PUBLIC 46: Prime Mover

46

On Collecting Media Art

EDITORIAL PUBLIC 46: Christopher Eamon Associate Editor: Christine Davis Managing Editor: Aleksandra Kaminska Art Reviews Editors: Dan Adler, Jim Drobnick Copy Editor: Eva Nesselroth-Woyzbun Design: Associés Libres Printing: Hignell Book Printing, Canada PUBLIC ACCESS COLLECTIVE Dan Adler, York University Kenneth R. Allan, University of Lethbridge Chloë Brushwood Rose, York University Christine Davis, Toronto Jim Drobnick, OCAD University Caitlin Fisher, York University Saara Liinamaa, NSCAD University Susan Lord, Queen’s University Scott Lyall, Toronto Janine Marchessault, York University Dorit Naaman, Queen’s University Deborah Root, Toronto EDITORIAL BOARD Ariella Azoulay, Bar Ilan University Ian Balfour, York University Bruce Barber, NSCAD University Vikki Bell, Goldsmiths, University of London Simon Critchley, The New School Sean Cubitt, University of Southampton Michael Darroch, University of Windsor Maria Fusco, Goldsmiths, University of London Monika Kin Gagnon, Concordia University Peggy Gale, Toronto John Greyson, York University Gareth James, University of British Columbia Michelle Kasprzak, Amsterdam Nina Möntmann, The Royal Institute of Art Kirsty Robertson, University of Western Ontario Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne Karyn Sandlos, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago Johanne Sloan, Concordia University Imre Szeman, University of Alberta Dot Tuer, OCAD University ADVISORY BOARD Ron Burnett, Emily Carr University of Art + Design Dick Hebdige, University of California, Santa Barbara Arthur Kroker, University of Victoria Chip Lord, University of California, Santa Cruz Dannys Montes de Oca Moreda, Havana Kaja Silverman, University of Pennsylvania Michael Snow, Toronto Aneta Szylak, Wyspa Institute of Art Peter Weibel, ZKM Akram Zaatari, Beirut FRONT AND BACK COVER: Andy Warhol, The Underground Sunday (Commercial for Schrafft's Restaurant), 1967. Colour videotape transferred to 16mm colour film with sound, 1:00 min.

Courtesy a private collection.

PUBLIC 303 Goldfarb Centre for Fine Arts York University, 4700 Keele St Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada public@yorku.ca www.publicjournal.ca Fall 2012 / Volume 23 Issue 46 Print ISSN 0845-4450 Online ISSN: 2048-6928 INDIVIDUAL SUBSCRIPTIONS 1 year (2 issues): $25 2 years (4 issues): $45 Please subscribe at www.publicjournal.ca/subscribe or send a cheque made out to “Public Access.”

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CONTENTS

5

PREFACE

The Public Access Collective

PRIME MOVER

Christopher Eamon

9

INTRODUCTION

13

EXHIBITION 1:

Still/Moving

33

EXHIBITION 2:

Prime Mover: Conceptualism in Motion

77

EXHIBITION 3:

Rare Film and Audio Art

97

EXHIBITION 4:

Real Time, Flux and Modernity

121

EXHIBITION 5:

Cinema and its Others

162

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

163

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

REVIEWS Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge, Scene Otherwise

167

Jill Glessing

170

Lisa Myers

173

Michael DiRisio

Art & Multitude

175

Andrew Stooke

One Day Sculpture and Locating the Producers

177

Yvonne Nowicka-Wright

Ahzhekewada [Let Us Look Back] – Revisioning the Indians of Canada Pavilion

The Art-Architecture Complex

PREFACE

FOR OVER TWENTY YEARS, PUBLIC has sought to provide ground-breaking material at the intersection of culture, politics, and aesthetics. We have chosen to devote an entire issue to an unusual project that examines two phenomena of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the rise of the private museum and the crucial role of media art in responding to the times. Five exhibitions as imagined by Canadian critic and curator Christopher Eamon provide crucial insight into the history of the moving image, the interpretive potential of collecting, and the dynamic response of artists to corporate media innovations. The seemingly contradictory premise of curating a collection of what was previously considered an uncollectible medium within the framework of a private collection rather than a public institution forms the backbone of the project. This issue, Prime Mover: On Collecting Media Art, exemplifies our commitment to publish work that is risk-taking, speculative, and timely.

The Public Access Collective

Janet Cardiff The Forty Part Motet, 2001.

