2001; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1987;
Tate Liverpool, 1993; Whitney Museum of Art, New York, 1998;
Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo with the Nagoya
Art Station, Nagoya, 2000; La Compagnie, Marseille; Centro
Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, both 2002; Fondation Cartier Pour
l’Art Contemporain, Paris, 2006; Barbara Gladstone, New York,
2007. Group exhibitions include the Venice Biennale, 1984;
Documenta, Kassel, 1987, 1992; Centre Pompidou, Musée
National d’Art Moderne, Paris, 1990; Museum of Modern Art,
New York, 1999; Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South
Wales; Tate Modern, London, both 2000; The Corcoran Gallery
of Art, Washington, dc, 2000; Vancouver Art Gallery; zkm /
Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe; The
Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, all 2002;
Outlook: International Art Exhibition Athens; National Museum
of Contemporary Art, Oslo, both 2003.
Teresa Hubbard
American, b. Dublin, Ireland, 1965; lives in Austin /
Alexander Birchler
Swiss, b. Baden, 1962; lives in Austin
Teresa Hubbard earned her bfa from the University of Texas at
Austin, 1988, and her mfa from the Nova Scotia College of Art
and Design in Halifax, 1992.
Alexander Birchler earned his mfa from the Nova Scotia College
of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada, 1992.
Hubbard / Birchler have participated in numerous international
solo exhibitions at Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, 1997,
2004; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2000; Museum Haus Lange
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and Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld; Huis Marseilles, Foundation
for Photography, Amsterdam, both 2001; ArtPace, San Antonio,
2002; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de
Compostela, 2003; Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria,
New York, 2004; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Museum
Sammlung Goetz, Munich, both 2005; Miami Art Museum, 2006;
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2008. Group exhibitions
include Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, 1997; Kunsthaus
Zurich / Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Triennale der Fotografie,
Esslingen; Centre pour l’Image Contemporaine, Geneva;
Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, all 1998; Skulturen Biennale,
Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Munster; Venice Biennale;
Melbourne International Biennial, all 1999; Schirn Kunsthalle,
Frankfurt; Biennial of Moving Images, Centre pour l’Image
Contemporaine, Geneva, both 2001; Pinakothek der Moderne,
Munich; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, both 2002;
zkm/Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe; Reina
Sofia Museum, Madrid, both 2003; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt;
and Kunsthaus Graz, Basel, both 2004; Mori Art Museum,
Tokyo, 2005; Kunsthaus Zürich, 2006; zkm, / Zentrum für Kunst
und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, 2007.
Anthony McCall
British, b. St. Paul’s Cray, England, 1946; lives in New York
Anthony McCall has a degree in graphic design from
Ravensbourne College of Art and Design, London, 1968.
Solo exhibitions include Museum of Modern Art, New York,
1976; Gagosian Gallery, London, 2004; Museum für Moderne
Kunst, Frankfurt; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona,
both 2005; Lieu d’Images et d’Art, Fort de la Bastille, Grenoble;
Peer/Round Chapel, London, both 2006; Sean Kelly Gallery,
New York, 2007. Group exhibitions include Hayward Gallery,
London; Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York, both 2004; Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects,
New York, 2005; Kunsthaus Zürich; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin,
both 2006; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2007.
Milan, 2005; Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of
Contemporary Art Japan, Marugame, 2006. Group exhibitions
include Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne,
Paris, 1995; Documenta, Kassel, 1997; Vancouver Art Gallery,
2000; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2001;
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Documenta,
Kassel, both 2002; Venice Biennale; 2003; zkm / Zentrum für
Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, both 2003; San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2005; Kunsthalle Mannheim,
2006; Manchester International Festival, Central Library,
Manchester, 2007.
