2 - Kunstmuseum Basel

Tell It
To My
Heart
:
Museum für
Gegenwartskunst Basel
Film and video program
at Elaine MGK
and Stadtkino Basel
5. February —
7. May 2013

D E
Texts: Jason Simon (JS), Julie Ault (JA), Amy Zion (AZ) and Marvin Taylor (MT)
Translation: Barbara Hess and Gerrit Jackson
Research assistance: Rasmus Røhling
Copyediting: Quinn Latimer
Design: Ronnie Fueglister & Martin Stoecklin, studiosport.in
Print: Druckerei Dietrich, Basel
This brochure is published on the occasion of the exhibition
Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault at the
Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel (February 2 – May 12, 2013).
The film and video program was developed by Jason Simon
Generous support for this program was provided by the george foundation.
E i n f ü h r u n g
von Jason Simon
Das Film- und Videoprogramm, das die Ausstellung
Tell It To My Heart begleitet,
wurde parallel zur gleichzeitig stattfindenden
Ausstellung von Julie Aults Privatsammlung
im Museum für Gegenwartskunst in
Basel entwickelt. Viele Künstlerinnen und
Künstler, die in der Ausstellung gezeigt
werden, arbeiten medienübergreifend und
bieten uns so, ergänzend zu den Arbeiten
in den Ausstellungsräumen, einen vielseitigen
Einblick in ihre zeitspezifische
Produktionsweise. Manche Künstlerinnen
und Künstler der Ausstellung sind selbst
Thema von Filmen, was uns ermöglicht, ihre
Arbeiten anhand von ausführlichen Dokumentationen
ihrer Arbeitsprozesse und Kontexte
zu erleben.
Zusätzlich wurden Arbeiten mit bewegten Bildern
in das Programm aufgenommen, die Einblicke
in die gesellschaftlichen Kräfteverhältnisse
geben, von denen die künstlerische
Produktion beeinflusst wird — das Thema
zahlreicher Filme oder Videos; sie bieten
dem Publikum die Möglichkeit, einzelne Werke
im Museum zu einem übergreifenden Bewusstsein
in Beziehung zu setzen, das die Filmemacher
erfasst haben. So entstand auf ebenso
organische wie stringente Weise ein Programm,
das zu einer alternativen Version
der gesamten Ausstellung wurde und sich aus
Aults langer Beschäftigung mit kreativen
Praktiken ergab.
I N T R O D U C T I O N
by Jason Simon
The film and video program accompanying the
exhibition Tell It To My Heart developed
in parallel with the concurrent show of
Julie Ault’s personal collection at the
Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel. Many of
the artists featured in the museum exhibition
work across media, thereby offering us
a rich selection of their own time-based
production, in addition to the works seen in
the galleries. Other artists included in the
show are themselves the subjects of films,
allowing their works to be experienced with
the benefit of these expanded records of
their process and context. And still additional
moving-image works that offer a
view on the social forces affecting artistic
production, the subject of many films or
videos, are included in the program, allowing
our audience to bridge individual works
in the museum to a shared consciousness
captured by the filmmakers. In this way a
program emerged, at once organically and
rigorously, that began to add up to an
alternate version of the entire exhibition,
itself drawn from Ault’s long engagement
with creative practices.
Key to such a program is the existence of
Elaine as a distinct viewing space. With its
own history as the former Plug.in, an
independent electronic media workshop and
screening room, Elaine now stands as a
bridge between the museum’s contemporary-art
Die Existenz von Elaine als separatem Vorführraum
ist für ein solches Programm von zentraler
Bedeutung. Elaine, mit seiner eigenen Geschichte
als das frühere Plug.in, ehemals ein unabhängiger
Ausstellungsraum für Medienkunst, fungiert
heute als Brücke zwischen den Ausstellungsräumen
des Museums für Gegenwartskunst und einer sich
ständig wandelnden Landschaft künstlerischer
Produktionen, in der Performance und Video einen
wichtigen Anteil darstellen. Bei der Konzeption
dieses Programms war für mich die Erkenntnis
wichtig, dass nicht nur eine Brücke zum physisch
präsenten Museum geschlagen wird, sondern
auch zu einem historischen Verständnis für das,
was dort gezeigt wird — ein Vermächtnis, das
trotz der heutzutage global verstreuten Omnipräsenz
von Videos bewusst medienspezifisch bleibt.
