Moving Image Exhibition

The exhibition I went to on Friday was Dreamlands:Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905~2016 in Whitney Museum. This is actually the first exhibition I have been to that is specially for moving image. The range of moving image in this exhibition does not constrain to film. There are also many interactive pieces in this exhibition, which I find innovative and enjoyable as the audience.

The first direct observation I have is that moving image objects in museum generally requires much more space. Many of the pieces in this exhibition need a room or space individually. One of the impressive objects is Ben Coonley's Trading Futures. For this piece, audience needs to enter into a geodesic dome with 3D glasses. There are bean bags for viewers to lie down to watch a 360 degree 3D video. The video has instructions for people to open or close left and right eyes to see different parts. I would say this is the most attractive object of the whole exhibition. On the exhibition guide, this one is actually marked as top picks for kids, which would totally bring families to this exhibition. The whole space could fit around a dozen of people.

Several pieces are placed in completely dark rooms. When I entered those dark spaces, the security turned on the flashlight for me to walk in. One of the typical ones is Anthony McCall's Line Describing a Cone, which uses the beam of a 16mm projector to make a large white circle through fine mist. Besides the beam from the projector, the projector itself and the circle on the wall, the room is so dark. I could barely notice if other people were right next to me. The other part of this piece that I find considerate for this object is that on the wall text, it says "Please be advised: This installation includes a fine mist in the air made of water vapor and glycol. Those with respiratory conditions may wish to avoid it." The similar situation happens in several other objects including one called Easternsports by artists Alex Da Corte and Jayson Musson, which warns viewers the piece has fragrant smells.

One of the traditional film piece I saw is Edwin S. Porter's Coney Island at Night, which I just watched on Thursday night in Film History class.

The exhibition in general is really large and it uses up the whole fifth floor of the museum. I still feel that some pieces need more space, especially pieces with audio.

Hierarchies in the Exhibition

Yesterday I finally managed to go see the Whitney’s exhibition, Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016. It was the first large exhibition that I’ve seen devoted exclusively to moving images and related works. To create the exhibition, the fifth floor was broken up into different spaces. Some rooms resembled the expected museum gallery, with multiple pieces arranged on white walls. Other spaces, sectioned off by temporary walls, made dark theaters. These were often devoted to a single work. In general, I found myself spending considerably more time with works in the latter type of space. The other visitors seemed to as well.

There are several practical reasons why people may have preferred the theater-like experience. Many of the enclosed rooms had comfortable seating like beanbags and cushions. As someone mentioned in class, seating gives people permission to linger, even when there isn’t enough space for everyone. The fabric walls creating the rooms helped isolate sound, preventing distracting spillover from other works. Another advantage of the enclosed spaces was a sense of immersion, the very quality emphasized by the exhibition title. In some cases the walls were part of the installation and created an environment. For example, Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun was in a room designed to look like the motion capture grid present in the video component of the installation.

I always appreciate when fine art museums borrow from the theater experience to display moving images because it often feels more native to the format. However, walking through Dreamlands, I found myself frequently thinking that I inherently preferred the works that were presented in their own rooms, which is distinct from simply preferring the display. This made me wonder to what extent exhibition design causes visitors to perceive the exhibition works as existing in a hierarchy. Creating an enclosed space requires additional resources, which seems to suggest that the piece is worth it. Presenting a video with muddled sound that is dominated by a louder piece suggests that the full experience of the piece is not essential. I was also interested in how display size affects perception of a work. Whenever I go to art museums, I think of a scene from Stephanie Barber’s movie, Daredevils (not part of the exhibition). In it, a young writer interviews an established artist. The artist tells the writer that she thinks creating large pieces of art is a way of saying that she is important, that her art is worth the resources. For moving images, the question of size is interesting because the technology does not require an image to always be displayed at the same size. Unless an artist indicates a fixed size for a piece, the curator may have to choose a display size. Such decisions are undoubtedly given a lot of thought, however, the process is invisible to most museumgoers who must evaluate the work based on their viewing experience.

