Exhibition at Guggenheim Museum:Video as an art form

Installations: Selections from the Guggenheim Collections analyzes the audiovisual medium through seven essential works to understand this expressive form of contemporary art.

I-Be Area. Photo: Guggenheim Museum

Following the 2008 exhibition Installations: Selections from the Guggenheim Collections, this presentation investigates the ways in which contemporary artists have used video to create sites of immersion and discovery.

The seven works in the exhibition have been acquired by the Guggenheim during the past five years, attesting to the museum's ongoing commitment to this vital field of contemporary art, all works. The exhibition will be opened until January 10th, 2010.

From its first uses in the late 1960s, video has played an important role in artists' explorations of self and society, providing a unique means of harnessing real time and space that has become increasingly sophisticated as technologies have advanced over the decades.

These installations offer a glimpse of the diverse range of themes and styles that occupy artists working with video today. In Zidane, a 21st century portrait (2006), Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno create a cinematic portrayal of soccer player Zinedine Zidane in real time over the course of a single match.

Slater Bradley's The Doppelganger Trilogy (2001-04) also focuses on icons of popular culture, conjuring the ghostly presence of musicians Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis, and Michael Jackson through the distancing lens of desire and memory.

Ryan Trecartin's feature-length video I-Be Area (2007) offers an entirely different take on the role of media icons in contemporary culture, looking to the internet, where new identities and communities can be constructed virtually, propelling even the most common of us into a self-made spotlight.

Mika Rottenberg, too, invents a sort of virtual reality in Dough (2006), creating an absurdist assembly line in which a cast of characters -including a woman grotesquely overweight and another who is eerily thin- mold and package raw dough. The function of fantasy that is implicitly referenced in Trecartin's and Rottenberg's works is brought to the fore in Cao Fei's video Whose Utopia (2006). This semi-documentary plumbs the realities of daily life at a massive Chinese light bulb factory, portraying the grinding monotony of its machinelike labor while also giving voice to the fantasies of its workers, who dance and play music amidst the factory spaces as if in a dream.

Isaac Julien's Paradise Omeros (2002) extends this dreamlike ambience, employing a richly imagined, elliptical narrative to explore the social, political, and emotional terrain of postcolonialism. Finally, in Link (1995-2000), Mariko Mori transports the audience to a space of contemplation through a 360-degree, four-channel video projection that documents a series of performances in major cities and archeological sites around the world. In each location, the artist lies dormant in her signature "body capsule." These acts, when witnessed together in the installation, unify the various sites across boundaries of time and place, aiming to create a transcendent, utopian space.