Enjoy Modern Mondays At MoMA

Modern Mondays, is a weekly program that brings contemporary, innovative film and movingimage works to the public and provides a forum for viewers to engage in dialogue and debate with contemporary filmmakers and artists. Modern Mondays presents new-and newly rediscovered-film and media works with the director in attendance, stimulating discourse, dialogue, and interaction in a social setting.

Organized by the Department of Film and the Department of Media and Performance Art. Modern Mondays is made possible by Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro. Additional support is provided by The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

Screening Schedule

An Evening with Carter - Monday, April 6, 7:00 p.m.

New York–based artist and filmmaker Carter (b. 1970) introduces the U.S. premiere of his most recent film, Erased James Franco (2008), and takes part in a post-screening conversation with its star, James Franco. Recalling the intellectual gamesmanship of Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 drawing Erased de Kooning, from which it derives its title, Erased James Franco is simultaneously a study of the craft of acting and of the fracturing—and reconstitution—of narrative and identity.

While filmmakers in recent years have attempted shot-for-shot remakes of existing films—most notably Gus Van Sant with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Michael Haneke with his own Funny Games—the emphasis here is on a single actor, alone on stage, recreating iconic film performances that have been stripped of their original context. In addition to reenacting scenes from several of his own past film roles, Franco also reinterprets a pair of haunting portrayals of psychic disintegration and renewal: Julianne Moore’s role in Todd Haynes’s Safe and Rock Hudson’s in John Frankenheimer’s Seconds. Denied the charged interplay with other actors, Franco adopts a strangely flat affect, imbuing the film with a quality that Carter describes as “like bloodletting or a kind of cleansing…a building up and tearing down, simultaneously.”

An Evening with Sterling Ruby - Monday, April 13, 7:00 p.m.

Los Angeles–based artist Sterling Ruby (German, b. 1972) is known for totemic resin forms, intentionally defaced Minimalist sculptures, and membrane-like ceramics. He also works with video and photography, drawing inspiration from graffiti, science fiction, institutional architecture, and antiquity. Ruby’s work tackles aesthetic tropes and social stereotypes, using gestures that refer to notions of transience, transgression, and transference. The program includes the premiere of Ruby’s recent untitled video from 2009, along with other works including Agoraphobic (2001), Found Cushion Act (2005), Transient Trilogy (2005–09), and Dihedral (2006).

An Evening with Michel Auder - Monday, April 20, 7:00 p.m.

For over forty years Michel Auder (French, b. 1945) has compulsively recorded the events of his life. Embracing a variety of roles—including silent participant, obsessive voyeur, discreet accomplice, and simple observer—he creates brashly self-referential films and videos that have earned him wide renown. Auder’s decades-long love affair with the Sony Portapak video system has yielded an epic amount of unsparing, poetic footage delineating the flamboyant life of an artworld dandy. His latest work, A Feature (2008), intercuts selections from Auder’s personal video archive with new segments (directed by Andrew Neel) in which Auder’s doppelganger (played by Auder himself) learns that he suffers from an incurable disease.

A Feature’s fictionalized biography intermingles truth, lies, life, and art into an ambiguous self-contained universe. The film illuminates, through the brutal honesty of visual diaries, the artist’s experiences in the New York art scene, from wild times at Andy Warhol’s Factory to Auder’s marriages to Viva and Cindy Sherman. Following the screening, Auder and Neel discuss the film and their use of personal archival footage.

An Evening with Mel Chin - Monday, April 27, 7:00 p.m.

Mel Chin (b. 1951) is an internationally celebrated and socially engaged conceptual artist whose work encompasses several disciplines. Already well known for interventions, earthworks, drawings, and works in other mediums, the Texan artist recently turned to filmmaking. In 2007 he completed his first animated work, 9-11/9-11, which confronts a pair of historic September 11s: Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup d’etat in Chile, and the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City. The video will be screened twice, and a discussion with the artist and the audience will take place in between. -- www.moma.org

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