While merely selecting a piece of art for exhibition confers value and potential canonization, I think it is worth considering to what extent exhibition design creates a distinction between lesser and major works.

Manon Gray

How to Post Properly 2017

Post to this blog by e-mailing text to 

streible1.curating@blogger.com.  

Use this blog to comment about readings, screenings, guest talks, experiences, and discussions related to the Curating Moving Images course. 

You can attach an image to the e-mail (as above, from the 200th episode of The Love Boat in 1985). Or you can embed the image in your e-mail (as below).

The subject heading of your e-mail will become the title for the post. 

Another way to post to the blog is to click "New Post" and compose there, which allows you better control of formatting options. 

Type your first and last name at the bottom of each posting. 

-- Dan Streible 

Spring 2017 Curating Moving Images -- post here

Here's blog space for students in Curating Moving Images to post short but thoughtful thoughts about issues that arise in the course of the course.

-- Dan Streible, instructor of record.

And here's a place holder text and graphic to test that all is working. Below are program notes I wrote for a screening a Mar del Plata International Film Festival this past November.  Since the festival, some of the undistributed films on the list have been made available online.  Here's one from the new site, www.vimeo.com/helenhill.

Madame Winger Makes a Film is now viewable at https://vimeo.com/197137362.

She made the tweet the festival put out.

Program for the Mar del Plata International Film Festival 
Huérfanos del Cine
 
The Orphan Film Symposium presents “Huérfanos del Cine,” two programs celebrating the rediscovery of rare but revelatory films preserved by archives around the world. “Amateurs and Animateurs” features twelve pieces lovingly created by talented amateur filmmakers across seven decades and four countries. “Nontheatrical Nonfiction” assembles an eclectic variety of restored wonders: newsreels, outtakes, home movies, as well as educational, experimental, and simply uncategorizable films. The term “orphan film” applies to the many thousands of neglected cinema artifacts abandoned by the commercial sector but identified as invaluable by preservationists, researchers, and artists. The Orphan Film Symposium is a biennial gathering of archivists, filmmakers, and scholars devoted to saving, screening, and studying an eclectic variety of neglected moving images. Dan Streible, professor of cinema studies and director of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation master’s program at New York University, organizes the symposium and programs other screenings of orphan films.

Program 1: Amateurs & Animateurs

Madame Winger Makes a Film: A Survival Guide for the 21st Century (Helen Hill, Canada/US, 2001) 10 min., 16mm
Cast: Meredith Pogue (narrator), Helen Bredin, Paul Gailiunas, Trixy Wattenbarger. Sound design: Fausto Caceres.
Source: Harvard Film Archive and NYU Film Study Center
Animator Helen Wingard Hill invented her alter ego Madame Winger to narrate this comic guide to making low-budget and amateur films in Super 8 and 16mm. This lively mock-educational film intermixes cut-out figures, live action, home movies, found footage, flip books, and pixilation. Hill also edited a self-published companion collection of tips and drawings by forty other artists entitled Recipes for Disaster: A Handcrafted Film Cookbooklet.  Preserved by Colorlab for Harvard Film Archive and the Orphan Film Symposium.

[Helen Hill’s Home Movies] (2000-2005) silent, 3 min., 16mm
Source: The Center for Home Movies, U.S. Library of Congress
Living in New Orleans, the filmmaker lost most of her worldly goods when the flood waters that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005 submerged the house she shared with her husband Paul and their infant son. She salvaged some of her damaged Super 8mm home movies, cleaning the tiny filmstrips by hand. The Center for Home Movies helped her preserve many of the reels in 16mm, rescuing these images of seldom-documented New Orleans communities as they looked before Katrina.

[Francena Feeding the Chickens] (Charles Camp, 1905) silent, b/w, 1 min., digital
Source: U.S. Library of Congress
Perhaps the oldest surviving home movie in the United States, this 35mm fragment shows 13-year-old Frances Bickling at her home in Colorado when visited by her uncle Charles Camp (1860-1929). A cowpuncher and rancher, Camp got his camera in 1904, filmed cattle roundups in Wyoming, and exhibited his motion pictures in Oregon at the Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition. Francena’s granddaughter Jeanne Burkhardt got the films to the Library of Congress for preservation in 2011.

