Electronic Media Gallery

Read up on the artists and films currently on view in the museum's Electronic Media Gallery:

Buoy
Seoungho Cho, b. 1959, Pusan, South Korea
2008, 7:11 min., color, sound

The barren landscape of Death Valley, California, recorded by Cho from a moving car, provides the texture of Buoy. As the title suggests, this work reflects on the extremes of this desert, which was once the floor of a vast sea. In contrast to the horizontal landscape, which floats endlessly past Cho's camera, vertical forms pattern the imagery, creating an axis between the natural landscape and Cho's composition. Cho accumulated his Death Valley footage over several years; the patterning hints at the collapse of this footage into a continuous but disconnected drive through the desert, a tense meditation on the nature and cost of isolation and the loneliness of integrating into a landscape other than one’s own.

Face of the Earth
Vito Acconci, b. 1940, New York, NY
1974, 22:18 min., color, sound

In Face of the Earth, Acconci's face becomes a metaphor of the mythic American landscape as he moves in and out of filmic stereotypes. Eyes closed, his face filling the screen in close-up, he inhabits a dreamlike, theatrical space. Alternately humming and whispering, Acconci begins a hypnotic narrative, stream-of-consciousness fantasy of a gunfighter in the American West. "As if I were riding in from over the mountains... Where did I come from?" His fingers run over the landscape of his face in the rhythm of a galloping horse as the narrative tension builds. With language as a catalyst, he conducts an examination of his own identity through American cultural mythologies, not simply stereotyping, but reflecting on his own experience with the real and imagined landscape.

The influential, provocative and often radical art-making practices of Vito Acconci have evolved from writing through conceptual art, bodyworks, performance, film, video, multimedia installation, and architecture. In the 1970s, he produced a remarkable body of conceptual, performance-based film and video works, in which he engages in an intensive psycho-dramatic dialogue between artist and viewer, body and self, public and private, subject and object. He currently teaches at Brooklyn College in New York.

Déserts
Bill Viola, b. 1951, New York, NY
1994, 26 min., color, sound

Viola's self-conscious collage is a real and spiritual reflection on the essence of place, ranging from the Great Salt Lake to the urban landscape to the sea floor. Déserts was created to accompany a live performance of the work of avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse (1885-1965). The Ensemble Modern, a contemporary music group based in Frankfurt, commissioned Viola to create a visual score for Varèse's Déserts after discovering notes by the composer referring to an unrealized image component of his composition. Varèse's composition uses taped sound collages that interrupt the live music, and Viola visually develops the structure through bolts of lightning striking the bass line, field fires rising in intensity with the music, and a contemplative analysis of a man in slow motion, reinforcing the metaphysical concept of the landscape. In one sequence a table is overturned, and bowls and jugs fall in slow motion. Spinning, they disgorge their contents in fractal patterns.

Viola’s works often focus on universal human experiences, and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and is best known for his significant body of work in multi-media installation, which he has been creating for over thirty-five years.