Saskia Olde Wolbers
Dutch, b. Breda, 1971; lives in London
Saskia Olde Wolbers completed a foundation course at Central
Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, 1989, a ba in
Fine Art from Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, 1990,
and an ma in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design,
London, 1996. She was awarded the First Base Studio Award,
acava, London, 1997; Prix de Rome Award Film and Video,
Amsterdam; Charlotte Köhler Award, Amsterdam, both 2001;
Baloise Art Prize, Basel Art Fair, 2003; Beck’s Futures art
prize, 2004.
Her solo exhibitions include those at Gallery 291, London,
1998; Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, 2000; Büro
Friedrich, Berlin; Galleria Laura Pecci, Milan; Gallery Tydehalle,
Helsinki, all 2002; Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam;
Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; Kunsthalle St. Gallen, both
2003; Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2005; Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam, 2006. Group exhibitions include Birmingham Art
Trust, 1997; Gallery Herold, Bremen, 1998; The Living Art
Museum, Reykjavik, 1999; Tirana Biennial, National Gallery of
Albania, 2001; Artspace, Auckland; Museum voor Moderne
Kunst, Arnehm, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam;
Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, all 2003; Centraal
Musem, Utrecht; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art,
Ridgefield, both 2004; Hayward Gallery, London, 2005; Stedelijk
Museum cs, Amsterdam, 2006.
Steve McQueen
British, b. London, England, 1969; lives in Amsterdam
Steve McQeen attended Chelsea School of Art, 1989–90;
Goldsmiths College, University of London, 1990–93; Tisch School
of Arts, New York University, 1993–94. He received awards
from the ica Futures Award, 1996; daad Artist in Residence,
Berlin; the Turner Prize, Tate Gallery, London, both 1999.
Solo exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,
1996; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1997; San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, 1998; Institute of Contemporary Art,
London; Kunsthalle Zürich, both 1999; Institute for Contemporary Art, Cape Town, 2000; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2001;
Art Institute of Chicago, 2002; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville
de Paris; Tate Britain, London, both 2003; Fondation Prada,
Tony Oursler
American, b. New York City, New York, 1957; lives in New York
Tony Oursler earned his bfa from the California Institute for the
Arts, Valencia, 1979.
His numerous solo exhibitions include Museum of Modern Art,
New York; School of the Art Institute of Chicago, both 1981;
p.s.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, 1982; Nova Scotia
College of Art and Design, Halifax, 1986; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven,
both 1995; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Musee
d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; Whitney Biennial, Whitney
Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Museu d’Art
Contemporani, Barcelona; Documenta, Kassel, all 1997;
Biennale di São Paolo, 1998; Museum of Contemporary Art,
Los Angeles, 1999; Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2005; Galleria Emi
Fontana, Milan, 2007. He has been included in group exhibitions
at New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Museum of
Modern Art, New York, 1982; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam,
1984; Centre Pompidou, Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris;
Documenta, Kassel, both 1987; Whitney Biennial, Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York; Documenta, Kassel, 1992;
Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg, 1994; Carnegie International,
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 1996; Whitney Biennial,
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1997; Museum
Ludwig, Cologne; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, both
1998; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, all 1999; Museum of Modern Art, New
York, 2001; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Whitney
Museum of American Art, both 2002; Tate Liverpool, 2003;
Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito, Mito, 2004; Galleria
Nazionale d’Arte Moderna di Roma, Rome, 2005.
Kelly Richardson
Canadian, b. Burlington, Ontario, 1972; lives in Gateshead
Kelly Richardson received her bfa from Ontario College of Art
and Design, Toronto, 1997, and her mfa from Nova Scotia
College of Art and Design, Halifax, 2003.
Solo exhibitions include the Centre Pompidou, Musée National
d’Art Moderne, Paris; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, both
2002; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax; Gwangju Biennial;
Stills Gallery, Edinburgh, all 2004; Northern Gallery for
Contemporary Art, Sunderland, 2005; Nunnery, London, 2006;
Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2007, at Articule, Montréal;
Federation Square, Melbourne, both 2007.
