Visual Art

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) was born in Kleve, Germany. After serving as a volunteer in the German military, Beuys attended the Dusseldorf Academy of Art to study sculpture, where in 1959 he became a professor. Much of his artwork reflects his attempt to come to terms with his involvement in the war. During the ’60s, Beuys became acquainted with the group Fluxus and artists such as Nam June Paik.

Fred Tomaselli’s mosaics and collages compose patterns and images that suggest ancient global influences. His materials, however, are products of modern consumption, addiction, bodily abuse, and pleasure: pills, nicotine patches, bandages, and the like. The surfaces are coated with a lacquered veneer, making these mundane sources of highs or healing gleam. Interview by James Rondeau. A historical interview originally recorded in 1999 and re-edited in 2007.

Perceptual concerns predominate in my videoworks. In Locating #2, Zeroing In, and Points of View, large outdoor spaces — as much as five miles in depth and one mile in width from fifteen floors up — are spanned on the video screen. Space is flattened and contracted. By placing a prop (a movable tube or a piece of cardboard with holes that open and close) in front of the camera, I block off most of the static camera view, leaving one or more circular images to come and go.

"A trance is a state of detachment with aspects of the ecstatic. Paradoxically, a trance can be induced by a surfeit of input or by its deprivation... In Anthony Discenza's Object 8242600, television imagery is reduced to a flood of unanchored signifiers reorganized as a motive mosaic."

—Steve Seid, Pacific Film Archive

This film originated as an expanded portrait of artist Carol Bove as she created four monumental sculptures commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One week after filming began, New York City went into its first pandemic lockdown. Filmed against the backdrop of the progressing pandemic, Medium evolved into a meditation on materiality and the artist as a medium through which ideas move into the world.

A short portrait of artist Anne Truitt (1921-2004). The film consists of an interview and 16mm footage made in and around her studio at the Yaddo artist colony, as well as footage from her home studio in Washington D.C.  Rather than an attempt to depict her art, which is in many respects un-photographable, the core of the film is found in Truitt speaking about the course and meaning of her work. Says Cohen, "I was honored to know Anne Truitt, and doubly so when she allowed me to make a short record of her presence and thoughts.

A 19th Century etching of a bedroom in the Palace of Versailles is animated and depicts the room in the midst of an earthquake. Every detail, from the moldings to the small figures in the hung paintings, trembles. Eventually all the elements — objects, furniture, decorative features — fall and pile-up on the floor. The once crowded walls are left empty, with only a few lines signifying the space. As the objects fall and break, their initial significance is questioned. The once strong, solid symbols of power and glorification fall and break to useless shreds on the floor.

Jack Tworkov (1900-1982) was an important member of the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters and was, for a number of years, head of the Yale University art program. During the Depression, Tworkov worked for the WPA Federal Art Project, and became friends with artists such as Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and Mark Rothko; their work was the foundation of the New York School of painting.  Late in his career, his work became more geometric, as the mark and gesture was increasingly determined by isometric grid structures.

In Excerpts from Behold Goliath, Tom Kalin presents four experimental short films inspired by American writer Alfred Chester (1928-71), who in 1964 published a collection of short stories of the same name. Each of Kalin's films, Some Desperate Crime on My Head (2003), The Robots of Sodom (2002), Every Evening Freedom (2002), and Salad Days (2004), devotedly exploits Chester's words with computer voice-synthesizers, and juxtaposes them with music, film and hand-drawn images.