The Getty’s Video Blockbuster

“California Video” gets all contemporary on us

Wednesday, March 26, 2008 – 11:00 am

For an exhibition dealing with one of the most quintessentially ephemeral of art-historical media, the Getty’s “California Video” is packing more than its share of baggage. The Getty Museum’s first historically significant contemporary-art survey (and a major push forward in the covert campaign to contemporize the institution’s mandated premodern stuffiness), the show is about as far from plundered-antiquities scandals as you can get. At the same time, it casts the Getty in its most convincing good-guy role, bringing its formidable resources and facilities for conservation and preservation to the rescue of one of the most important and neglected regional collections of 20th-century art — the Long Beach Museum of Art’s seminal archive of video art, begun by David Ross in 1974 and mothballed in 1997 for lack of funding.

With that 6,000-some collection as a core, the Getty has set about making itself the go-to educational institution for the medium that was supposed to eliminate institutions once and for all. As usual for museological endeavors that depend on the fetishistic enshrinement of countercultural ephemera — from MOCA’s recent “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution”back at least to Alfred Barr’s 1936 MoMA exhibition, “Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism” — the clotted-irony elephant in the room makes it somewhat difficult to appreciate the art on its own terms. Not that that’s ever been particularly easy when it comes to video.

Continue reading

Bryant and Luckring at SolwayJones

by victornine

Selected Works

March 8, 2008 – April 19, 2008

Strange, quirky, almost ridiculous, the new photographs of Elizabeth Bryant are at once complex and simplistic, choreographed and crude. Using the Japanese art of ikebana flower arrangement as a jumping off point, Bryant’s carefully crafted scenarios present a rabbit-hole reality that both enchants and disorients the viewer.

Ikebana flower arrangement began as a ritual offering to the spirits of the dead. Over centuries, this ritual crystallized into a formal and rigorous art form that continues to be practiced today. The essence of the classical arrangement is a triangular construction representing heaven, earth and man. The vessel for the arrangement is chosen for it’s aesthetic under-statement; twigs, leaves, and an intentionally spare use of blooms characterize the refined expression that is ikebana.

Continue reading…

Getty exhibition showcases 40 years of groundbreaking video by California artists

California Video
At the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, March 15-June 8, 2008

Jim Campbell, Home Movies 920-1, 2006

http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/californiavideo/

LOS ANGELES—Over the past four decades, video has played an increasingly central role in artistic production throughout the world. This has been particularly true in California, where many of the state’s most prominent artists have used the medium to produce some of their most significant works. Co-organized by the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Museum, and on view in the J. Paul Getty Museum’s special exhibition pavilion at the Getty Center, March 15 through June 8 2008, California Video highlights the unique sensibilities of West Coast video, while providing the first major survey of video art produced in California.

California Video will feature more than 50 single-channel videos and 15 installations by 58 artists including Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari, Brian Bress, Nancy Buchanan, Chris Burden, Jim Campbell, Meg Cranston, Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn, Allan Kaprow, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Tony Oursler, Martha Rosler, Jennifer Steinkamp, T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm, Diana Thater, Bill Viola, and William Wegman. Approximately half the works in the exhibition will be drawn from the Getty Research Institute’s (GRI) extraordinary collection of video art, which, since its acquisition of the Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive in 2006, has become one of the largest institutional collections in the world. The GRI’s superlative collection will be augmented by the loan of important video installations, rarely exhibited historical single-channel works, and a selection of recent works by established and emerging artists.

Out at P.S.1, the three-story red-brick schoolhouse is filled with “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” Feb. 17-May 12, 2008, the show that Connie Butler organized for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where it premiered. The survey features works by 120 artists, largely from the 1970s, a pivotally disorganized decade between the Pop, Minimalist and Conceptual 1960s and the Neo-Expressionist and Postmodernist 1980s. Along with feminism, art in the 1970s branched out into artist’s books, alternative spaces, performance, video and assorted other rag-tag undertakings.

Most of the works in “WACK!” are low-tech, as one might expect from that pre-digital time, and sociological, as befits an art that was politically and socially engaged. And since it’s international, the show has a surprising number of important works that aren’t so well known in New York. One example here is the French artist Léa Lublin (1929-99), who moved into the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris with her small son in 1968 to exhibit herself as a mother.

The show is not without its nostalgic touches, as well. Veterans of the 1970s art world should take the time to listen to the extended collection of telephone messages left for the vivacious SoHo artist Hannah Wilke (1940-93). Dating from 1975 and indexed by the names of the callers, the list includes beseechings and audio performances by Claes Oldenburg, Richard Hamilton, Donald Goddard and her other paramours, as well as calls from now-forgotten artists from the 1970s like Eddie Shostak and James Collins.

Best of all is hearing once again the voice of Scott Burton (1939-89), the furniture artist and onetime Art in America editor (who showed me the ropes in this writing and reporting business). A person of considerably energy and charm with a uniquely vivacious way of speaking, Scott would call Hannah up and urge her to join him at one opening or another, because he was sure that they could have some fun. A victim of HIV, he died way too soon.

Artnet

image: Hannah Wilke’s Intercourse with. . . . (1975/2007), in “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” at P.S.1