The show will fill Moderna Museet's temporary exhibition area
as well as seven rooms in which the museum normally shows works
from the permanent collection of contemporary art. The temporary
exhibition space measures 1,050 square meters (11,300 square
feet) and will be used for displaying McCarthy's large installations.
The single-channel works will be exhibited in several areas
using different display modes: on monitors in The Guard House,
a separate exhibition space adjacent to the museum, on screens
in The Studio, which is the museum's study center, and in screening
programs that will be projected in the cinema. States af Petersens,
"Our goal is that all of his video works should be availableÉ.
He has made maybe 60 hours of video--at least."
"We will have a resource area with a couple of computers where
you can sit down and select among his worksÉ. But some of them
I believe need to be seen in historical context, in the curated
context of a room, inside the exhibition. We have a cinema that
we will use. And then there will be those monitors connected
to computers that will be in a space we call The Studio, by
the seaside entrance."
The exhibition format for the video works in the galleries will
most likely be DVD. For permanent video displays Moderna Museet
normally connects the projectors or monitors in the galleries
to a hard drive on which the work is stored. For a temporary
exhibition such as the McCarthy survey, encoding and storage
requirements may make hard drive playback difficult.
In a study room, a large number of McCarthy's single-channel
works will be available on computers. The initial idea was to
store all the works on one hard drive so that all the works
could be available from any one of the computers. As af Petersens
explains, "There is a coding process that has been done so that
they can be on the hard drive, and then you can select from
the computer screen. But unfortunately that coding process is
quite expensive and it also means that the information has to
be compressed, and sometimes you can see the pixels. In addition
to this it would be difficult to fit 60 hours of video on the
hard drive; the storage capacity would not be enough." Instead
the presentation question might be resolved by having one DVD
on each computer holding a smaller number of works. With this
model there would be six different programs that can be accessed
from each computer.
Having several video installations in the same space will not
be a problem in terms of sound, according to af Petersens. The
curatorial team considered using sound showers (parabolic speakers),
but ultimately decided against them. According to af Petersens,
"Sometimes [the potential for sound overlap] can be solved in
other ways. I think that sometimes low volume is a good solution.
Some works demand high volume, but not all." Even though the
volume will be kept low, the works will still be audible once
the visitor approaches them. Headphones may be used with some
of the single-channel video works shown on monitors. The installations
will all be exhibited with amplified sound.
Benches or chairs will be used sparingly. Some seating may be
available for durational video works, but will not be placed
in the installations, as this would contribute an additional
architectural element not intended by the artist.
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Paul McCarthy Case Study