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The Week in Germany: Culture February 29, 2008 New Exhibit Examines the Dream-Like State Induced by Cinema
From the seemingly peaceful sleep of the poet John Giorno, whom Andy Warhol filmed for over five hours in 1963, to the darker recesses of the imagination or the digital dreamworlds of video artists of 21st century, “Dreams,” the first part of the new moving-art exhibition by the Hirshhorn Museum, “Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image,” explores how cinema affects our perceptions of what is real and what is an illusion through works by range of influential and emerging international artists, including some from Germany.
These days, we no longer need to go to a movie theater to experience
cinema; film, as well as television and the internet, have become part
of our daily lives. This idea is underscored in the work Rheinmetall/Victoria
8 The process of projecting or the projection itself becomes the subject matter in British artist Anthony McCall’s work You and I Horizontal. With the help of a fog machine, the projection turns into 3-D curvilinear planes of light. Visitors who stand directly in these beams will enjoy the sculptural qualities achieved by the hazy light.
Similar to the way a DJ takes a few beats of a song and scratches out an entire rhythm, German artist Christoph Giradet used scenes from the 1933 movie “King Kong” to create a work titled Release. The artist has drawn out the frenzied cry at the moment when Fay Wray first sights the colossal beast into nightmarish, twitching scenes with screeching sounds. In another room, British artist Darren Almond utilizes strobe effects, trancelike imagery, and electronica music in his work. The eeriness of the footage, which was taken in an old-fashioned Geisterbahn, or haunted house amusement park ride, in Vienna, is heightened by the abstract, minimalist soundscapes of the Berlin music artist Stefan Betke, a.k.a. Pole, who became known for his work in the glitch genre.
Some works in the exhibition delve into dreamscapes created through digital technology that are reminiscent of the early days of video games, while yet others blur the lines between reality and fiction or documentary and feature films. The large-scale projection of the Niagara Falls by German artist Wolfgang Staehle appears to be in “real time.” Meanwhile, the seemingly “actual” reflections of Berlin that British artist Tacita Dean shows in the bronze mirrored windows of the Palace of the Republic no longer exist, since that building, the former seat of the East German Parliament, is in the process of being dismantled.
Whether a moviegoer or consumer of today’s media searches for a temporary escape from “reality” or seeks to learn more about the world around us, one remains suspended between belief and doubt in what we see and between our desires to be informed and yet also entertained. The exhibition ends with American artist Siebren Versteeg’s digital double portrait in which, as the title states, the individual is neither completely present nor entirely absent in the two representations. The individual is using a hand-held electronic device while particles of him flow from each screen into the other as part of a closed-circuit transmission. This image also serves as an apt depiction of modern-day man’s relationship to the ever-changing technological and media-centered world we live in. “Dreams,” part one of the exhibition “The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image,” runs through May 11 at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Part two is titled “Realisms” and will begin June 20. Links: |
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