From Fluxus to Media Art
Maya Stendhal Gallery
March 6 - May 24, 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 6, 6-8pm
Maya Stendhal Gallery is pleased to present From Fluxus to
Media Art, a special selection of artists working in a range
of media including film, video, sculpture, conceptual performance, and
digital technologies. On view will be work by Jonas Mekas,
George Maciunas, Fluxus, George
Brecht, Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik,
Shigeko Kubota, and Studio IMC.
The exhibition offers a wider view of the history of media art, exploring
many of its defining attributes in the pioneering practices of artists
during the 1960’s. This time observed a radical shift when artists,
strongly influenced by the anti-art practices and objects of Marcel
Duchamp and Dada and theories of Surrealism,
challenged established modes of value and interpretation. Critical artworks
and films in combination with rare and original archival material shed
new light on the interrelated, avant-garde activities of various artists
whose sensibilities to new technologies of their time and multi-media
foundations expanded the scope of artistic practice for later artists.
Highlights include the international Fluxus art movement of the
1960’s comprised of artists who, through shared interdisciplinary
interests, collectively explored the creative possibilities that occur
between genres including art, performance, literature, non-narrative film,
and music. Also featured will be Fluxus contemporaries Jonas Mekas
and Andy Warhol whose unconventional approaches to filmmaking
helped established film as an art form.
As early as the 1950’s, leading avant-garde filmmaker Jonas
Mekas was experimenting with new technologies, developing his
signature diaristic approach and in-camera style of editing. Nearly 60
years later, he continues to be at the helm of digital innovation with
his website www.jonasmekas.com. The website witnessed
Mekas’ relentless commitment to the art of film through his ambitious
365 film project. Drawing from old and recent footage,
he released one film each day throughout 2007. For the exhibition, Mekas
personally selected films from this collection capturing the creative
impulses and interdisciplinary interests of key Fluxus members with appearances
by its charismatic Chairman and Impresario George Maciunas,
Shigeko Kubota, Nam June Paik, Ben
Vautier, as well as Andy Warhol.
On view for the first time is Mekas' new 9-monitor video installation
Fluxus & Warhol (2008), part of an engaging
series of works that reshape his film diaries for a different social space
facilitating interaction among viewers. Measuring 40 inches, these monitors
represent the latest innovation in Westinghouse digital technologies.
Revealed in text presented intermittently between frames is Mekas’ “assessment
of the similarities between Maciunas and Warhol
based on his personal
empathy for both artists as well as his understanding of their work.”
The exhibition also marks the release of a new collection of
40 film stills entitled Warhol Series #1
by Jonas Mekas. Spanning a remarkable 609 x 80 cm. in
its entirety, the collection presents a penetrating look into the life
and career of artist Andy Warhol. Produced in edition
of 10, these still images capture Warhol during the early days of his
Factory with Baby Jane Holzer, vacationing at his estate in Montauk, Long
Island with friends Lee Radziwill, and the 1971 retrospective at the Whitney
Museum of American Art when he covered the walls with his novelty cow
wallpaper.
Founded in 1955 by Mekas and his brother Adolfas, the New York based magazine
FILM CULTURE was widely considered the foremost
resource on independent and avant-garde cinema during its 41 years of
publication. It penetrated deep into the currents of the experimental
underground cinema community through landmark articles on film theory
and technique, interviews, symposiums, and manifestos. On view will be
hand-written notes, drawings, original photographs, and letters describing
the conception of FILM CULTURE no. 45 published
in 1967, an essential source to understanding the shifting impulses happening
in art during this time. Maciunas, at one time the magazine’s design
director, executed the graphics and images find subject in Warhol’s
photographs of Factory members including Edie Sedgwick,
Nico, Baby Jane Holzer, The
Velvet Underground, and others. Film historian and critic Amy
Taubin writes “It is an amazingly “filmic” volume,
in which Maciunas and Warhol’s shared penchants – for series,
repetition, and for images produced through the layering of various reproductive
technologies – completely dovetail.”