[Triptych Poem] Unidentified Theisen No. 1 (1926) silent, b/w, 35mm or digital, 4 min.
Filmmakers and cast unknown. Text from “In Youth, Beside the Lonely Sea” (1896) by Thomas Bailey Aldrich.
Source: U.S. Library of Congress [35mm print and MP4 file available]
Photographer Earl Theisen was also a collector of ephemera from early cinema. No one knows who made this triple-wide silent cine-poem or where Theisen got it. Mistakenly first catalogued as “Polyvision Test,” this technically sophisticated creation was made, anonymously, a year before Abel Gance used Polyvision for his triptychs in Napoleon. 

Another Day (Leslie Thatcher, Canada, 1934) silent, b/w, 10 min., digital
Source: Toronto Amateur Movie Club; Archives of Ontario
The Amateur Cinema League named this one of 1934’s “Ten Best” productions. A frequent award-winner, Les Thatcher reveals here how amateur cinema culture was often in dialogue with international art cinema, in this case with a city symphony film of his hometown of Toronto.

Venus and Adonis (J. V. D. Bucher and Harry Dunham, 1935) b/w, 10 min., digital
Cast: Anne Miracle, Victor Kraft, Eric[k] Hawkins. Music: Paul Bowles.
Source: Museum of Modern Art
Unseen for 80 years, this New York amateur production was a playful attempt at surrealism. The cast was part of a circle of artists that included Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, Gertrude Stein, and Man Ray. Its directors went on to significant careers in documentary. A year later Dunham was filming civil wars in China and Spain, then Too Much Johnson (1938) for Orson Welles. In 1935, Bucher began a long globetrotting career shooting films with Julien Bryan.

Color (Lydia García Millán, Uruguay, 1955) 4 min., 16mm
Music: Jazz ensemble of El Hot Club de Montevideo
Source: NYU Film Study Center & Fundación de Arte Contemporáneo
Perhaps the first experimental color film made in Uruguay, Color was the work of a pioneering woman filmmaker, still a teenager.

Rain Dance (Helen Hill, 1990/2007) 4 min., 16mm
Music: Paul Gailiunas, Matthew Butterick. Title song by Paul Gailiunas, lyrics by Elijah Aron.
When Helen Hill’s films were severely damaged by floodwaters, only the image track for her first student film survived. Following her untimely death in 2007, the original musicians re-recorded soundtrack for the restoration done by Bill Brand and NYU students for the Orphan Film Symposium.

Think of Me First as a Person (Dwight Core, Sr., 1961-75) completed by George Ingmire (2008) 8 min., 35mm or digital
Camera: Dwight L. Core, Sr. Sound design: George Ingmire. Music: James Black, George Ingmire, Kyiv Chamber Choir.
Cast: Dwight Core, Jr. Narrated by Dwight Core, Sr.
Source: Center for Home Movies, U.S. Library of Congress, 35mm print or digital
Named to the National Film Registry, this compilation of home movies was preserved by Haghefilm (Amsterdam) and united with its soundtrack for the first time. A loving letter from the filmmaker to his son with Down Syndrome, this amateur film outstrips any professional production on the subject.

Scratch and Crow (Helen Hill, 1995) 4 min., 16mm
Source: Harvard Film Archive and NYU Film Study Center
Made as a student film at the California Institute of the Arts, this vividly colored work of cel animation touches the sublime, a spiritual homage to animals and the human soul. Named to the National Film Registry.  

