For this exhibition, the Media Arts Watch gallery is a screening room with projected works by Terence Gower, Juan Downey, and Alexander Kluge. These three artists work within and against the conventions of documentary film and video, pointing to the genre’s limitations while also positioning new ways for using the moving image to represent history and culture.
First shown on German television in 1988, Alexander Kluge’s Changing Time (Quickly), 1988, pairs news images with documentary and musical sound recordings to stage a history of Germany from the late-nineteenth-century to World War II. Shuttling between different types of historical events, Changing Time encourages viewers to question what makes an event historically significant.
In Hard Times and Culture: Part One, Vienna ‘fin-de-siecle,’ 1990, Juan Downey creates an alternative television travelogue of the Austrian city, focusing on the social, political, intellectual, and artistic upheavals of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-centuries, including the outbreak of World War I, the emergence of psychoanalysis, and the architectural marvels that line the city’s famed Ringstrasse.
Like Downey, Terence Gower analyzes architecture to understand the culture of a place. Gower’s video, Ciudad Moderna, 2004, reveals how modern architecture and design function as a cultural fantasy by using clips from the 1968 film, Despedida de Casada, to enliven architectural sites from Mexico City and Acapulco.