Tatsächlich sind es gerade diese Verstreuungen,
die zu einer Sammlung wie diesen Videos im
Rahmen von Tell It To My Heart führen — Videos,
die eine Gruppe von Künstlerinnen und Künstlern
und ihre kreativen Vorläufer zusammenführen,
um uns an die künstlerischen Entwicklungen zu
erinnern, die alles prägen, was wir sehen.
Die Ressourcen und Geschichten von Tell It To
My Heart, die Elaine im Verlauf des Filmund
Videoprogramms füllen werden, bleiben einem
frühen Versprechen von Künstlervideos treu:
an Inhalten orientierte Ansprüche an die selektive
Aufmerksamkeit eines Publikums durch
alternative Mittel.
Die erste für das Programm ausgewählte Zusammenstellung
war das kurze Videoporträt Martin Wong
(1998) von Charlie Ahearn und Robert Youngs
Independent-Spielfilm Short Eyes (1977) nach dem
Gefängnis-Stück von Miguel Piñero aus dem Jahr
1974. Martin Wongs Gemälde Come Over Here
Rock Face (1994), das in der Museumsausstellung
gezeigt wird, entstand vor dem Hintergrund
seiner Beziehung zu dem Dichter und Dramatiker
Piñero und der Geschichten, die Piñero und
seine Freunde Wong über das Leben im Gefängnis
erzählten. Während Piñero eine zentrale Figur
des Off-Off-Broadway-Theaters in New York war,
ist Ahearn — seit seinem bahnbrechenden Film
über den frühen Hip-Hop, Wild Style (1982) – für
seine Film- und Videodokumentationen über die
New Yorker Kunst- und Musikszene bekannt; sie
erzählen die Geschichten von DJs und Tänzern aus
der South Bronx, die Teil der Downtown-Bohème
werden, während Letztere von der Lower East Side
bis zum East Village ihren eigenen Transformationsprozess
durchläuft. Dass man die Beziehung
dieser Geschichte der Medien, der Kunst und
des Theaters in Downtown New York zu Wongs Gemälde
— das in Aults Wohnung hing, seit ich
sie kenne — so intuitiv spüren kann, setzt
einen hohen Massstab für das gesamte Programm
in Elaine.
Insgesamt sind die Videos, die gezeigt werden,
thematisch, historisch und nach Affinitäten
gruppiert, die persönlicher sind, als es ihr
Inhalt selbst vielleicht vermuten lässt.
Sechs von ihnen stammen aus der Serie On Art and
Artists, die 1974 von Lyn Blumenthal und Kate
Horsefield begonnen wurde; es waren die ersten
Produktionen der Video Data Bank, einem inzwischen
führenden Vertrieb für Künstlervideos.
Zu diesen Videos gehören Arbeiten über Nancy
Spero, Andres Serrano und Ault selbst, sowie
drei Videos mit Lucy Lippard aus den Jahren 1974
bis 1987. Als Studentinnen am Art Institute
of Chicago interviewten Blumenthal und Horsefield
Künstlerinnen, die in der Galerienund
Museumswelt als feministischer Kontrapunkt
galleries and an ever-shifting landscape of
artistic production that includes, quite importantly,
performance and video. In conceiving
this program, it was important that I recognize
that such a bridge extends to both the physically
present museum as well as to a historical
understanding of what is shown there, a legacy
that remains, despite video’s globally dispersed
and multivalent ubiquity in the present day,
pointedly medium-specific. Indeed, it is just
such dispersals that prompt such a collection as
these videos within Tell It To My Heart, which
gather an artistic cohort and their creative
predecessors in order to remind us of the artistic
evolutions that inform everything that we
see. The resources and histories of Tell It
To My Heart that will populate Elaine over the
course of the film and video program follow
through on an early promise of artists’ video:
content-driven claims upon an audience’s elective
attention by alternative means.
The first pairing selected for the program was
the short video portrait, Martin Wong (1998)
by Charlie Ahearn, and the Robert Young independent
feature Short Eyes (1977), from the 1974
prison play by Miguel Pinero. Martin Wong’s
painting in the museum exhibition, Come Over
Here Rockface (1994), emerged from his relationship
with the poet and playwright Pinero, as
well as the tales Pinero and his friends would
tell Wong of prison life. And while Pinero
was a central figure of off-off Broadway theater
in New York, Ahearn is well known for his
film and video documentaries of the New York art
and music scene — beginning with his groundbreaking
feature on early hip-hop, Wild Style
(1982) — that tell the story of DJs and dancers
from the South Bronx entering a downtown bohemia
in the midst of its own transformation from
the Lower East Side to the East Village.
