Exhibition Dates: February 23 – April 29, 2007
Exhibition location: Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, North Mezzanine Gallery and The Gioconda and Joseph King Gallery
The first multi-artist exhibition of video art and new media at The Metropolitan Museum of Art will be presented from February 23 to April 29, 2007. Drawn entirely from the collection of the Museum's Department of Photographs, Closed Circuit: Video and New Media at the Metropolitan features video and new media works made between 1994 and 2004 by eight American and international artists: Darren Almond, Lutz Bacher, Jim Campbell, Omer Fast, Ann Hamilton, David Hammons, Maria Marshall, and Wolfgang Staehle. These highly respected figures in contemporary art will be represented in Closed Circuit by some of their best-known and most celebrated works, only one of which has been on exhibit before at the Met.
The exhibition is made possible by Diana Barrett and Robert Vila, Marlene Nathan Meyerson, and Robert Yaffa and Jennifer Saul Yaffa.
In recognition of the increased fluidity between photography, video, and new media since 1960, over the last five years the Met's Department of Photographs has expanded its collection to include recent video and new media works. The first of these acquisitions was the hypnotic work abc (1994/99) by Ann Hamilton (American, born 1956). The video shows a wetted fingerprint slowly erasing inked letters of the alphabet on a pane of glass and then "writing" the letters in reverse. "Small in scale and unobtrusive in presentation, Ann Hamilton's abc seemed to us almost like a still photograph come to life," said Doug Eklund, Assistant Curator of the Department of Photographs and curator of the exhibition.
Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs, added: "The works we have acquired thus far constitute a natural outgrowth from our traditional interest in the still image. We are extremely grateful for the ongoing support of the Henry Nias Foundation, who contributed the funds for acquiring all or part of five of the eight works on display."
Several of the works in the exhibition explicitly blur the lines between still and moving images. Closed Circuit (1997-2000) by Lutz Bacher (American) creates a composite portrait and affecting narrative from thousands of individual video frames selected from 1,200 hours of footage of the late art dealer Pat Hearn at work in her office. Taking as his subject the same Hudson River Valley that inspired Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church, Wolfgang Staehle's (German, born 1950) Eastpoint (September 15, 2004)uses more than 8,000 still images, synced to real time, to depict the landscape's subtle changes over the course of a single day. "Situated at the crossroads of painting, photography, film and new media, Eastpoint resonates especially beautifully with the Museum's collections," Doug Eklund noted.
Other works in the exhibition relate video to more traditional forms of moving pictures. Schwebebahn (1995) by Darren Almond (British, born 1971) is a mesmerizing ride via suspended rail—shot in crudely beautiful super-8 film and shown upside-down and in reverse—that is a hallucinatory vision of the past melding into the future. In Spielberg's List (2003), Omer Fast (American, born Israel, 1972) brilliantly deconstructs Steven Spielberg's Holocaust epic Schindler's List through interviews with Polish locals who appeared in the Hollywood film as extras. The LED work Motion and Rest #2 (2002) by new media pioneer Jim Campbell (American, born 1956) is a digital update of Eadweard Muybridge's celebrated motion studies from the 1880s.
Also featured in the exhibition are provocative and important video works of the 1990s: David Hammons' (American, born 1943) haunting and humorous Phat Free (1995/1999), which plays on metaphors of invisibility and death; and Maria Marshall's (British, born Bombay, 1966) disturbingly seductive When I Grow Up I Want to Become A Cooker(1998), a vision of maternal dread that employs digital effects to make it appear as if the artist's young son is confidently smoking a cigarette.
Closed Circuit has been organized by Douglas Eklund, Assistant Curator in the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Photographs.
The exhibition will also be featured on the Museum's Web site (www.metmuseum.org).
As a complement to Closed Circuit, the Met is presenting a related selection of photographs dating from 1969 to 1993 on the first floor of the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing. Entitled Series and Sequence: Modern Photographs from the Collection, this installation features multiple-image works by Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Sophie Calle, Jack Goldstein, David Lamelas, Allen Ruppersberg, and Christopher Williams.
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January 26, 2007