Boys Recording session

5

Introduction CHRISTOPHER EAMON

PRIME MOVER, AS IT IS PRESENTED HERE, is selection of five essays corresponding to five exhibitions of works from an influential private collection with which I was professionally involved for more than ten years. These essays, along with a set of as yet unpublished extended entries constitute, in a sense, a history of moving-image art starting from around 1900. At the same time, it is a compendium of five imagined exhibition catalogues in a single volume, imagined so precisely because they are comprised of works acquired, in part, with the ideas presented here in mind. In the late 1990s, the collectors and their advisor at the time asked me to curate five hypothetical exhibitions of works from the collection so that the architects for a building to house the collection could take this information into consideration during their initial designs.

Later, these conceptual exhibitions began to take on a different role, that of armature for future acquisitions, and serving as a prospective guide for ideas and proposals.

From the outset this publication was meant to be a resource for students of film and video art, on the one hand, and for scholars investigating the history of collections on the other. The collection, one of the first in private hands to focus almost exclusively on time-based media, has been the subject of a number of graduate theses and museum catalogues, but this publication aims to bolster these efforts towards better understanding of a collection that has altered the field of media art. Media, or time-based, art had not been seriously collected before, not in depth by private collectors, and except for the small number of public institutions worldwide—those which had specific curatorial departments dedicated to the medium—much of the film and video installation art shown at many museums was not actually collected by those institutions over the years; the work was considered by many to be uncollectable. The collectors’ commitment to the form at once levelled that understanding, ending what had once been a resistant strategy for artists opposing the limits of commodification. Since then, the existence of the collection has opened up new approaches to curation, new practices of exhibition, and, yes, new models of resistance particular to time-based media.

9

Since the late 1980s, the period during which the collection was built, the media arts moved from the margin to the centre of institutional exhibition practices, especially at important largescale survey exhibitions such as the Venice Biennial and Documenta. As the collection grew, it paralleled activity in the public sphere; it shaped, and was shaped by, the developments of timebased art in institutional settings, as well as by the passionate choices of its founders. In many respects, it also affected the development of the market for video art, which still lagged behind institutional practices and, more importantly, artistic developments in the field.

When the idea for this publication first arose, its impetus was based in part on a desire to contribute insight to a poorly understood, still fairly marginal medium. Both the collection and the works of art in it needed to be documented for their interrlated histories to be consolidated.

As media art became more and more mainstream, yet never as central as, for instance, painting or sculpture, which are commonly collected and exhibited as art—no questions asked—it became important to place media art, and the ideas worked out in Conceptualism, in Pop art, and in appropriation art for instance, within the context of other artworks where similar ideas held sway in more traditional media. That is to say, in this volume, I attempt to enrich the history of timebased art by placing it back into the mainstream of art where it has always belonged; as any visual art practiced by artists for nearly 40 years, time-based art no longer needs to be treated as an ancillary practice.

Although the five exhibitions imagined here evolved separately, they can be read as chapters of a continuous story, or, alternatively, they can be read as different lenses through which one can look at the history of media art itself, as a necessarily fragmentary history. In this book, for the first time, the real-time video experiments of the 1970s are linked to the first actualitĂŠs from early at the turn of the last century. Exhibition 2 explores the centrality of time-based work to the conceptualism of the 1960s, for the roots of video art in performance art are today vastly overstated. Performance is only part of the story. In my writing I connect the roots of video art

10

INTRODUCTION

CHRISTOPHER EAMON

EXHIBITION 1.

Still/Moving

IN 1998, I WAS ASKED to develop five possible exhibitions from a major private collection, a project that eventually became the basis for this volume. At that time, Still/Moving was included; now, it is the only one of the original exhibition ideas to make it into this publication significantly unaltered (although I have now added works the collection acquired since 1998). In the title, “Still-slash-Moving,” the forward slash marks an unstable boundary between the fixed and unfixed, an oscillation between the two—which is in some sense a condition of our modernity, just as it is at the heart of the ontology of the moving image. Contingency and the moving image mutually reinforce each other in the experience of modernity. It is around the changing sense of time, as exemplified by the cinema, that many of these discussions are centered, specifically with respect to the status of the still (the not-moving), in relation to the still and yet also moving. This dilemma is often thought in cinema studies in relation to the pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno’s paradoxical arguments on motion. For him, there is no “real” motion, which is to say that truth can only be found in the immobile or fixed.

Indeed, the relation between the still and the moving is not evident. Received notions about time and cinema issue from assumptions such as the primacy of one state over the other, as in the idea that motion is comprised of a series of now-moments, or by analogy that cinema is derived from photography.1 Another is that motion or time is divisible into distinct and regular “instants.” For theorists such as Mary Ann Doane, Christian Metz, and Gilles Deleuze, motion and flux in film still represent a wellspring of meaning, whereas those who have a stake in realism find the still image, or photography, to be most pregnant with possibility. In actuality, these distinctions can never be made cleanly. This exhibition includes works of art that explicitly or implicitly exemplify the richness, for art, of the paradoxical coexistence of the moving and the still.

