The exhibition is made possible by Diana Barrett and Robert Vila and by Marlene Nathan Meyerson.
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 Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs.
Several of the works in the exhibition explicitly blur the lines between still and moving images. Closed Circuit by Lutz Bacher (American, born 1943) 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.
Other works in the exhibition relate video to more traditional forms of moving pictures. Schwebebahn (1995) by Darren Almond (British, born 1971) transforms super-8 film footage of the first monorail into a hallucinatory look at the past melding into the future. In Spielberg's List (2003), Omer Fast (American, born Israel, 1972) has created a two-screen pseudo-documentary about Hollywood and the Holocaust that is alternately funny and harrowing. 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), 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. -- www.metmuseum.org
Posted January 17th, 2007 by ruzik_tuzik
