Ken Feingold

Biography

Since he began working in film and video in the early 1970s, Ken Feingold has explored a complex discourse on the representation of the Other. His examination of the relation between the self and the real, as reflected in media images and new technologies, has led to an inquiry into the subjective observation of cultural otherness. In recent years, Feingold has produced a series of complex interactive installations that merge advanced interactive computer applications with theoretical strategies.

In early works, modelled on Lacanian psychoanalytic and semiotic theory, Feingold constructs episodic sequences of linked images and sounds as "semi-narrative signifying chains" that mimic unconscious thought processes. Juxtaposing appropriated broadcast television footage with original material, he constructs non-fiction texts whose meaning and structures emerge as a meta-language of associations in "the spaces between the images, open[ing] up directly into the unconscious." Unfolding without narration, these ordered visual sequences become charged systems of signs, evoking the linguistic devices of metaphor and metonymy as condensation and displacement.

Feingold has travelled for extended periods through Asia and India, and the subjective visual records of his journeys address his role as a Western observer of other cultures. As reflected in the title of his series Distance of the Outsider (which he terms "postmodern ethnography" or "visual anthropology"), Feingold questions the relation of the videomaker, subject and viewer, and the cultural politics of "looking and watching... being the one with the camera."

Feingold was born in 1952. He received a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. He is the recipient of grants from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts; in 1988, he was awarded the N.E.A.'s United States/Japan Exchange Fellowship. Feingold has taught at Princeton University, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and Cooper Union. He was artist-in-residence at the San Francisco Art Institute and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among other institutions. His work has been exhibited internationally, at festivals and institutions including the Berlin Film Festival; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; National Art Museum of China, Beijing; Mediations Biennale, Poznań; ACE Gallery, Los Angeles; Wrocław, as part of the 11th WRO Biennial; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; World Wide Video Festival, The Hague; The Asia Society, New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. He lives in New York.