That this history of downtown media, art, and
theater can feel so viscerally bound to the
Wong painting, which has been hanging in Ault’s
apartment for as long as I have known her,
sets a high standard for the program at Elaine
over all.
As a whole, the videos to be screened are
grouped by subject, history, and affinities more
personal than the content itself may suggest.
Six are from the On Art and Artists series,
begun in 1974 by Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsefield
as the earliest efforts of the Video
Data Bank, now a foremost distributor of artists’
videos. These videos include works on
Nancy Spero, Andres Serrano, Ault herself,
and three with Lucy Lippard that span the years
1974 to 1987. As students at the Art Institute
of Chicago, Blumenthal and Horsefield set out to
interview women artists operating in the gallery
and museum world as a feminist counterpoint
to art-world patriarchy, as well as to accumulate
valuable information for their own practices
in painting and sculpture. In later years,
the University of Colorado at Boulder continued
the series under their own visiting-artist program,
and yet more titles were added by subsequent
producers in Chicago. Intended as spare
records of artists’ commentaries on their own
practices, the tapes were formative accounts of
counter narratives for artists to live by.
Two other videos sample American television as
late-twentieth-century investiture in consumption
at its prime: an episode of the 1980s popular
nighttime soap opera serial Dynasty (Season

D E
D E
zum Patriarchat der Kunstwelt wirkten, und sammelten
dabei zugleich wertvolle Informationen
für ihre eigenen Praktiken in Malerei und Skulptur.
In späteren Jahren setzte die University
of Colorado at Boulder die Reihe im Rahmen ihres
Gastdozenten-Programms fort, und spätere Produzenten
in Chicago fügten weitere Titel hinzu.
Die Bänder, gedacht als einfache Aufzeichnungen
von Künstlern, die ihre eigenen Praktiken
kommentieren, wurden zu prägenden Darstellungen
von Gegen-Narrativen, von denen Künstler
zehren konnten.
Zwei andere Videos sind Zusammenstellungen amerikanischer
Fernsehsendungen als Auseinandersetzung
mit dem Gipfel des Konsums im ausgehenden
zwanzigsten Jahrhundert: Eine Folge der
in den 1980er-Jahren beliebten abendlichen
Seifenoper-Serie Dynasty (dt. Der Denver-Clan,
Erste Staffel, Folge 9, Krystle’s Lie,
Part One) und The World of Liberace (Tony
Palmer, 1972). Dynasty war Teil einer wichtigen
Ausstellung des Künstlerkollektivs Group Material
und wird in Elaine zusammen mit meiner
Arbeit Vera (2003–2006) gezeigt, ein mit Unterstützung
Anderer produziertes Selbstporträt
eines leidenschaftlichen Käufers. The World of
Liberace hingegen wird zusammen mit House (after
five years of living) (1955) von Charles und
Ray Eames sowie Supersurface (1973), einem Film
des italienischen Architekten-Kollektivs
Superstudio, vorgeführt. In dieser Gruppe von
Arbeiten wird Liberaces Führung durch sein
extrem überladenenes Haus in Las Vegas kontrastiert
mit einer vorschriftsmässigen Selbstuntersuchung
des Raums, den die Eames bewohnen
und der auf dem Bildschirm bis auf das kalifornische
Licht und eine andächtige Aufmerksamkeit
für die subtilsten Ausstattungselemente
entleert ist, wie auch mit dem restriktiven
Vorschlag von Supersurface, in der Abwesenheit
von Architektur zu leben. Es handelt sich um
eine Sammlung gegensätzlicher Auffassungen, in
denen die zeitlichen Bedingtheiten und Psychologien
gestalteter Umgebungen bis zu ihren
logischen Endpunkten gesteigert werden. House
und Supersurface wurden bereits im Jahr 2000
in Outdoor Systems, indoor distributions zusammen
gezeigt; dies war die erste Ausstellung,
bei der Ault und Martin Beck miteinander kooperierten,
und ein Vorläufer von Tell It To My
Heart, da auch Outdoor Systems, indoor distributions
Kultur als im Zeitverlauf beschriebene
Verhältnisse von Nähe untersuchte.
