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"Reprocessing Information: Utilizing Information as Landscape, Medium and Commentary"
2003-08-30 until 2004-02-08
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco, CA, USA

From August 30, 2003, through February 8, 2004, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present Reprocessing Information, an exhibition of artworks that employ information as both primary subject and medium. Organized by Benjamin Weil, SFMOMA curator of media arts, the presentation will feature works by Ant Farm, Anthony Discenza and Pierre Huyghe. Their video pieces explore the pervasiveness of the mass media in contemporary life and the ways in which mediated information influences what we perceive as “the real.”

Ant Farm, Media Burn, 1975

Formed in 1968 and most active between 1973 and 1977, Ant Farm (Chip Lord, Hudson B. Marquez and Doug Michaels) was an influential Bay Area collective that explored the experimental fringe of architecture, design and media arts. Their work combined irreverent pop humor with cultural and political critique and a keen understanding of the public’s (and the media’s) hunger for spectacle. One of their best-known works was Cadillac Ranch, 1974, a group of 10 Cadillacs buried fins-up in a field off Route 66 in Texas.

Media Burn, another legendary Ant Farm project, was a series of performances recorded on single-channel video in which the members re-created major media events, casting themselves as the primary participants. The videos parodied television news programs and humorously questioned the notion of reportage: Was the footage inspired by the events it documented, or was the camera’s presence the primary motivation for the staging of the event? This exhibition will feature a large-monitor projection of the Phantom Dreamcar episode filmed on July 4, 1975, in which a Cadillac is driven through a wall of burning television sets. It is part of SFMOMA’s media arts collection.

Anthony Discenza, November, 2002

Bay Area artist Anthony Discenza uses compressed television footage to produce his audio/video installations. His finished works are so radically sped up and compacted that his original sources are barely recognizable, let alone classifiable as news, sitcoms or commercials. Via this high-speed info-overload, the artist seeks to lull spectators into a kind of suspended and blurred reality, or what he calls “a dreamlike space in which the complexity of real-life events and situations becomes subordinated to the narrative logic of the ‘spectacle.’” Simultaneously seductive and schizophrenic, his work calls attention to the intensively constructed nature of our mass media—its speed, constant repetition and staggering volume.

The featured work, November (on loan courtesy of Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco), is a double projection that runs in a continuous loop. To create it, Discenza culled imagery and audio from pre-recount television news coverage of the November 2000 presidential campaign. Faces and text flash by and disappear in the blink of an eye; the major news events of two years ago barely register as blips on the artist’s metaphorical radar screen.

Pierre Huyghe, The Third Memory, 1999

The Third Memory (part of SFMOMA’s media arts collection) exemplifies Pierre Huyghe’s continued interest in the convergence of reality and fiction, memory and history. It is a complex installation that retraces Sonny Wartzik’s famous bank robbery of August 22, 1972, which inspired the classic film Dog Day Afternoon. Wartzik was an ordinary citizen who, driven by passion and an improbable motivation (to raise money for his boyfriend’s sex change), elicited the first-ever real-time broadcast of a crime. The news broadcast that day even superseded network coverage of the Republican convention, in which Richard Nixon was campaigning.

The central component of The Third Memory is a split-screen video projection that combines footage from Dog Day Afternoon with synchronized commentary by Wartzik, who reenacts the robbery and comments on the feature film’s veracity. The installation also includes newspaper clippings and TV shows from just after the robbery. Huyghe’s strategic juxtapositions enable him to deconstruct the ways in which subsequent news and Hollywood coverage have reshaped even the original participants’ recollections of “actual” events. On one occasion, for instance, Wartzik makes a revealing slip of the tongue by referring to something that happened “in the real movie.”   

Huyghe was recently featured at SFMOMA as one of the primary artists responsible for No Ghost Just a Shell, a major multimedia project that brought to “life” a generic manga character named Annlee. Huyghe won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2002 and has produced an extensive body of work that ranges from film to photography, video, sound, computer animation, sculpture, design and architecture. He lives and works in Paris.

SFMOMA’s Education Department and The Seventh Art film series will present a variety of programs and public lectures to further enhance visitors’ experience of this exhibition. Additional program information will be provided in a separate press release and on the Museum’s Web site at www.sfmoma.org.

IMAGE
Pierre Huyghe
still from The Third Memory, 1999
Collection SFMOMA,
purchased through a gift of The Art Supporting Foundation
and the Accessions Committee Fund


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