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| David Claerbout | Media
Test Wall | The Dean's Gallery |
David Claerbout, Sections of a Happy Moment, 2007
Yvon Lambert, Paris/New York; Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Anvers; Hauser & Wirth,
Zurich/London; Johnen/Schöttle, Cologne/Berlin/Munich
David Claerbout
(February 8-April 6, 2008)
Opening Reception: Friday, February 8, 2008, 5-7PM
Conversation between artist David Claerbout and LVAC curator Bill
Arning
5-6PM, Bartos Theatre
This is the first museum survey exhibition of works by Belgian artist
David Claerbout. Since 1996, Claerbout has explored the boundaries
and overlaps between video and still photography, blurring the line
between the still and the moving image. He digitizes found photographs
and then introduces moving elements, and with them, time. He also
uses digital video to create mini-narratives set in buildings or
urban spaces that play on the changing light and passage of time
to interrogate "the substance of time."
Influenced by phenomenology, David Claerbout has developed a body
of work that challenges our habitual perceptions, testing the limit
of all forms of visual reproduction in his endeavor to transport
reality. "I belong to a generation of artists that has problems
with the aura of the art object, and that's why I work in a medium,
digital video, historically associated with mass culture," says
the artist.
David Claerbout is designed and organized by the Centre
Pompidou, Paris, France where it was on view from October 2, 2007-January
7, 2008. Centre Pompidou Curator of New Media Christine Van Assche
is the curator of the exhibition. The exhibition will travel to the
Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (May-June 2008); and to the De
Pont Foundation, Tilburg, The Netherlands; and the Metropolitan Museum
of Photography, Tokyo, Japan in 2009.. The exhibition is accompanied
by a catalogue published in two separate editions: one French and
one English by JRP/Ringier. The 170 page illustrated publication
was jointly produced by the Centre Pompidou, Paris with the MIT List
Visual Arts Center and the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg.
The catalogue features essays by Raymond Bellour, Françoise Parfait,
Dirk Snauwaert, and Christine Van Assche.
Support for David Claerbout has been generously
has been provided by Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, Switzerland;
Minister for Culture, Youth and Sports, Flemish Community; Nimoy
Foundation; the Council for the Arts at MIT; the Society of Friends
of Belgium in America; and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Media Sponsor: Phoenix Media/Communications Group.
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Media Test Wall:
Mary Lucier
January 14-March 7, 2008
Arabesque (2004)
(Single-channel video, 6:57 minutes)
Viewing Hours: Daily 24 Hours
Image courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix
Mary Lucier’s single-channel video work, Arabesque, is part of her
larger five-channel installation, The Plains of Sweet Regret (2004),
which was originally commissioned by the North Dakota Museum of Art.
In Arabesque’s opening sequence, a bull ridden by a cowboy charges
out of a holding pen into a rodeo arena. The heaving animal throws—and
nearly tramples and gores—the rider until rodeo clowns manage to rescue
him. The bull then kicks free of its traces, lopes away, and stops to
survey the situation.
Three more sequences featuring different bulls and riders follow. However,
the image is now split, mirrored, and slowed. Lucier’s Rorschach Test
footage doubles, converges, and separates in a kind of measured ballet.
Throughout the video, the artist underscores her kaleidoscopic, slow
motion images with George Strait’s plaintive country-western song, I
Can Still Make Cheyenne, in which a woman loses her man to the rodeo
life as he travels the circuit without her. Lucier’s Arabesque is a
moving and beautiful dance of color and sound.
About the Artist
Mary Lucier was born in Bucyrus, Ohio in 1944. She received a B.A.
from Brandeis University in 1965, and moved to New York City in 1974,
around the time that she began working in video. She has been the recipient
of many prestigious awards including the Skowhegan Medal for Video,
a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an American Film Institute Independent
Filmmaker Grant. She has also received grants from the National Endowment
for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. She has been
artist-in-residence at Capp Street Project, San Francisco, and the Television
Laboratory at WNET/Thirteen, New York; and has taught at New York University,
the San Francisco Art Institute, the Cleveland Institute of Art, Minnesota
College of Art and Design, and the School of Visual Arts, New York.
Lucier’s solo exhibitions include those at North Dakota Museum of Art,
Grand Forks; the Lab at Belmar, Lakewood, Colorado; The Carnegie Museum
of Art, Pittsburgh; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; Capp Street Project,
San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum
of Art; and Madison Art Center, Wisconsin. Her work has also been exhibited
in group shows at festivals and institutions including the American
Film Institute National Video Festival, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum
of American Art Biennial Exhibition, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam;
The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Artspace, Sydney; Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Lucier lives
and works in New York City.
The Media Test Wall, an ongoing series of contemporary
video exhibitions, is located in the Whitaker Building (21 Ames St.,
Bldg. 56) on the MIT campus.
This presentation of the Media Test Wall is generously
supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Council
for the Arts at MIT, and the Robert and Maurine Rothschild
Fund.
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The Dean's Gallery
Robert Mapplethorpe’s ‘Y Portfolio’
October 29, 2007 – February 29, 2008
Robert Mapplethorpe, BUDS (LILY), NYC, 1977
silver print
Throughout his body of work, Robert Mapplethorpe interrogates
classical notions of beauty, a concern which surfaces as
much in his flower imagery as in his infamous nude portraits
and photographs of pop icons.
On view in The Dean’s Gallery are thirteen examples of Mapplethorpe’s
early studies of flowers, known as the Y Portfolio. Throughout
his career, Mapplethorpe photographed flowers in order to
develop his skills with the camera and lighting techniques,
and to illustrate more classical ideas of beauty. The
exhibition presents images, from negatives made in 1977 and
1978. Much of Mapplethorpe’s other works, specifically his X
Portfolio and his Z Portfolio, have been controversial
due to their explicit content, but the subtlety of the works
on view often resonates more powerfully, possibly because
of what is suggested but not shown.
Born in 1946 in
New York City, Robert Mapplethorpe is one of the most prominent
and skillful photographers of the 20th Century. Though initially trained in painting and sculpture,
Mapplethorpe has focused on the medium of photography since
the mid 1970’s. He passed away due to complications
from AIDS in 1989, at the age of 42.
[Press
Release]
The MIT List Visual Arts Center organizes three exhibitions per year in the Dean's Gallery at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The artwork is drawn from the LVAC's collection. |
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MIT List Visual Arts Center