Vier Beispiele für das Genre Kunst-im-Film sind
die überragenden Porträts von Künstlerinnen
und Künstlern, deren Werke ebenfalls in der Ausstellung
gezeigt werden: Golub von Kartemquin
Films (1988); Kids of Survival: The Art and Life
of Tim Rollins + K.O.S. (1996) von Dayna Goldfine
und Dan Geller; We Have No Art (1967) und
Mary’s Day (1964). Die beiden letztgenannten
Filme sind von Baylis Glascock und beschäftigen
sich mit der Kunst, der Lehre und den öffentlichen
Happenings von Sister Corita Kent.
Diese Filme sind Zeit- und Künstlerporträts
gleichermassen und erfassen die Auseinandersetzung
von Aults Sammlung mit dem Anspruch von
Kunst auf eine politische Stimme. In Kids of
Survival und den Glascock-Filmen geht es im
Wesentlichen um die radikale Pädagogik, die die
Künstler Corita (in den 1960er-Jahren) und
Tim Rollins (in the 1980er- und 1990er-Jahren)
als leidenschaftlichen Mittelpunkt ihrer
lebenslangen Arbeit mit zwei Generationen von
Studenten geprägt haben. Und als Künstler,
One, Episode 9, Krystle’s Lie, Part One) and The
World of Liberace (Tony Palmer, 1972). Dynasty
made an appearance in a key exhibition by the
art collective Group Material, and at Elaine it
is shown with my own Vera (2003–06), an assisted
self-portrait of a passionate shopper. The World
of Liberace, meanwhile, is screened with House:
After Five Years of Living (1955), by Charles
and Ray Eames, and Supersurface: An Alternative
Model For Life On The Earth (1973), by the
Italian architecture collective Superstudio.
This group of works contrasts the tour Liberace
gives of his radically overstuffed Las Vegas
home with a prescriptive self-study of the
Eames’s own living space depopulated on the
screen save for the California light and a rapt
attention to the subtlest of amenities, as well
as with the proscriptive proposal for living
in the absence of architecture in Supersurface.
It is a gathering of contrary proponents, in
which the temporalities and psychologies of
designed environments are taken to their logical
extremes. House and Supersurface were previously
paired in 2000 in Outdoor Systems, indoor distributions,
the first collaborative exhibition
by Ault and Martin Beck, and a precursor of
Tell It To My Heart in its inquiry into culture
as proximities described over time.
Four examples of the art-on-film genre appear as
exceptional portraits of makers in the exhibition:
Golub, from Kartemquin Films (1988); Kids
of Survival: The Art and Life of Tim Rollins +
K.O.S. (1996), by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller;
Corita on Teaching and Celebration: We Have
No Art (1967); and Mary’s Day (1964). The latter
two films are by Baylis Glascock, and both
focus on the art, teaching, and public happenings
of Sister Corita Kent. As much portraits of
their time as they are of their subjects, these
films span the Ault collection’s engagement
with art’s claim upon a political voice. Kids of
Survival and the Glascock films are centered
on radical pedagogies invented by artists Corita
(in the 1960s) and Tim Rollins (in the 1980s
and ’90s) as the passionate centers of their
life-long work with students a generation apart.
And as artists committed to bridging activism
with their work in painting and drawing, artists
and partners Leon Golub and Nancy Spero stand
as pater- and materfamilias of the 1980s generation.
In a period now recognized more for its
triumphant marketing of culture, but then experienced
as a politicized engagement with Reaganomics,
the US intervention in Central America,
and the AIDS crisis, Spero and Golub were
unassuming leaders.
The contemporary artists whose films and videos
accompany their works in the galleries are a
small sampling of Ault’s recent engagements.
James Benning, Sadie Benning, Alejandro Cesarco,
and Moyra Davey are polymaths that have been
subjects of Ault’s writing, teaching, and
curatorial work, while each has also extended
video’s role in the consideration of current
artistic practices to an extraordinary degree.
