Mar. 22–June 5, 2005

Birnbaum manipulates footage from popular television shows to isolate and analyze constructions of gender identity in the media. In Kiss The Girls: Make Them Cry (1978) Birnbaum isolates a cavalcade of introductions from television’s Hollywood Squares to fashion a portrait of actors struggling to differentiate themselves with a mere “Hello;” the repetition of their gestures exposes stereotypes of Hollywood self-presentation. In Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman  (1978–79), through stutter-stop editing of video fragments, Birnbaum traps Wonder Woman in a constant cycle of transformation, endlessly spinning through repeated bursts of light. In the pre-home-video era, the trapping and recontextualizing of TV imagery to expose archetypes was a progressive artistic strategy to, in the artist’s words, “manipulate a medium which is itself highly manipulative.”

In Super Mario Movie, Cory Arcangel and his collaborators hacked into a 1980s era video game cartridge and reprogrammed the data into a 15-minute movie that uses all of the original game graphics. Arcangel recasts Super Mario, removing him from his mythic journey full of challenging puzzles and heroic acts, and stranding him in a new world full of glitches. Super Mario finds himself in an alternately barren or hyperdense environment of nonsensical imagery that is disintegrating around him—a narrative that parallels the real-life fate of technologies as they are supplanted by newer models. Arcangel’s use of vintage games as the source of his work is neither ironic nor critical. In the artist’s mind, it is logical for a generation who came of age in the 1980s: “I have seen more TV and video games than anything real in my life, therefore when I make something I know of no other language to use.”

June 7–Aug. 14, 2005

Peter Fischli/ David Weiss’ film The Way Things Go (1987–88) unfolds as a sequence of actions and reactions created by a massive Rube Goldberg-like “living sculpture” made from found objects. The pace of this chain reaction is deliberately slow, each chemical or physical reaction methodically activated by the breaking down or collapse of the previous scenario. In isolation, the events could appear accidental, but when shown in sequence, the viewer realizes each movement is meticulously choreographed. Fischli/Weiss worked for more than a year to make this film; its labor-intensiveness underscores the tension between the chaos of a thing continually falling apart and the planning and control required to make it happen.

John Wood/Paul Harrison’s Twenty Six (Drawing and Falling Things) (2002) presents performance vignettes in which the artists use their bodies and various props to realize pseudo-scientific demonstrations. They craft research experiments for themselves, testing specific aspects of endurance, physics, visual perception, and the limits of the body. Their deadpan demeanor dovetails with the absurdly logical or logically absurd nature of their actions. But the experimentation is not entirely serious, as both artists play straight man to the comedic overtones of the constructed situations. They may set these varied actions in motion, but in the end they are at the mercy of the forces they exploit.

Fischli/Weiss and Wood/Harrison are in control in the closed environment of a studio; but in the world, we are all subject to natural and physical forces—quite literally gravity and combustion, or more poetically mortality and entropy.  In the end, both works speak to the duality of power and powerlessness inherent to the human condition. We may cause events that affect others, but at the same time we are often subject to forces beyond our control.

Aug. 16–Oct. 9, 2005

Nam Jun Paik begins Global Groove, by imagining the future: “This is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow when you will be able to switch on any TV station on the earth.” Broadcast originally on public television, Global Groove is a synthesis of video footage and the frames race past like so many channels surfed on cable Television. The video contains sequences devoted to avant-garde personalities as well as appropriated imagery of performances from around the world. Paik envisions “a weekly TV festival of music and dance from every county,” that would “have a phenomenal effect on education and entertainment”—a buffet of art, culture, and information to counter the limited diet of commercial television

Today, global culture reaches our living rooms largely through the steady stream of television news. Omer Fast’s CNN Concatenated uses raw CNN footage to build a commentary on media’s role in sensationalizing and essentializing events. The artist edited and spliced hours of CNN footage into one-word snippets, creating a lexicon of 10,000 words. He manipulates CNN’s talking heads word by word, replacing their reports of kidnappings, bombings, health scares, and severe weather watches with his own monologue of doubt, ambiguity, and fear. He inserts emotion and intimacy into the customary detached neutrality of news casting; confronting and enticing the viewer, his anchors voices what goes unspoken in regular television news.

In an era increasingly defined by political, social, cultural, and personal interconnectedness, television plays a singular role in bridging our personal experiences to the world at large. Paik and Fast ask us to consider how television shapes the messages we receive, both opening up and closing down our understanding of the world, and to be aware of our own capacity to control what we see and know.

Oct. 11–Dec. 4, 2005

In Bill Viola’s work, lingering observational shots of animals build into a meditative rhythm that transcends documentation to serve the power of perception and transformation, the existence of inner and outer worlds, the intertwining of consciousness and memory, and the visualization of physical and mental landscapes. For Viola, observation of nature has the power to key us into primordial feelings as it reinforces innate connections to the earth and our “pure existence.” He literalizes this transcendent worldview, filming his own visage as reflected in the black pupils of the animals that populate the video, thereby affirming his own existence and place in the natural order.

With a style of animation that mixes drawn elements with collaged photographic and video footage, Zon Ito and Ryoko Aoki manipulate imagery of the natural world to imagine a hypothetical third space, not of reality and not of fiction, but an intermingling of the two. Inspired by a childhood spent in observation of the miniature natural worlds tucked inside of our own human world, Ito and Aoki’s work embodies a kind of hallucinatory seeing. Through their eyes, one can imagine a simple object as a myriad other things, like a tangle of disused electrical wire that can become a jumping rope, or snakes looped around one another, or a frame through which to see the landscape. The fluidity of line that defines their work exposes the interconnectedness of the natural order as images melt into one another and morph between beings and landscape, a continual cycle of transformation.

Both works use the fodder of the world that surrounds us to reveal the fundamental connection we have to our environment, allowing us to meditate on the abiding sense of mankind’s place in the totality of nature.

Dec. 13, 2005–Jan. 29, 2006

Anri Sala’s dual video projection Blindfold (2002) depicts an incidental occurrence on the street in the Albanian capital Tirania and in an outlying village. Blinding sunlight reflects off the aluminum surfaces of empty billboards, its intensity virtually unnoticed by passersby. The billboards become inhabited by an abstract brilliance burning through the mundane realities of urban life, an insertion of the sublime into the everyday. Yet the people are too involved in the details of crossing the street or distracted by cell phone conversations to witness this miraculous visitation.

Edgar Arceneaux’s installation Blocking Out the Sun (2004) is a slide show through which the artist records his response to a series of beatific, sun-drenched landscapes. In most of the images, the artist’s hand or thumb blocks out the sun. This gesture is both a romantic insertion of the self into a sublime landscape and an allusion to the hand of God, seeming to impose darkness or spark creation. The reference has perceptual implications as well, mimicking the astronomical practice of covering the sun to measure clarity in the atmosphere and predict conditions for solar observation. Arceneaux’s gesture of obfuscation may be a metaphoric reference to our inability to fully or directly comprehend natural phenomena, suggesting the human condition of making sense of the world by confronting the unknown through art and science.

Since humankind first recorded the world in images, the sun and its light have been used as symbols, from the spark of knowledge to the purity of the spirit, from the source of all energy to a home for deities. Modern and ancient civilizations invented solar myths and fables to make sense of their world and inexplicable phenomena. Today despite our greater understanding of the sun’s scientific properties and its effects, the human capacity to marvel at the sun’s beauty and powerful symbolism remains.

General support for the exhibitions and programs at Carnegie Museum of Art is provided by grants from The Heinz Endowments and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.