Wolfgang Staehle
German, b. Stuttgart, 1950; lives in New York
Wolfgang Staehle attended the Freie Kunstschule, Stuttgart,
1970–72 and earned his bfa from the School of Visual Arts,
New York, 1979.
Staehle is the founder and executive director of the thing
(www.bbs.thing.net), an online arts forum and one of the first
cyberspace arts venues.
Solo exhibitions include T’Venster Museum, Rotterdam; New
Museum, New York, both 1988; The Kitchen, New York, 1989;
Marimura Art Museum, Tokyo; Museum Fridericianum, Kassel;
Kunsthalle Bremen, all 1990; Massimo De Carlo Gallery, Milan,
1991; Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris,
1993; Art & Public, Geneva, 1996; Kunstverein Schwäbisch Halle,
2000; Postmasters Gallery, New York, 2001 and 2004. Group
exhibitions include Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Onmitel MediaLab,
Rome, both 2001; Gagosian Chelsea, New York; Whitney
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Museum of American Art, New York, both 2002; University of
South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, 2002;
Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, 2003; Tate
Modern, London; Chelsea Art Museum, New York, both 2004;
Santa Monica Museum of Art; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke
University, Durham; Oboro, Montreal, all 2005.
Siebren Versteeg
American, b. New Haven, Connecticut, 1971; lives in New York
His awards include University of Illinois merit fellowships, 2002
and 2003; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture fellowship, 2004; Illinois Arts Council fellowship, 2005.
His solo projects and exhibitions include Museum of
Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2003; Wexner Center for the Arts,
Columbus; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, both 2004; University
Galleries, Normal; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, both 2005; Bellwether, New York, 2006; Max Protetch, New York, 2007. Group
exhibitions include 1926 Space, Chicago, 2000; nga Space,
Chicago; Ambrosino Gallery, Miami, both 2001; The Renaissance
Society, University of Chicago, 2002; Krannert Art Museum,
Champaign; Art Basel Miami Beach, both 2003; International
Biennale of Contemporary Art, Prague; Art Basel Miami Beach,
both 2005; Krannert Art Museum, Champaign; Contemporary
Museum, Baltimore, both 2007.
Realisms
Candice Breitz
South African, b. Johannesburg, 1972; lives in Berlin
Candice Breitz earned a ba in Fine Arts from the University of
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1993; an ma in Art History from
the University of Chicago, 1995; a Masters of Philosophy in Art
History from Columbia University, New York, 1997; completed
the Whitney Independent Studio Program, Whitney Museum,
New York, 1997; and a Doctoral Candidacy in Art History at
Columbia University, New York, 1998–2002. Residencies and
stipends include those from O.K Centrum für Gegenwartskunst
Oberösterreich, Linz, 2001; ArtPace Foundation, San Antonio;
Künstlerhaus Bethanien International Artists in Residency
Program, Berlin, both 2002; iaspis International Artists’ Studio
Program, Stockholm, 2003; and Cité Internationale des Arts,
Paris, 2005.
Solo exhibitions include Kunstverein St. Gallen Kunstmuseum,
St. Gallen, 2001; inova Institute of Visual Arts, Milwaukee,
2002; Goethe Institute, Zagreb; Modern Art Oxford, both 2003;
Moderna Museet, Stockholm; fact/Foundation for Art &
Creative Technology, Liverpool, both 2004; Castello di Rivoli,
Turin, 2005; Hellenic American Union, Athens; baltic Centre for
Contemporary Art, Gateshead, both 2006; Museo de Arte
Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, 2007. Group exhibitions
include Miami Basel, Miami; National Museum of Modern
Art, Tokyo; Tate Liverpool, all 2002; Centro Galego de Arte
Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela; Museum of Modern
Art, Dubrovnik, both 2003; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Art 35
Basel; Time Based Arts, Amsterdam, all 2004; Armand Hammer
Museum, Los Angeles; Milwaukee Art Museum; Venice
Biennale all 2005; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; baltic Centre
for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, both 2006; Kunstverein
Hanover, 2007.
