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Video
Acts: Single Channel Works from the Collections of Pamela
and Richard Kramlich and New Art Trust
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York
November 10, 2002 - April 13, 2003
Video Acts was an exhibition of
performance-based single-channel video from the collections
of Pamela and Richard Kramlich and New Art Trust. The
exhibition took place at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
in Long Island City, New York, from November 10, 2002
through April 13, 2003. The 134 works in this major exhibition
spanned the mid-1960s through 1998 and demonstrated an
ongoing relationship between video and performance.
Among the artists represented in the exhibition
were Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Vito Acconci, John Baldessari,
Dara Birnbaum, Peter Campus, VALIE EXPORT, Dan Graham,
Gary Hill, Joan Jonas, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Nam
June Paik, Tony Oursler, Pipilotti Rist, Martha Rosler,
Bill Viola, and William Wegman.
The exhibition was unique not only in its
scale—134 historical works by 24 artists—but
also in its exhibition strategy: each of the works was
presented continuously and simultaneously on a separate
monitor or as a projection. The exhibition was also notable
for its depth of representation of certain artists.
Video Acts was organized by Klaus
Biesenbach, then P.S.1 Chief Curator (currently Chief
Curator of the Media Department at The Museum of Modern
Art, New York), with Barbara London, Curator in the Media
Department at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and
Christopher Eamon, Curator of the Kramlich Collection
and Director of New Art Trust. All of the works were selected
from the collection of video works in the Kramlich and
New Art Trust collections in San Francisco.
A 312-page catalogue of the exhibition
included essays by Biesenbach, London, and Eamon, and
interviews with Abramovic, Acconci and Jonas. A smaller
version of the exhibition traveled to the Institute of
Contemporary Art (ICA), London, in 2003.
Describing the exhibition's
distinctive design and strategy, Klaus Biesenbach commented,
"We were working exclusively with single-channel video,
but we were showing a lot of works, and we basically tried
to show each work on a separate playing device, projected
or on a monitor. So we were simultaneously and continuously
showing all of the works. Each of the works was looped
on its own screen, which was very important, because it
was about the performative idea of the work.
"You could experience the works wherever
you decided to put your focus. You were not directed by
a screening schedule, with one work that starts at 3:45
and the next at 3:50, etc. You could freely move between
the works, and that was a very important aspect of the
show from a display point of viewÉ.
"We were thinking of the idea of a library.
So it was like a workstation. It emphasized that it was
nearly an archival report, showing as many of these works
as possible.ÉWe didn't create a movie theatre, we created
almost a mediatheque. It was hopefully viewer-friendly,
but we tried to accommodate something that would express
both the archival nature of curatorially going through
so many works and presenting so many works, but also allow
for the works to be viewed in private and with integrity.
So we had headphones, we had benches, we had books. We
tried to merge all these different aspects that sometimes
seemed difficult to connect, and I felt that this display
succeeded in that."
According to Christopher Eamon, "It was
a very simple idea: treat each thing on its own, which,
at the time of its making, it was. The exhibition had
such a profound effect; it was like a school or like a
museum. And everyone could visit it over and over again
and pick and choose, and have a whole course on early
performance video.
"The real interesting thing, though, is
that there's a reason that it hadn't been done before
on that scale: it's incredibly expensive to do it that
way. It was not a cheap exhibition. Multiply the costs
of high-quality DVD presentation by 134 works. And then
you have the playback equipment and the monitors. So that's
two more things multiplied by 134.
"We [New Art Trust] made a huge commitment
to work that is mostly distribution material. ...The amount
put into it was many times the value of what that work
is worth in financial terms, like maybe five times. But
it was really a joy, and culturally important. A show
like that-it should be the trumping feature, whether a
show is culturally important."
Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection
Pamela and Richard Kramlich hold one of
the world's largest private collections of video and new
media art. They first began collecting video-based art
in the early 1990s. The Kramlichs' holdings today include
over 60 installations and 100 related photographs, paintings,
and objects. The collection also includes over 200 single-channel
video works, many of which are seminal pieces from the
1960s and 1970s. The media-based installations include
video as well as other projected or moving-image media
(including slides and film installations) from the 1960s
to the present.
The Kramlich collection includes early
pieces by important figures such as Vito Acconci, Dara
Birnbaum, Dan Graham, and Bruce Nauman, as well as works
by leading contemporary artists including Matthew Barney,
Stan Douglas, Steve McQueen, Mariko Mori, and Jeff Wall.
Thirty media-based installations from the Kramlich collection
were the focus of a major exhibition at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art (October 1999-January 2000), titled
Seeing Time: Selections from the Pamela and Richard Kramlich
Collection of Media Art.
New Art Trust
The New Art Trust was founded in 1997 by
the Kramlichs to advance the media arts through the support
of research and scholarship in the field. New Art Trust
has participated in the preservation and presentation
of hundreds of significant time-based media works and
has supported professional symposia in the area of preservation
and conservation of media art, including the TechArcheology
symposium at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in
2000. They have a partnership with Bay Area Video Coalition
of San Francisco, the only nonprofit video and audio preservation
center in the United States.
New Art Trust partnered with San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
and the Tate Gallery in London to further develop public
education and research related to the public presentation
and long-term care of media art. Curators, conservators,
registrars, and media technical managers from New Art
Trust, MoMA, SFMOMA, and Tate formed the Matters in Media Arts
consortium to establish best practice guidelines for care
of time-based media works of art (for example, video,
slide, film, audio, and computer-based installations).
The first phase of this project focused on the loan process
for media installations.
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, an affiliate
of The Museum of Modern Art, is the oldest and second-largest
nonprofit arts center in the United States solely devoted
to contemporary art. Recognized as a defining force of
the alternative space movement, P.S.1 stands out among
major arts institutions for its cutting-edge approach
to exhibitions and direct involvement of artists within
a scholarly framework.
P.S.1 was founded in 1971 by Alanna Heiss.
Today, P.S.1 operates two internationally acclaimed spaces
for contemporary art: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in
Long Island City and the Clocktower Gallery in Lower Manhattan,
both of which contain museum-quality galleries and extensive
studio facilities.
P.S.1 is devoted to the production, presentation,
interpretation, and dissemination of the work of innovative
artists in all media, fostering creativity and uninhibited
artistic exploration. Its focus includes recognizing the
work of emerging artists, placing disparate media into
new and meaningful contexts, and defining alternative
movements and endeavors.
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