Davey and Cesarco have placed their readings
of literary history at the center of their
artistic lives, while father and daughter
Benning are each, separately, central to any
consideration of moving-image practice for their
respective generations. While other contemporary
artists in Tell It To My Heart would have
fit well in the program for their concurrent
video activity, these four also describe intersecting
axes that I take as central to Ault’s
die sich in ihrer Arbeit auf den Gebieten der
Malerei und Zeichnung dafür einsetzten, eine
Brücke zum Aktivismus zu schlagen, treten die
Künstler und Partner Leon Golub und Nancy
Spero als Pater- und Materfamilias der 1980er-
Jahre-Generation auf. In einer Zeit, die heute
eher wegen ihrer siegreichen Vermarktung von
Kultur anerkannt wird, damals jedoch als eine
politisierte Auseinandersetzung mit Reaganomics,
der US-Intervention in Mittelamerika und der
AIDS-Krise erlebt wurde, waren Spero und Golub
bescheidene Anführer.
Die zeitgenössischen Künstler, deren Arbeiten
in den Ausstellungsräumen durch Filme und Videos
ergänzt werden, sind eine kleine Auswahl, die
auf Aults aktuelle Beschäftigungen verweist.
James Benning, Sadie Benning, Alejandro Cesarco
und Moyra Davey sind interdisziplinär arbeitende
Künstler, die Gegenstand von Aults Texten,
Lehrtätigkeit und kuratorischer Arbeit waren,
wobei jeder von ihnen zugleich die Bedeutung von
Video bei der Betrachtung gegenwärtiger künstlerischer
Praktiken ausserordentlich erweitert
hat. Davey und Cesarco haben ihre Interpretationen
der Literaturgeschichte in den Mittelpunkt
ihres künstlerischen Lebens gestellt,
während Vater und Tochter Benning für ihre jeweiligen
Generationen in Fragen der Praxis
des bewegten Bildes eine zentrale Rolle spielen.
Obwohl auch andere zeitgenössische Künstlerinnen
und Künstler in Tell It To My Heart aufgrund
ihrer parallelen Video-Aktivitäten gut
in das Programm gepasst hätten, beschreiben
diese vier zugleich sich überkreuzende Achsen,
die aus meiner Sicht zentral für Aults kritisches
Projekt sind, Autoren im Prozess der Neubestimmung
ihrer Formen zu verorten.
Und schliesslich sind zwei Filme unmittelbare
sozialgeschichtliche Dokumente, die hier
für den politischen Impetus vieler Arbeiten in
der Ausstellung stehen. Memories of Underdevelopment
(1968) von Tomás Gutiérrez Alea —
der zusammen mit dem einzigen, selten gezeigten
Video »Untitled« (A Portrait) (1991) von Felix
Gonzalez-Torres zu sehen sein wird – und Target
City Hall (1989) von DIVA TV verbindet die
akute Auseinandersetzung mit Ereignissen, die
die Welt verändert haben: die Massenauswanderung
von Kubanern nach der kubanischen Revolution
in den 1950er-Jahren und ihre Auswirkungen auf
eine einzelne Person, die zurückbleibt; und eine
Schlüsselaktion von AIDS Coalition to Unleash
Power (ACT UP) in ihrem wirksamsten und letztlich
lebensrettenden Modus des Aktivismus.
Target City Hall könnte auch als Einführung für
den von Marvin Taylor kuratierten Abend dienen,
der die Downtown Collection of the Fales Library
der New York University vorstellt. Dort finden
wir weitere Fortsetzungen kreativer Biografien,
die von den Banden der Freundschaft und den
dazugehörigen Schwächen engagierter Existenzen
inspiriert sind.
critical project of situating authors in the
process of redefining their forms.
Finally, two films are direct records of social
history that stand here for the political
impetus of much of the work in the museum exhibition.
Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)
by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (which will be accompanied
by “Untitled” (A Portrait) (1991), the
single, rarely seen video by Felix Gonzalez-
Torres) and DIVA TV’s Target City Hall (1989)
share in-the-moment engagements with worldchanging
events: the mass exodus of Cubans
following the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s,
and its effect upon a lone character who remains
behind; and a key action by the AIDS Coalition
to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in its most effective
and ultimately life-saving activist mode.
Target City Hall also may serve as an introduction
to the evening, curated by Marvin Taylor,
that features the Downtown Collection of the
Fales Library of New York University. There we
find yet more extensions of creative lives
inspired by bonds of friendship and the attendant
frailties between lives so engaged.

Tuesday, 5. February 19.00 h Elaine MGK
Friday, 15. February 20.00 h Elaine MGK
K i d s o f S u r v i v a l :
T h e A r t a n d L i f e o f
T i m R o l l i n s & K . O . S .
1996. USA. Dayna Goldfine
and Dan Geller. 87 min.