When Jeff Wall speaks of the photographic moment or the instant, which is a distinctly modern notion, arising in photography at around the time of the mass availability of the first film actualités, he is also speaking about a philosophy of the still in relation to the moving that has never been resolved, but which takes as its starting point ancient Greek philosophy, Kant,

Andy Warhol, Sleep (detail), 1966.

13

20

EXHIBITION 1

STILL/MOVING

Marcel Broodthaers Bateau Tableau, 1973 80 colour slides, dimensions variable. Š Estate of Marcel Broodthaers. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

21

32

EXHIBITION 1

STILL/MOVING

EXHIBITION 2.

Prime Mover:

Conceptualism in Motion

FROM THE OUTSET, “Conceptualism” identifies an unstable practice. The phenomenon first named by Fluxus composer Harry Flint as “concept art” in 1960—half a decade before Conceptual Art itself came into existence—is elucidated in Lucy Lippard’s definitive text, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object 1966-1972. It was already clear at the time of the book’s publication in 1973 that Conceptual Art is a varied and diverse phenomenon proceeding, in Lippard’s narrative, not primarily from Duchamp (who places the emphasis almost entirely on “the idea”), but rather from Minimalism, which places the emphasis entirely on the visual. As Lippard explains, Minimalism’s reduction of the visual paradoxically places the viewer in the position of “thinking about the artwork,” thus leading to Conceptual Art’s disavowal of the visual in favour of the ideal.1 Paradoxes and contradictions reside at the heart of Conceptualism: for instance, a repudiation of the visual in visual art, and a persistence in following a false opposition between opticality and the conceptual—all of which eventually led to a collapse of Conceptual Art in its strictest forms, as in the work of the British collaborative Art and Language. The latter collaborative group embraced so much the original ideals of Concept Art, that it remain a construct of the mind, their work began to take the form only of language and to this degree was often reduced to philosophical arguments. While American Joseph Kosuth was initially involved with Art and Language, many of his early works (such as “Chair”) were rejected by Art and Language as being far too object based, thus beginning a fatal schism among Conceptual Art’s founding artists, which in the United States included Lawrence Wiener, Robert Barry, and Sol LeWitt, among others. A debate largely carried out in art magazines such as Studio International in the late 1960s led to the end of Art and Language’s image-making practice. For them, the purity of the Conceptualism left no room for the document, photograph or aesthetic remainder of any kind. For others, especially those named above, Conceptual Art was actually an heterogeneous practice from the beginning.

It is particularly striking today that Michael Snow’s film classic Wavelength of 1966 is among the first examples of Conceptual Art cited in Lippard’s book. For many the history of video art is

Jeff Wall, Untangling (detail), 1994.

33

Gary Hill Viewer, 1996 Five-channel colour video installation.

Courtesy the artist.

Dan Graham Tudor Style House, Perth, 1985/Beauty Parlor, Palo Alto, 1978 Two colour photographs on a single matte, 35 x 25 他 inches.

Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

58

EXHIBITION 2

PRIME MOVER

Dan Graham Section of New Homes, Vancouver, 1976/Tennis Lady, Palo Alto, 1978 Two colour photographs on a single matte, 35 x 25 他 inches.

Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

59

EXHIBITION 3.

Rare Film and Audio Art

THIS SELECTION OF FILM and audio works from this private collection presents an opportunity to view works from the 1960s and 1970s by international artists better known for their work in other media. It offers a glimpse into a period when artistic experimentation with the moving image was at an historical peak. While some of the works presented here dovetail with performance-based practices central to the earliest film and video productions, many of them are only now finding acceptance as art within the broader field of visual arts. This begs the question about the historical status, or for lack of a better term, the positioning of “film art” or the moving image in art. Many of the pioneers in filmmaking as an art form did not consider themselves artists, but today are finding a far greater acceptance in the art world. In this arena, the contributions of artists like Tony Conrad, Yvonne Rainer, Marcel Broodthaers, and Andy Warhol are beginning to be acknowledged as newer generations of artists learn more about their work made outside the frame of the visual arts.