Na odnoi zemle [On the Same Earth] (Vladimir Medvedev, People’s Film Studio, House of Culture of Professional Technical Schools, Leningrad, USSR, 1976-77) 10 min., digital
Written, directed, shot and edited by Vladimir Medvedev. Script consultant: Boris Goller. Music: Jean-Michel Jarre, “Oxygène.” In Russian with English subtitles by Maria Vinogradova.
Source: Vladimir Medvedev and Maria Vinogradova
In the Soviet Union, a culture of amateur filmmaking (kinosamodeiatelnost) developed within a state-sponsored system of clubs and studios that gave enthusiasts access to equipment. The wide range of films made in this context include this humanistic documentary essay, using film shot while visiting Canada at the time of the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.

EPH 4/27/16  (Ephraim Horowitz, 1979) 26 min., digital
Narrated by Ephraim Horowitz.
Source: NYU Orphan Film Symposium, Fandor, and the Horowitz estate
An avid amateur filmmaker from the 1930s until his death in 2012, Ephraim Horowitz reflects on his life in this sophisticated, wry Super 8 memoir. Named one of the Ten Best amateur films of 1979.

Museum Cinema: Analyses of Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir’s Development

For just under one month, January 17 to February 15 of 2015, the main exhibition space in Hafnarborg Museum was transformed for artist Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir’s show Development (in the native language Framköllun). The relatively small but influential museum[1] but faces the ocean on the main street of Hafnarfjörður, a small town on the outskirts of Reykjavík, Iceland. Hekla Dögg[2] is a well-known Icelandic artist whose work has been internationally exhibited. She often works in sculptures and installations, and the installation on display here can be called her largest and most ambitious project to date.[3] She has attempted to capture moments of the unexpected in her work and uses multimedia installations to this end.[4]

Development captures the unexpected in new ways as she creates a version of a site-specific collaborative installation with the participation of 36 artists. The show can in fact be looked at as one piece of art presented as an installation and composed of different multimedia elements. Film as a medium for art and a site for creativity is at the center of the piece and becomes the carrier of creative thought. The collaborative aspects of the show reflect Hekla’s career, which is marked by interaction with other artists on many levels of the Icelandic art scene. Besides working as an artist, Hekla teaches at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and has curated exhibitions of other artists work. Furthermore, she was one of the founders of the influential Kling & Bang gallery in Reykjavík.[5] Her established relationships with other artists become an important function of Development.

Picture 1: This is a rough scetch of the installation from above. The curves in the top right and bottom left corners represent the curving of the walls which end where the curve meets the outer line. The other end of each wall is at each square’s opposite corner. The image is courtesy of the Museum’s webpage. http://hafnarborg.is/en/exhibition/development/.

Walking into a large space of 380 square meters the museum guests are greeted by what first appears to be a large white sculpture. It is in fact an installation of four rooms divided into two halves, which fills almost three-fourths of the hall. It soon becomes apparent that these are movie sets, one white and one black. Guests are not guided through the space in any particular way. Instead, the show invites inspection of the space at the visitor’s convenience. The space is located on the second floor of the museum. On the lower floor is an exhibition of the work of artist Hanna Davíðsson, whose work in decoration, painting, and drawing from the early 20^th century creates a sharp contrast with Hekla’s modern installation.[6] The floors are parquet and the ceiling is rises to a high beam. Facing the entrance is a long and tall, partially curved white wall and a raised white floor. The floor is strewn with white pedestals in various sizes, tripods, lights and one camera. In the middle of this set hangs a very large white sphere, around one and a half meters, suspended from the ceiling. Moving around the sculpture one comes to a small doorway in its side. Half of the doorway is painted white, but after that the wall is painted black. Inside is a small editing room filled with equipment and unused films. Further along is the other half of this structure, identical to the white set except painted entirely black. It has a similar black sphere hanging from the ceiling, but less filmmaking equipment and no pedestals. Outside this space stand two black monoliths. Moving past this black set one is greeted by another door as well as a tall pedestal on which stands a 16mm projector. It is projecting into the small theater on the other side of the doorway. Inside is a conventional, if very small, cinema complete with red leather chairs on loan from the National Film Archive.[7]                                                                      

Pictures 2 and 3: The black and white sets.