Filmed in the South Bronx studio workshop
of Tim Rollins + K.O.S. over the course
of three years, Kids of Survival portrays
the workings of this combined classroom and
art studio during the production of some
of their most celebrated suites of paintings
and sculptures. In 1981, Tim Rollins opened
the workshop to the students of Intermediate
School 52, many of whom had few creative
opportunities open to them in the severely
disenfranchised neighborhood in which they
lived. By the mid-1980s, out of a network of
roughly seventy participating students to
date, a core group populated the film. This
included Victor Llanos, Carlos Rivera, Angel
Abreu, and Rick Savinon, all long-standing
members of K.O.S. who had begun working with
Rollins at the age of 13; some — Abreu and
Savinon, among them — continue to work with
Rollins to this day.
Rollins’s work with K.O.S. began while he was
getting a Masters in Education at New York
University, and just two years after he cofounded
Group Material. It is Rollins’s dual
effectiveness in teaching and art-making,
and his fusing them into a singular process,
that makes his project such a breathtaking
story. The teacher and artist’s method is
to ground the creative entire enterprise in
literature, emphasizing the experiential
value of great books equally among art works
and students who would not encounter these
texts otherwise. “We begin by cutting up the
text. We vandalize it, but we also honor it;
and we end up making it our own,” Rollins
states near the opening of Dayna Goldfine and
Dan Geller’s film.
Their moving-image work also focuses on
Rollins and K.O.S.’s engagement with the art
world. The studio, production supplies, and
salaries paid to the participants are derived
entirely by sales of their art works, obviating
what might have been an expected politically
motivated rejection of the market under
a banner of art as social production. It is a
tension that bleeds into discussions of the
cultural boundaries challenged by Rollins and
K.O.S. by their very practice. Felix Gonzalez-Torres
responded to some of these questions
in a statement from 1989: “The collaborative
process that leads to the creation of
the work — for example, the paintings based
on Animal Farm — is very significant. It is
through those discussions that Tim brings
important knowledge to the group, knowledge
that contextualizes the place of those kids
in history and in the world in general. It is
okay to live in the ghetto, but to be the
ghetto is dreadful.” (JS)
T a r g e t C i t y H a l l
1989. USA. DIVA TV collective. 27 min.
DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activist Television)
came into existence expressly to document
the 1989 ACT UP demonstration against New
York Mayor Ed Koch’s lack of response to AIDS
(he was mayor from 1978 to 1989). Following
this action, the group continued as an affinity
member of the larger coalition. The main idea
was to “grab a camera and document the activism
in your area.” The grassroots organization ACT
UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) had been
founded in 1987 to fight government indifference
and misrepresentation of AIDS. ACT UP created
hundreds of demonstrations, engaged in acts
of civil disobedience, organized education campaigns,
produced lobbying efforts, and infiltrated
research and policy organizations to
great effect.
Target City Hall is an energetic and emotional
record of preparing for the demonstration, of
the demo itself, and of its aftermath. We see a
crowded teach-in on doing civil disobedience,
in which people practice letting their bodies go
limp when the probability of arrest is high.
We watch animated demonstrators en route to converge
at Wall Street. Once there, demonstrators
who plan to put their bodies on the line form
a wide circle. They express fear, great emotion,
and camaraderie. An on-the-spot poll is conducted
about when they should lie down in the
street to block traffic. Should they risk physical
harm from the police with so few cameras
around, or wait for more media to arrive?
The decision count is tense, and the result is
“Now.” The demonstrators link arms and walk
single file into the street, shouting, “Health
care is a right—act up, fight AIDS.” As police
vans move in and arrests are made, moving
image shift into stills and Melanie’s anti-Vietnam
War protest anthem, “Lay Down,” accompanies
the images. “Lay down, lay down, lay it all
down. Let your white birds smile, at the ones
who stand and frown. We were so close, there
was no room. We bled inside each other’s wounds.
We all had caught the same disease. And we all
sang the songs of peace.” Testimonials expressing
excitement and resolve conclude the film.
Agitation has given way to enthusiasm: empowerment
is a stimulant. “There’s no AIDS care in
this city, let them drag me across the street
a few times, I don’t care.” (JA)
2
C o r i t a o n T e a c h i n g
a n d C e l e b r a t i o n :
W e H a v e N o A r t
1967. USA. Filmed at Immaculate Heart College,
Los Angeles. Baylis Glascock. 26 min.