Matthew Buckingham
American, b. Nevada, Iowa, 1963; lives in New York
Matthew Buckingham earned a ba in film production and film
studies at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1988, and an mfa
at Bard College, 1996. Fellowships and grants include an Artists
Fellowship through the New York Foundation for the Arts,
2001; the daad Artists Program, Berlin; Watershed: The Hudson
Valley Project through the Minetta Brook Foundation, New
York, both 2003; the Henry and Natalie E. Freund Teaching
Fellowship, Washington University School of Art, St. Louis, 2004;
Artist in Residence, The Arts Institute, University of WisconsinMadison, 2006.
Recent solo exhibitions include Murray Guy Gallery, New York,
2003 and 2004; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig,
Vienna, 2003; Dallas Museum of Art, 2004; Kunstverein
St. Gallen Kunstmuseum, St Gallen; Midway Contemporary Art,
Minneapolis; St. Louis Art Museum; The Kitchen, New York;
Fundación Telefonica, Madrid, all 2005. Group exhibitions
include Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1999; p.s.1
Contemporary Art Center, New York, 2000; Kunsthalle
Exnergasse, Vienna, 2003; Werkleitz Biennale, Halle, 2004;
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Corcoran Biennial,
Washington, dc, both 2005; Madison Museum of Contemporary
Art, 2006; Camden Arts Centre, London, 2007.
Paul Chan
Chinese, b. Hong Kong, 1973; lives in New York
Paul Chan earned his bfa in Video and Digital Arts at the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1996, and an mfa in Film, Video
and New Media at Bard College, 2002. Awards and fellowships
include the Jerome foundation New York media arts grant;
the Andy Warhol Foundation / Lower East Side Printshop Van
Lier Fellowship; the College Art Association / National
Endowment of the Arts Development Fellowship, all 2001;
the Rockefeller Foundation new media arts fellowship, 2003.
Recent solo exhibitions include Hammer Museum, ucla, Los
Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Franklin Art
Works, Minneapolis; Hallwalls, Buffalo, all 2005; Portikus,
Frankfurt; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; Galleria Massimo
De Carlo, Milan, all 2006; Greene Naftali Gallery, New York;
Western Front, Vancouver, both 2007. Group exhibitions
include Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art,
2006; Serpentine Gallery, London; Sundance Film Festival,
Park City, both 2007.
Ian Charlesworth
Irish, b. Liverpool, England, 1970; lives in Belfast
Ian Charlesworth earned his ba in Fine Art at De Montfort
University, Leicester, 1992, and an mfa from the University of
Ulster, Belfast, 1998. He was the recipient of the Arts Council
of Northern Ireland Fellowship in 2005–06.
Solo exhibitions include rha Dublin; Space, London, both 2003;
Herzlia Museum, Tel Aviv; Venice Biennale; The British School
at Rome, all 2005; Regina Miller Gallery, Pittsburgh; Katzen Arts
Center, American University, Washington, dc, both 2007.
Phil Collins
British, b. Runcorn, England, 1970; lives in Glasgow
Phil Collins studied at the University of Manchester and then
the School of Art and Design at the University of Ulster, Belfast.
Residencies and awards he has received include p.s.1
Contemporary Art Center, New York, 2002; the Illy Prize, 2003;
Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem; iaspis,
Stockholm, both 2004; Platform Garanti Contemporary Art
Center, Istanbul, 2005; the Wexner Arts Center, Columbus; the
Turner Prize, Tate Gallery, London, both 2006.
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Solo exhibitions include Artopia, Milan; London Print Studio,
both 2002; Maccarone Inc., New York, 2003; Kerlin Gallery,
Dublin and Bogotá, 2004; Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio
State University, Columbus; National Gallery of Arts, Tirana;
Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, all 2005; Neue Kunsthalle, St.