The silent film shown repeadetly throughout the day, in this small cinema is composed of black-and-white segments, each of them around two and a half minutes, roughly the length of one 100 foot 16mm Kodak spool each. Every segment is created by an artist or a performance group following simple rules: they are allowed to use one black and white film roll and must use the black and/or white sets built by Hekla in the museum. In the days before the opening 9 artists took turns individually bringing their creative input to her sets and adding their voices (or rather visages) to the film.[8] A few of the participants are generally known for video art, but their techniques and focus varies from one to the next. This makes their joined parts variegated and distinct from each other in execution and subject matter.

Picture 4: Inside the editing room.

This set, editing room and cinema sculpture becomes its own contained black and white universe into which artists are invited to participate, bringing their own artistic vision into Hekla Dögg’s rule-bound world. The product is then edited and exhibited right in this same space, and even though it is brought out of the sculpture, to a lab for photocemical processing. The editing room thus binds these tree areas together and the process into a totality in the middle of the space physically, and in the middle of the temporal process from shooting to viewing. Visitors are invited into the piece as well to view the result of this merge from the safety of the familiar cinema seats. The only things that are not either black or white in the piece are these seats ant the yellow boxes around the film cartridges and a few other objects in the editing room. The red color of the chairs, seen despite the dimness inside the cinema, accentuate the spectators place as an outsider, invited into this domain and watching from an outside point of view. The very act of watching, situated inside the piece, therefore becomes a part of the art-performance itself. Spectators become participants in a performance of creation and reception. Without them the self-contained universe would collapse.

Picture 5: The projectionist preparing to change reels. On the other side of the projector is the entrance to the cinema.

After the opening of the exhibition, more artists joined the creation and both asked and were asked to participate by filming their own contribution in the same rule-bound manner. These parts to the piece were filmed both when the museum was closed and when it was open, depending on the artists time and caprice. Some of these became performances in themselves, though the act of filming them was the main focus. Each time the piece was added to the end of the collection/film, making it four reels, each comprised of 9 rolls, by the time the show was closed on February 15th. As more and more artists joined the creation they became a somewhat more diverse group. The original group consisted of artists in circles close to Hekla herself, often related to Kling & Bang Gallery which she co-founded. By the end of the show a total of 36 collaborators from a wide spectrum had added their voices and an interesting cross-section of the Icelandic art scene at this time had been carved.

The participating artists experimented with a medium not familiar to most of them in the process of making this installation and by asking them to do this Hekla posed questions as to the nature of filmmaking and production as an art form within the museum institution. She contacted friends within the film industry in Iceland asking them to join the project, however, they were unwilling to participate according to the artist, who was present in the exhibition on both of the days I went there. The divide between filmmaking and the art world that she encountered and questioned in this piece is a prevalent one in Iceland. Filmmaking and video production are not included in the Academy of the Arts, which has widened the gap between these two areas, which would seem to overlap. Further, Hekla brings the cinema into the museum space and establishes it as a place to witness art. The red chairs, brought into the space and expanding it beyond the common and simple viewing hall prevalent for video art and normally containing only of one black bench at the far end of the room.

Hekla questions the relationship between cinema and museum, but it can be argued that there is another gray area in her piece. In a sense there is a question about the nature of curating art and film to be found in the execution of this piece. Through her personal vision Hekla brings together artists and arranges their work in an order. However, the resulting film is in fact put together almost randomly. Each of the artists chose a time to film their contribution, and Hekla edited these parts together according to the order they were shot in. This creates an uncertain element in the piece and some randomness in the films construction. Is Hekla then an artist curator?

In relation to this is may be of use to look at Terry Smith’s book Thinking Contemporary Curating (2012) where he situates the artist-curator historically and criticizes the blurring of these boundaries. Smith comes to the conclution that the artist curator negatively subverts the appropriate relationship between artist and institution.[9] Hekla’s ambiguous relationship with the institution comes from her arrangement of other’s work, yet this is in the interest of her own artistic vision, and thus can rather be likened to a collaborative piece than a curated one. The question is an interesting one though.