In the United States, many of the practices in time-based media of the 1960s and 1970s are, or were characterized by, intensive interdisciplinarity. Much of this activity occurred in and around the Judson Church in New York City, which as a site of creative production has achieved near-mythic status. Little remains to suggest the degree of influence then exerted by the loosely affiliated group around Judson—performers, artist, poets, and musicians—on their colleagues and audiences in the 1960s, but in the past decade several film restorations have been undertaken. Focused on the body, the immaterial, and the everyday, the choreography of Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and other founding members of the Judson Dance Theatre can be considered a bridge between the everyday-ness of Pop and later key art movements of the 1960s. However, little but photographs remains of most of their performances.

Rainer’s earliest films are works of art in their own right. Hand Movie (1968), for instance, consists of a close-up of a hand performing choreographed scratching and bending of fingers. Richard Serra credits it as the inspiration for his own Hand Catching Lead (1968), the first in a series of hand films he was to make that year. Rainer’s early performance-based films, however, are arguably

Marcel Broodthaers, Une Discussion Inaugurale, 1968.

77

Yvonne Rainer Trio Film, 1968 16mm black-and-white, 13:00 min. Cinematographer: Phill Niblock.

Courtesy the artist.

89

Yvonne Rainer Continuous Project Altered Daily, 1970 16mm black-and-white, 10:00 min.

Courtesy the artist.

90

EXHIBITION 3

RARE FILM AND AUDIO ART

96

EXHIBITION 4

REAL TIME, FLUX AND MODERNITY

EXHIBITION 4.

Real Time, Flux and Modernity

THE HISTORY OF MODERNITY has been characterized by substantial increases in speed, flux, and the shocks that emanate from them. They have been substantial enough to register across diverse fields of arts and sciences as a seismic shift in the experience and knowability of time.

Cinema, at its birth, participated in this shift at the outset end of the nineteenth century by both effecting and thematizing these changes. Since the movie camera is indeed a machine, it carried with it the representability of a regularized or abstract time. With its new and overwhelming ability to “capture” chance events or the unforeseen detail, cinema became a prime example of the technical and social developments contributing to the historical rupture that is the modernity we inhabit today. While modernity’s rapid urbanization and industrialization, along with its instrumentalization of time, coexist with the birth of cinema in the late nineteenth century, the earliest artistic uses of the television or video camera in the 1950s and 1960s can be said to have further participated in redoubling the effect of contingency and chance, long after cinema’s turn to narrative effectively closed off its potential for revealing the unforeseen or uncontrollable. Indeed, by articulating the relationship between video art’s attachment to closed circuit video in particular, and early film’s embrace of the contingent, the histories of film and video are brought together.

Early in the postwar period, new areas in electronic composition and literature participated in a somewhat Utopian drive to embrace the contingent and its potential for alternate sources of signification. John Cage in music and Bryon Gysin in his poetry Cut-Ups of the 1950s come to mind, as does the adoption of the Cut-Up by William Burroughs. Contingency enters the cultural sphere under a variety of guises, including the ancient Eastern philosophy of Buddhism, but the results are similar; the embrace of contingency in life and art are seen to have an upending effect on systems of knowledge and regularity generally assumed as a given by mid-century.

Body Art, Performance Art, and other Fluxus- and Happenings-inspired practices provide the basis for much video art of the late 1960s and 1970s. An overlooked event in this complicated history is the fusion of new electronic media with the philosophical underpinnings of chance and openness. In no other artist’s work is this more splendidly exemplified than that of Nam June Lee Friedlander, Nashville, 1963, Silver gelatin print, 8 x 10 inches.

Courtesy the artist and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

97

Robert Adams Untitled, c. 1973 Vintage silver gelatin print, 6 x 6 inches.

Courtesy the artist and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

110

EXHIBITION 4

REAL TIME, FLUX AND MODERNITY

Joel Meyerowitz Untitled (New Jersey), 1965 Vintage silver gelatin print, 7 3/16 x 9 9/16 inches. Š Joel Meyerowitz.

111

EXHIBITION 5.

Cinema and its Others

THE CINEMA’S INFLUENCE in modern times has been shown to have made a deep impact on art-making from its inception. A broad approach to cinema’s impact on art could not be made in a single exhibition. Very good, focused exhibitions of this kind have already taken place, which included early twentieth century works of art, specifically modern painting in relation to early cinema.1 Others have traced both the close and more tenuous connections between the art of the post-war era and the dominant industrialized cinema we know today.2 This exhibition does not focus on ground covered in these examples. Examined here is the confluence of factors from the late 1980s onward, including the re-emergence in the 1990s of the film/video installation. Whereas television was the main source and subject of much video art of the late 1970s and 1980s, the so-called “cinematic” became a key influence on video in the late 1980s and 1990s. In the 1990s, the art scene seemed to be working through “video-ized” experiments in Structuralist cinema, and through rule-based and endurance works in video art, engaging here and there with narrative or Hollywood cinema. That is, contemporary practices appeared to cycle, seemingly unwittingly, through all previous tropes forgotten at the time. Concomitant with the rise of video art since the late 1990s, ever-more complex, ever-more expensively produced spectacles of video art appeared, seemingly themselves products of a dominant industry, leaving content or at times concepts at the far end of a long shot.

