AROUND AMERICA IV: MARKING TIME, MAKING SPACE
Curated by Beth Stryker
Beirut Art Center
Nov 11, 2009
Artists
Matthew Buckingham, Oliver Herring, Gordon Matta-Clark, Ana Mendieta and Alex Villar.
Following on the imperative of Matta-Clark and his fellow anarchitects to "[make] space without building it," the artists in this screening perform critical, spectacular, and spatial interventions at various scales: of the body, the building, the city, and the landscape. Utilizing the moving image as a tool in the marking, mapping, and etching of site, these works explore America both through an examination of those spaces which are overlooked (the voids and the gaps which don't appear in master plans), and through a study of the ways in which the act of cartography impartially inscribes and describes nation and place.
Matthew Buckingham
Muhheakantuck-Everything Has a Name
2003, 40 minutes, color, sound, 16mm film on video.
Courtesy of Murray Guy Gallery
Originally presented as screenings in 2003 onboard a NY Water Taxi navigating the Hudson River, Buckingham's film explores the social and political impact of the relatively brief but violent period of contact between Dutch colonists and the Lower Hudson River Valley's indigenous Lenape people. By examining how maps are constructed, how places are named (and thereby owned), and what stories are left silent, the film exposes the consequences of Henry Hudson's journey. Buckingham's narrative reminds us that "The river that became known as the Hudson was not discovered--it was invented and re-invented." "Muhheakantuck-Everything Has a Name" juxtaposes two related modes of representation--historical narrative and geographic mapping--and asks whether the practices of history and cartography are adequate to describe it as a space and place.
Oliver Herring
Waterloo Street
2007, 4:20 minutes, color, sound, video.
Courtesy of Max Protetch Gallery
Waterloo St. documents a performance Herring staged with local kids in a rough North Philadelphia neighborhood as part of his Task improvisatory workshops. Task's open-ended, participatory structure provides a framework for unexpected interactions between the children and the city, transforming structures and spaces through play, turning parking lots into swimming pools.
Gordon Matta-Clark
Splitting
1974, 10:50 min, black & white and color, silent, Super 8mm film on video.
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
This film documents the major building cut performed by Matta-Clark on a house on Humphrey Street in Englewood, New Jersey in 1974. One of a number of Matta-Clark's interventions into abandoned urban structures, the work reflects Matta-Clark's concern with the non-monumental, what he called the "non-u-mental." Trained as an architect, Matta-Clark practiced and was a proponent of "Anarchitecture" - "making space without building it."
Ana Mendieta
Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Anima, Silhouette of Fireworks)
1976, color, silent, Super 8mm film on video.
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong
"Anima, Silueta de Cohetes" is one of a series of performances Ana Mendieta undertook and documented while a student at the University of Iowa. Informed by her identity as a Cuban exile living in the US, her "Silueta" series marked Mendieta's interventions in the landscape, etching traces of her body through various means. "Anima" records the artist's wicker effigy exploding with fireworks at night-time, an act at once of inscription and erasure.
Alex Villar
Temporary Occupations
2001. 6 minutes, silent, video.
Courtesy of the Artist
Temporary Occupations depicts a person running on the sidewalk in New York while ignoring the city's spatial codes and therefore resisting their effects upon the organization of everyday experience. The clips in the video register situations of temporary invasion and occupation of private spaces located in a public setting. The action simply articulates the continuity of these spaces with the remaining areas from which they were extricated, drawing attention to, and possibly subverting, the boundaries that demarcate them.
More Info
About the Participants
BEIRUT ART CENTER
Jisr El Wati - Off Corniche an Nahr. Building 13, Street 97, Zone 66 Adlieh. Beirut, Lebanon.
E: info@beirutartcenter.org
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Beirut Art Center (BAC) is a non-profit association, space and platform dedicated to contemporary art in Lebanon.