Also on view will be a special version of Fluxus founder George
Maciunas’ Fluxfilm Anthology, personally compiled
by the artist for Jonas Mekas’ birthday in 1968. This rarely exhibited
edition has complimentary footage not included in the Anthology Film Archives
version. Maciunas’ ambitious collection summarizes Fluxus’
playful, yet critical engagement with film. Through a humorous and minimalist
approach, key Fluxus members Nam June Paik, Yoko
Ono, George Brecht, and others created what
has been aptly termed as “anti-films.” These
works called into question the medium’s inherent attributes by subverting
all notions of traditional film narrative, leaving meaning open-ended,
and letting chance influence outcome.
Also showing will be Warhol’s landmark experimental film Empire
(1964). Produced with the help of Jonas Mekas who also worked
the camera, the film presents New York City’s Empire State Building
filmed for 8 hours and 5 minutes on the night of July 25-26. Lacking any
traditional narrative, Empire is an observation of the passage of time
sensed as the iconic structure materializes forth when day turns to night,
and in the flashes of light that signal each new roll of film. Warhol
stated that the film’s point is to “see time go by.”
Shot at a speed of twenty-four frames per second, footage is projected
at a slower speed of sixteen frames per second lengthening its running
time.
As a music student, George Brecht studied under avant-garde
composer John Cage whose radical theories on composition,
along with the “readymades” of Marcel Duchamp
would play a pivotal role in his artistic development during the 1950’s
and 60’s. On view will be Brecht’s minimal “event
scores,” words and short instructional phrases printed
in black ink type on small white card stocks, designed by George Maciunas
and central to Fluxus performances. Open and generative, these seemingly
simple works embodied Fluxus’ “death of the author”
notion giving way to a range of possibilities that could take place during
their enactment, susceptible to the individual viewer’s own subjective
interpretation.
Nam June Paik’s experiments in performance, composition, and film
during Fluxus served as background for his groundbreaking work in television
and video. Film and media art curator John Hanhardt writes, “Paik’s
investigations into video and television and his key role in transforming
the electronic moving image into an artist’s medium are part of
the history of the media arts.” He prophetically coined
the term “Electronic Superhighway” in the
1970’s. On view will be Majestic (reset1996),
a video sculpture originally created in 1975. Incorporating two historically
important objects of media and technology, Paik placed a small television
set inside an antique radio as if to playfully negotiate with the viewer’s
audio and visual senses.
Artist Shigeko Kubota, employing a diaristic approach
to video, was one of the first to utilize an electronic medium as a means
of artistic expression in the late 1960’s. Joining traditional sculpture
with the moving image, she conveys the personal, spiritual, and creative
aspects that motivate her in life and in art. On view is Nam
June Paik II (2007), a towering metal sculpture of her late
husband and artistic collaborator. Footage portraying the couple over
the years plays on monitors throughout Paik’s body, singularly representing
a creative partnership that helped legitimized video as an art form.
Fluxus artists compelled their activities into the fabrics of society,
encouraging participation from their viewers. Guided by this same principal,
Studio IMC artists James Tunick, Tony Rizzaro, and Eric
Alini created IMCtv, an interactive platform
for information sharing and free speech where the users’ views and
actions generate meaning and content. Dynamic images and text generated
from text messages and votes cast to free speech bulletins by viewers,
web images, and live news feeds construct a real-time portrait of our
digital culture.
Leading visionaries of avant-garde cinema receive an honorary place in
the exhibition. Rotating on a single screen will be Luis Buñuel’s
surrealist work Un Chien Andalou (1929) written
in collaboration with Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp’s characteristically
Dada film Anemic Cinema (1926), Hans Richter’s
experimental breakthrough Rhythmus 21 (1921),
and Fernand Léger’s modern masterpiece Ballet
Mécanique (1924).
Special thanks to the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center, Vilnius for loan
of George Maciunas’ Fluxus archives and materials related to Film
Culture no. 45, the Andy Warhol Museum for loan of Empire,
and Amy Taubin, Ken Friedman, and Julia Robinson for their significant
contributions in research and scholarship.
For further information please contact:
Maya Stendhal Gallery | 545 West 20th St. | New York, NY 10011
T 212.366.1549 | F 347.287.6775 | email
gallery@mayastendhalgallery.com
www.mayastendhalgallery.com
| www.jonasmekas.com
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