Gallen; Tate Britain, London; Museum of Contemporary Art,
Belgrade, all 2006. Group exhibitions include p.s.1, Contemporary Art Center, New York, 2001, 2002; Centro de Arte Moderna,
Lisbon; bak basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, both 2003;
Modern Art Oxford, 2004; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago;
c.r.a.c. Alsace, Centre Rhénan d’Art Contemporain, Altkirch,
both 2005; Swiss Institute, New York; Nordic Festival of
Contemporary Art, Moss; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
all 2006; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 2007.
Jeremy Deller
British, b. London, England, 1966; lives in London
Jeremy Deller studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of
Art, London. Awards include the Turner Prize, Tate Gallery,
London, 2004.
Solo exhibitions include Tate Gallery, London, 2000 and 2001;
Art: Concept, Paris, 2002; Neue Kunsthalle, St. Gallen; Centre
Pompidou, Museé National d’Art Moderne, Paris, both 2004;
Kunstverein, Munich; bawag, Vienna, both 2005; Louvre and
Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Nice, both 2006. Group
exhibitions include Venice Biennale, 2003; Art Basel; Carnegie
International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, both 2004;
Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, 2005; Berlin Biennial
for Contemporary Art, 2006; Tate Liverpool; Prague Biennale;
Munster Sculpture Project, all 2007.
Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Gallery
400 at the University of Illinois, Chicago, all 2005; Whitney
Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum
of Contemporary Art, Miami; CaixaForum, Barcelona, all 2006,
Omer Fast
Israeli, b. Jerusalem, 1972; lives in Berlin
Omer Fast completed his mfa at Hunter College of the City
University of New York, 2000. Awards include the Boit Award,
Boston Museum School of Fine Arts; the Peter J Wade Award
for Studio Work, Tufts University, both 1995; Kulturkreis: Ars
Viva, Film in der Kunst, Germany; Lois Comfort Tiffany
Foundation Prize, both 2003.
Solo exhibitions include gb agency, Paris, 2002; Postmasters
Gallery, New York; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt,
both 2003; Centre National de la Photographie, Paris, 2004;
Kunstwerke, Berlin; Midway Contemporary, St. Paul, both
2005. Recent group exhibitions include p.s.1 Contemporary
Art Center, New York; Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Palm
Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, all 2001; Whitney
Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2002;
Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts, Montreal; Kunst en
Cultuur Noord-Holland, Den Helder; Brandenburgischer
Kunstverein, Potsdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Basel,
all 2003; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; George Eastman
House, Rochester; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt; Busan
Biennale, all 2004; Hammer Museum, ucla, Los Angeles;
Kunstmuseum, Basel; Milwaukee Art Museum, all 2005; Vox,
Montreal, 2007.
Pierre Huyghe
French, b. Paris, 1962; lives in Paris
Kota Ezawa
German, b. Cologne, 1969; lives in San Francisco
Kota Ezawa studied at Staatliche Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf,
1990–94, earned his bfa at the San Francisco Art Institute,
1995, and his mfa at Stanford University, Palo Alto, 2003.
Awards include the Jack and Gertrude Murphy Fellowship, San
Francisco Foundation, 2002; the Louis Comfort Tiffany
Foundation Award, 2003; the seca Award; San Francisco /
Bay Area 2005 Artadia Award Recipient, Wattis Institute,
both 2006.
Recent solo exhibitions include San Francisco Arts Commission
Gallery, 2001; Haines Gallery, San Francisco, 2003; Santa
Monica Museum of Art; Murray Guy Gallery; New York;
Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, all 2005; Artspace, San
Antonio, 2006. Group exhibitions include Hauptpost,
Düsseldorf, 1999; Otis Gallery, Los Angeles, 2000; Yerba Buena
Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2002; cca Wattis Institute
for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; Seattle Art Museum;
Shanghai Biennial, Shanghai Art Museum, all 2004; Musée d’Art
Pierre Huyghe graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure
des Arts Décoratifs, 1985. He received the Hugo Boss Prize,
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2002. His numerous projects include the Temporary School, started in 1996;
Anna Sanders Films founded in 1997.