This question can be argued both ways and could perhaps be a topic for a much longer paper. For now, Development can at least be called a thought-provoking piece that questions creative space and its own nature of becoming. By blurring boundaries and examining the function of creative spaces Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir created a compelling exhibition in Hafnarborg museum. The searching nature of her show Development thus finds moments in the unpredictable as other artists bring their unique creative talents into her prepared and rule-bound universe.

 

Picture 6: The artist on her set.

Work Cited

Hafnarborg online. “Development – Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir.” Accessed march 1, 2015. http://hafnarborg.is/en/exhibition/development/

Iceland Art Center. “Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir.” Accessed march 1^, 2015. http://icelandicartcenter.is/people/artists/hekla-dogg-jonsdottir/

“Nýr Safnstjóri Listasafns Reykjavíkur,” Reykjavík city official website, May 4, 2015.  http://reykjavik.is/frettir/nyr-safnstjori-listasafns-reykjavikur

Smith, Terry. Thinking Contemporary Curating. 2nd ed. ICI Perspectives in Curating. No. 1. Independent Curators International: New York, 2012.

Further reading of interest

Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir. http://this.is/hekla/

Hafnarborg. “Spark – Hanna Davíðsson.” http://hafnarborg.is/en/exhibition/spark-hanna-davidsson/

Appendix: The 36 Collaborators in Development – in the order of their participation

Kolbeinn Hugi Höskuldsson

Claudia Hausfeld 

Sigurður Guðjónsson

Erling Klingenberg 

Gjörningaklúbburinn (The Icelandic Love Corporation)

Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir 

Unnar Örn J. Auðarson

Hannes Lárusson

Rakel Gunnarsdótt

Hulda Stefánsdóttir

Sara Björnsdóttir

Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir 

Curver

Sunneva Weisshappel

Klāvs Liepiņš

Halldór Úlfarsson

Aki Asgeirsson

Páll Ívan Pálsson

Haraldur Jónsson 

Óskar Kristinn Vignisson 

Auður Ómarsdóttir 

Sigga Björg Sigurðardóttir 

Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir

Hrönn Gunnarsdóttir 

Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir

Ragnar Kjartansson

Bjargey Ólafsdóttir

Sirra Sigrún Sigurðardóttir

Lukka Sigurðardóttir

Þórdís Aðalsteinsdóttir

Ilmur Stefánsdóttir

Ólafur Sveinn Gíslason

Páll Banine 

Katrín I. Hjördísardóttir

Magnús Helgason

Anne Rombach

---

[1] In a recent article about the museum director on the Reykjavík city’s official website , the museum was touted as an important and influential part of the Icelandic art scene. “Nýr Safnstjóri Listasafns Reykjavíkur,” Reykjavík city official website, May 4, 2015.  http://reykjavik.is/frettir/nyr-safnstjori-listasafns-reykjavikur

[2] In Iceland, people are always referred to by their first names (sometimes their middle names as well) since surnames are a parent’s first name.

[3] “Development – Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir,” Hafnarborg online, accessed march 1, 2015, http://hafnarborg.is/en/exhibition/development/

[4] “Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir,” Iceland Art Center, Accessed march 1^, 2015. http://icelandicartcenter.is/people/artists/hekla-dogg-jonsdottir/

[5] . “Development – Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir,” Hafnarborg online, http://hafnarborg.is/en/exhibition/development/

[6] The fact of their positions as women in the Icelandic art world is also worth noting. This creates another contrast as their work is devided by circa 100 years of (women’s) history. This also marks 100 years of women’s sufferage in Iceland.

[7] According to the museum director, Ólöf Kristín Sigurðardóttir, from whom I got a guided tour of the exhibition. Full disclosure; she is my mother.

[8] See appendix for a full list of collaborators.

[9]Smith, Terry. Thinking Contemporary Curating. 2nd ed. ICI Perspectives in Curating. No. 1. Independent Curators International: New York, 2012.