Image Stream discussion panel at the Wexner
IMAGE STREAM, a panel discussion on video art, will be held from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm on Thursday, November 6th at the Wexner Center Film and Video Theater. This lecture is sponsored by the Wexner Center for the Arts and is free and open to the public. A link to the Image Stream informational site can be found here.
Image Stream invites you to explore a select group--eight works--of recent film and video art. Each utilizes moving images and narrative structure in striking and inventive ways. The artists of these works address film, television, and other moving images and enter into dialogue with the architectural space of the gallery and the traditional role of sculpture as a three-dimensional object. Their works also share the dimension of being time-based: They ask you to pause for the duration of the piece (and perhaps its repetition). With these strategies, the artists challenge conventional treatments of moving images as manipulative, readymade, or mind-numbing. Instead, they offer you a chance to share an experience and a space that is neither regimented by Hollywood nor ordered by the usual walk through the museum?s white cubes.
Visitors to museums and art exhibitions--including the Wexner Center?s--frequently find the traditional "white cube" of the gallery transformed into a "black box" occupied by moving images. Such film and video installations have become an increasingly prevalent form of artistic expression, sometimes even more in evidence than traditional painting or sculpture. Many of these works are made by a generation of artists who grew up with television, so perhaps the current predominance of the moving image in art should be no surprise.
When artists first used video in the mid-1960s, they usually employed it to investigate abstract problems such as artistic process or visual perception. Most often they rejected the kinds of narrative and spectacle associated with television and movies, the moving images most familiar in popular culture. Now, however, contemporary artists borrow and analyze narrative and visual forms from all the kinds of moving images that pervade our lives: from CNN to MTV, from Hollywood to the security cameras in your local grocery store. This embrace of mass culture and storytelling devices signals a significant shift in film and video art.
Image Stream is the first exhibition organized for the Wexner Center by Helen Molesworth, chief curator of exhibitions, and is currently on exhibit at The Belmont Building, 330 West Spring Street, Columbus, Ohio.
In association with this exhibit and panel discussion, The Wexner Center Film
and Video Theater hosts the Columbus Theatrical Premiere of Matthew
Barney's CREMASTER CYCLE, a five part series being screened in the
Wexner Film/Video theater Wednesdays, November 5, 12, and 19th, 7pm. Information
on the sreenings can be found at the Wexner
Center. Additionally you can visit the Cremaster
Cycle website.
Posted: 10/29/2003