The Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester (MAG) continues the conversation on the art of the moving image through a new exhibition in its “Media Arts Watch” program, Reflections on Place & Culture: Downey, Gower, Kluge. “Media Arts Watch” is curated by world-renowned authority on the moving image, John G. Hanhardt, consulting senior curator of media arts for MAG.
Reflections on Place & Culture will run through June 18, 2017 and features the work of three artists: Juan Downey, Terence Gower and Alexander Kluge. These artists work within and against the conventions of documentary film and video, pointing to the genre’s limitations while also positing new ways for using the moving image to represent history and culture.
“This exhibition comprises historical, contemporary, and international works that represent innovative narrative and documentary strategies,” said Mr. Hanhardt. “They critically and creatively reflect on the idea of place and are some of the most influential video artworks to explore how we can represent history and our world today.”
First shown on German television in 1988, Alexander Kluge’s Changing Time (Quickly) 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,’ 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, 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.