Solo exhibitions include Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de
Paris, 1998; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2000;
Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Amsterdam, 2001; Kunsthaus
Bregenz; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, both 2002; Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2003. Group exhibitions
include Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, 1995;
Johannesburg Biennial, 1997; Manifesta, Luxembourg, 1998;
Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh;
Istanbul Biennial, both 1999; Venice Biennale, 2001;
Documenta, Kassel, 2002; University of Virginia Art Museum,
Charlottesville; Dia: Chelsea, New York, both 2003; Tate
Modern, London; Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York, both 2006; musac, León; Sundance
Film Festival, Park City, both 2007.
Runa Islam
Bangladeshi, b. Dhaka, 1970; lives in London
Runa Islam studied at the Manchester Metropolitan University,
Middlesex University, Rijksadademie van Beeldende Kunsten,
Amsterdam, and the Royal College of Art, London, completing
her studies in 2004. Prizes and commissions include the Ford
Motor Co. & Breakthrough Commission, 2000; the London Arts
‘Visual Arts’ Award, 2001; the ‘Arena,’ Samling Foundation and
nesta Commission, 2002 and 2003; the Public Art Strategy,
Artists Commission for Home Office Building, 2004 and 2005.
Solo exhibitions include Tschumi Pavilion, Groningen, 2000;
White Cube, London; April in parking meters, Cologne, both
2001; Kunsthalle Wien, Karlsplatz Project Space, Vienna; mit
List Visual Arts Centre, Cambridge, both 2003; Shugo Arts,
Tokyo, 2004; Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto;
Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg, both 2005. Group exhibitions
include Tate Modern, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam;
Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, all 2001; Taipei Biennial,
Taiwan; New Museum, New York, both 2002; Expo Centre,
United Arab Emirates; Istanbul Biennial, both 2003; Antiqua
Fábrica de Tabacos, Madrid; Temporary Contemporary, London,
both 2004; Redux, London; Venice Biennale, both 2005;
White Cube, London, 2006.
Christian Jankowski
German, b. Göttingen, 1968; lives in New York
Christian Jankowski studied art at the Hochschule für bildende
Künste, Hamburg, 1990. He has been the recipient of grants
from the Venice Ministry of the Interior, 1998; the city of
Hamburg, 1999; the Schmidt-Rotluff grant, 2000.
Solo exhibitions include Swiss Institute—Contemporary,
New York, 2001; Klosterfelde, Berlin; Maccarone Inc., New
York, both 2002; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; Museum für
Gegenwartskunst, Basel, both 2003; Videonale im
Kunstmuseum Bonn; Public Art Fund, New York, both 2004;
Para-site, Hong Kong; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea,
Santiago de Compostela, both 2005; Centre de Arte Santa
Monica, Barcelona; fact, Liverpool, both 2006. Group exhibitions include Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American
Art, New York; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, both 2002;
Internationale Münchner Filmwochen, Munich; Kunsthalle
Düsseldorf, both 2003; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston;
Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, both 2004; Kunstverein
Hamburg, 2005.
Isaac Julien
British, b. London, England, 1960; lives in London
Isaac Julien earned his ba in Fine Art Film at Central Saint.
Martins School of Art and Design, London, 1984. His numerous
awards include the Andy Warhol Foundation Award, New York,
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1998; Art Pace, International Artist in Residence, San Antonio,
1999; The McDermott Award, mit, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
2001; Ford Foundation Award, 2002; the Grand Jury Award,
Kunst Film Biennale, Cologne, 2003.