This exhibition brings together engagements with cinema in this period that do not confuse art with the entertainment industry, but rather investigate, interrogate, and otherwise experiment with its forms. While not specifically about all of cinema’s alternative practices—which could be a tome on its own, even if limited to experimental cinema from the 1920s to present—an inference of cinema’s alternate forms cannot be altogether left out of discussions on this topic. Indeed, in an exhibition claiming to approach video art or visual art’s engagement with “Cinema,” it would be gross oversight to assume that other forms of alternate or “paracinematic” practices in the past century are irrelevant to what supposedly “belongs” to visual art’s context. When it comes to media initially not conceived as tools for visual artists, omitting such histories only weakens the practice

Matthew Barney, Cremaster 3 (detail), 2001.

121

Billy Name ****(Four Stars): Andy, Ondine, Geldzahler’s Apartment, 1967 Vintage silver gelatin print, 4 ½ x 7 ¾ inches.

138

EXHIBITION 5

CINEMA AND ITS OTHERS

Billy Name ****(Four Stars): Ultra’s Apartment, 1967 Vintage silver gelatin print, 9 ½ x 13 ½ inches.

139

Matthew Barney Cremaster 1, 1995-1996 35mm film print, mixed media, silk-screened video disc in acrylic vitrine, 40:30 min.

Photo: Michael James O’Brien. © 1995 Matthew Barney, Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

148

EXHIBITION 5

CINEMA AND ITS OTHERS

Matthew Barney Cremaster 5, 1997 35mm film print, mixed media, screen-printed laser disc in acrylic vitrine, 54:30 min.

Photo: Michael James O’Brien. Š 1997 Matthew Barney, Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

149

Stan Douglas Television Spots, 1987-1988 Musical Vendor (30 sec.), Spectated Man (30 sec.), Sneeze (15 sec), Male Naysayer (10 sec.), Female Naysayer (15 sec.), Lit Lot (15 sec.), My Attention (37 sec.), Answering Machine (30 sec.), No Problem (15 sec.), Funny Bus (15 sec.), Box Office (30 sec.), Slap Happy (30 sec.).

Twelve videos, twelve black-and-white photographs with text plate, 7 x 9 inches (each image), 7 x 9 inches (each text plate).

Courtesy the artist.

154

EXHIBITION 5

CINEMA AND ITS OTHERS

Stan Douglas Monodramas, 1991 As Is (60 sec.), Eye on You (60 sec.), Encampment (60 sec.), I’m Not Gary (60 sec.), Up (30 sec.), Disagree (30 sec.), Stadium (30 sec.), Guilty I (60 sec.), Guilty II (60 sec.), Guilty III (60 sec.).

Ten videos, ten silver print photographs with text, 10 x 19 inches each.

Courtesy the artist.

155

REVIEWS

165

E X H I B I T I O N R E V I E W : J I L L G L E S S I N G Ryerson University, Toronto

Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, The Plague (detail) (2009). Photo: Courtesy the artists.

Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Scene Otherwise TORONTO FREE GALLERY 19 January – 26 February 2012

COLLABORATIVE ARTISTS-ACTIVISTS Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge have spent most of their lives waging a representational battle against inequitable social structures and they have done so mostly within the separated spaces of labour unions and artist-run centres. Despite the historic tension between these realms, the artists have “always tried to engage the political and the art world in equal measure.”1 But, these sectors are now coming together on the streets in protest of corporate profits and austerity budgets. It is perhaps this expanded political consciousness that has fuelled the formal and thematic exuberance apparent in the artists’ recent exhibition, Scene Otherwise.

Condé and Beveridge developed as artists in the competitive, commercial New York art world of the 1970s, when Minimalism and Conceptual Art were fracturing under radical cultural critique. Joining such groups as Art and Language, and the Ad Hoc Women’s Art Committee, who protested the Whitney Museum of American Art’s preference for male artists, they strayed from their minimalist sculpture practice. Rejecting the primacy of the New York art scene, they returned to Toronto. In the Art Gallery of Ontario exhibition It’s Still Privileged Art (1976), they unveiled their new relation to art production. Working collaboratively rather than individually,

167