Exhibition Sections

• Lost Illusions: Dismantling the Dream Factory

  The first segment of the exhibition presents works that criticize the power and prestige of Hollywood’s “Dream Factory” era of the late 1930s and reflect a period of decline that followed in the American film industry. Hollywood had reached its peak in 1939 with classics such as Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, and The Wizard of Oz. From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, artists and filmmakers created works that provided an alternative to the glamorous view of Hollywood presented in the mass media. The photographs of Weegee and Dennis Hopper and films such as Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963) went behind the scenes of the film industry to reveal its sinister and more human sides. Artists such as Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Ray Johnson, and Andy Warhol used images of movie stars from posters, promotional photos, and film stills to simultaneously reveal and critique our fascination with celebrity. Mimmo Rotella, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus examined Hollywood’s effect on the lives of everyday people in the broader American and European landscapes and cityscapes, narrowing the gap between cinema and the average moviegoer.

• Cinema Degree Zero: Testing the Limits

  The title of this segment refers to the French philosopher and critic Roland Barthes’s text Writing Degree Zero, which describes a form of writing stripped to the bare essentials of language, signaling a similar condition in cinema. During the 1960s and 1970s, both artists and filmmakers sought to test the limits of art by reducing it to the most fundamental elements of expression, such as light, color, shape, and material. The work in this segment brings art and film (and the relationship of the two) to a “zero degree,” a point at which cinema focuses on the process of making film itself. “Structuralist” and reductivist filmmakers such as Peter Kubelka, Michael Snow, Paul Sharits, and Tony Conrad, and artists such as Andy Warhol (in his 1964 film Empire) rejected the use of film as a narrative, storytelling medium, choosing instead to stress the structure of a film as it is experienced over time. This emphasis is apparent in works from more mainstream filmmakers, such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). Artists such as Fabio Mauri and Carolee Schneemann used film in performance-based works (in which a live person, usually the artist, was present) that expanded the use of film as a medium to occupy physical space.

• Rear Window: Fragments of the Cinematic Past

  The title of this segment, taken from the famous 1954 Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window, indicates the tendency of artists to look back at the history of cinema to comment on issues in art, film, and contemporary society. It also evokes the Hitchcock film’s central theme of voyeurism-deriving erotic pleasure from the act of watching-with artists such as Cindy Sherman, Victor Burgin, Douglas Gordon, and Judith Barry examining this theme as it figures in various Hollywood feature films.

  Other artists represented in this segment use the “tableau”-a common element in 18th- and 19th-century paintings involving elaborate staging of dramatic events-in film. In the 1960s and 1970s, directors such as Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and Akira Kurosawa, among others, used the tableau to bring cinema closer to more traditional art forms such as painting. Artists working in the last decade, including Douglas Blau, Sharon Lockhart, and Jeff Wall, have reversed this practice, using the staging found in films in their photographs and installations.

  The work of Cindy Bernard, Stan Douglas, Chris Marker, and Ed Ruscha emphasize otherwise forgotten aspects of cinema such as silent film, the locations where films are shot, and the scratches and spots that accumulate on the film surface. Bernard and Ruscha, for example, concentrate on cinematic elements that are either unseen or taken for granted by the viewer (such as the background landscapes or the leader of a film, which assists the projectionist in changing film reels), calling our attention to the importance placed on human interactions in feature films. Douglas and Marker approach silent film from different perspectives to comment on film’s place in contemporary culture. Douglas has used actual silent film footage to express nostalgia, while Marker’s simulated silent films demonstrate our ability to fabricate what appear to be “historical” documents with the advanced technology available to us today.