Solo exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,
2000; mit List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, 2001; Victoria
Miro Gallery, London, 2003; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal;
Museum Boymans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, both 2004;
Centre Pompidou, Museé National d’Art Moderne, Paris; mak
Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; vivo Open Air, São
Paulo, all 2005; and w.e.b. Du Bois Institute for African and
African American Research, Harvard University, Cambridge,
2006. Recent group exhibitions include Art Tower Mito, Mito,
2002; Venice Biennale, 2003; Whitney Biennial, Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York, 2004; Tate Modern, London,
2005; Centre Pompidou, Museé National d’Art Moderne, Paris,
2006; kestnergesellshaft, Hanover; Brändströme & Stene
Gallery, Stockholm, all 2006; St. Louis Art Museum; Roslyn
Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw,
all 2007.
Michèle Magema
Congolese, b. Kinshasa, 1977; lives in Courcouronnes
Michèle Magema studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure
d’arts de Cergy, 1997–2002. Awards include an artist residency
at the Kaywon School of Art and Design, Seoul, 2002; President
of the Republic Prize at the Dakar Biennial, 2004.
She held a solo performance at Espace Mains D’oeuvres,
Saint-Ouen, 2002. Group exhibitions include Basilique de SaintDenis, 2001; Kaywon Gallery, University of Kaywon, Seoul,
2002; Camouflage, Brussels; Bamako, Mali; Centro de la Imagen,
Mexico City; La Vitrine, Paris, all 2003; galerie ipso facto, Nantes;
Centre de Cultura Contemporania, Barcelona; Lieu Unique, Lille,
all 2004; Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf; Centre Pompidou,
Museé National d’Art Moderne, Paris; Hayward Gallery, London;
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2004–06; Cultural Center of Tehran,
2005; Havana Biennial; Musée des Art Deniers, Paris, both
2006; Brooklyn Museum, New York, 2007.
Julian Rosefeldt
German, b. Munich, 1965; lives in Berlin
Julian Rosefeldt earned an ma in Architecture from the
Technische Universität Munich, 1994. His awards include the
daad Award, ets Barcelona, 1991; Artist-in-residence at
the Hoffmann Collection, Berlin, 2000; Produktionsstipendium
Kunst und neue Medien, Munich, 2004.
Solo exhibitions include Kunstsammlung nrw, Düsseldorf,
1998; Goethe-Institut, Paris, 2000; Künstlerhaus Bethanien,
Berlin, 2001; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2002; Chulalongkorn
Art Gallery, Bangkok, 2003; Max Wigram Gallery, London,
2004; Arndt & Partner, Zurich, 2005. Group exhibitions include
shows at the Centre Pompidou, Museé National d’Art Moderne,
Paris, 2002; Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo, 2003;
São Paulo Bienal, 2004; Art Basel, 2005; Santa Monica Museum
of Art, 2006.
Corinna Schnitt
German, b. Duisburg, 1964; lives in Cologne and Berlin
Corinna Schnitt studied fine art and film in Offenbach and
Düsseldorf from 1989 to 1996. Her numerous awards include
the Media Art Prize, Stadt Wiesbaden/Kunstadapter, 2000;
fellowship at Villa Aurora, Los Angeles, 2003; Artist-inResidence at the Chianti Foundation, Marfa, and Stiftung Kunst
und Kultur des Landes nrw, Schloss Ringenberg, 2004; grant
from the Else-Heiliger-Fonds, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, 2005.
Recent screenings include Goethe Institut, London; Museum
Reina Sofia, Madrid; International Film festival, Rotterdam,
all 2002; Kunstfilmebiennale, Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Jamaika
Center of the Arts, New York, both 2003; International
Filmfestival, Oberhausen, 2005; Centre Pompidou, Museé
National d’Art Moderne, Paris, 2006. Group exhibitions include
Kunsthalle, Hamburg, 2004; International Biennale of
Contemporary Art, The National Gallery, Prague, 2005; Neue
Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2006.
Mungo Thomson
American, b. Woodland, California, 1969; lives in Los Angeles
Mungo Thomson earned his ba from the University of
California, Santa Cruz, 1991, attended the Whitney Museum of
American Art Independent Study Program, New York, 1994,
and earned his mfa at the University of California, Los Angeles,
2000. Thomson has been awarded several grants and
residencies from institutions including Stichting Kaus Australis,
Rotterdam, 2001; The Fund for us Artists at International
Festivals and Exhibitions, 2003; and the Fabric Workshop and
Museum, Philadelphia, 2007.
Recent solo exhibitions include Margo Leavin Gallery, Los
Angeles, 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2007; John Connelly Presents,
New York, 2005; John Connelly Presents, Basel; rec, Berlin, both
2006; Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, 2007. Group
exhibitions include shows at the Transmission, Glasgow, 2002;
Bienal Internacional de Cuenca, 2004; Berlin Biennial for
Contemporary Art; Institute for Contemporary Arts, San
Francisco; Creative Time, New York, all 2006.
Kerry Tribe
American, b. Boston, Massachusetts, 1973; lives in Los Angeles
Kerry Tribe earned a ba in Visual Art and Art: Semiotics at
Brown University, 1997. She attended the Whitney Museum of
American Art Independent Study Program, New York, 1998,
and earned her MFA from University of California, Los Angeles,
2002. Her numerous awards include the Louis Comfort Tiffany
Foundation Award, 2005; Guna S. Mundheim Fellow, American
Academy, Berlin, 2006.
Solo exhibitions include mwmwm Gallery, New York, 1998; Los
Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 2003; Art Chicago, 2004;
Lewis Glucksmann Gallery, Cork, 2005; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien,
Berlin, 2006. Group exhibitions include Venice Biennale;
Istanbul Biennial, both 2001; New Museum of Contemporary
Art, New York, 2002; Hammer Museum, ucla, Los Angeles;
Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, both
2003; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2004; Bard
Center for Curatorial Studies, Annandale-on-Hudson, 2005;
Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York; Louvre, Paris, all 2006.
Francesco Vezzoli
Italian, b. Brecia, Italy, 1971; lives in Milan
Francesco Vezzoli studied at the Central Saint Martins College
of Art and Design, London, 1992–95.
Solo exhibitions include Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte
Contemporanea, Turin; New Museum of Contemporary Art,
New York, both 2002; Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2004; Museu
Serralves, Porto, 2005; Le Consortium, Dijon; Tate Modern,
London, both 2006. Group exhibitions include Studio Museum
in Harlem, New York, 2004; Fabric Workshop and Museum,
Philadelphia; Venice Biennale; Prague Biennale, all 2005;
Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York;
Shanghai Biennial; Taipei Biennial, all 2006.
Artur Zmijewski
Polish, b. Warsaw, 1966; lives in Warsaw
Artur Zmijewski studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw
in the Faculty of Sculpture, 1990–95. He earned a diploma at
the studio of Professor Grzegorz Kowalski, 1995, and studied
at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 1999.
Solo exhibitions include Foksal Gallery, Warsaw, 2001; Galerie
Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, 2002; iteso University, Guadalajara,
2003; mit List Visual Arts Center; Cambridge; Centre d’Art
Contemporain de Brétigny, Paris, both 2004; Venice Biennale;
Kunsthalle Basel, both 2005; Centre Pompidou, Museé National
d’Art Moderne, Paris, 2006. Group exhibitions include Liverpool
Biennial, 2002; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Foksal Gallery
Foundation, Cieszyn; Auckland Art Gallery, all 2003; Zacheta
National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Passage de Retz, Paris; Galerie
Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, all 2004; Prague Biennale; Wattis
Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Kunsthalle
Fridericianum, Kassel; Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea,
Bergamo, all 2005; Kunsthaus Dresden; Zacheta National
Gallery, Warsaw; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, all 2006; Documenta,
Kassel, 2007.
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Photography Credits
Overleaf:
Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler
Eight, 2001 (detail)
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