C o r i t a o n T e a c h i n g
a n d C e l e b r a t i o n :
M a r y ’ s D a y
1964. USA. Filmed at Immaculate Heart College,
Los Angeles. Baylis Glascock. 12 min.
Baylis Glascock’s color-infused, beautifully shot, and
artfully constructed films convey the gentle charisma
of Sister Corita Kent and the exhilarating environment
of her classroom, which in the mid-1960s was adorned
with billboard fragments and the “colors of the marketplace.”
Here, Corita frequently repeats the axiom
of the Immaculate Heart College’s Art Department in
Los Angeles: “We have no art, we do everything as well
as we can.”
Corita’s teaching philosophy permeates the film as we
witness her crafting “Ten Rules for Students and Teachers”
with a group of young women. (A sample goes: If
you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who
do all of the work all the time who eventually catch
on to things… Look at movies carefully and often. Save
everything, it might come in handy later). She assigns
experiments, instructing students to question their own
working structures and, when making collages, to “take
things for their visual qualities rather than their
content — surprisingly you’ll find the content is always
there.”
Interspersed with classroom footage, we witness Corita
turning one of her lectures into a participatory happening,
and a field trip to the colorful and visually
layered Mark C. Bloome tire shop, where Corita tells
students to delight in a two-hour “looking exercise,”
despite the fact that the location offers “sixteen hours
of looking.” We also view footage from the Vatican
II-era Mary’s Day celebration that Corita and her IHC
colleagues and students choreographed using Del Monte and
supermarket signage to “celebrate the everyday — boxes
and cans and packaged things.” Corita kicks off the 1964
gathering with this: “If Mary were here today, I think
she would laugh out loud.” Food for people who have none
is collected at the altar place. News images of the
Vietnam War and civil-rights struggles are tacked to the
college’s walls. Glascock’s filmic methods seem to
mirror Corita’s educational tenets. Aesthetic stills of
people on the street, traffic signage, a Wonder Bread
delivery truck, and other quotidian moments are folded
into his sensitive cinematography. (JA)

Thursday, 28. February 19.00 h Elaine MGK
Wednesday, 6. March 20.00 h Stadkino Basel
D y n a s t y , S e a s o n
O n e , E p i s o d e N i n e ,
“ K r y s t l e ’ s L i e ,
P a r t O n e ”
1981. USA. Don Medford and
Philip Leacock. 46 min.
The prime-time soap opera Dynasty (1981–1989), created
by Richard and Esther Shapiro, focused on the
lives and milieu of the ostentatiously affluent
Carrington family. Like its chief competition Dallas,
which told the story of the oil-rich Ewing family,
with cocky J. R. Ewing at its helm, Dynasty epitomized
the operative clichés of the 1980s, including
a widespread fascination with material wealth and
luxury markets, and economic hedonism modeled after
Gordon Gekko and his “Greed is Good” motto — byproducts
of the economically inflated Ronald Reagan era.
The Reagan administration’s “economic revolution”
deregulated markets, ushered in tax cuts for wealthy
corporations and individuals, and significantly
escalated the fast-growing gap between rich and poor.
Tellingly, I rarely missed an episode of either
series, nor of the weekly documentary Lifestyles of
the Rich and Famous.
Watching the time capsule of “Krystle’s Lie” anew is
immediately engaging. The near-cartoonish unfolding
of family secrets and family feuds plays out in
quintessential ’80s style: there are crystal decanters;
Gloria Vanderbilt jeans; heavily eye-shadowed,
long-maned women; plushy carpeted pearl-gray offices
tastefully appointed with potted ferns; and young
men with sizable mops of blonde hair wearing shirts
with outsize collars, unbuttoned just a little
too low. Bill Conti’s faintly regal theme song heralds
each installment of betrayal in the dog-eat-dog
oil business and in the Carrington clan. Krystle
Carrington, typically dressed in furs, Quiana shirtdresses,
and high heels to match her peach-silk
pajamas, exudes empathy with her deep-set, steel-blue
eyes. Light-catching diamond earrings enhance her
ash-blond coif and tanned, chiseled features. The
silver-haired, conservative tycoon Blake Carrington
is played by John Forsythe, of Charlie’s Angels
(the television series) fame. The entertaining excursion
takes us through plots of hidden homosexuality,
illicit affairs, teenage pregnancy, marital
deceit, and a shocking final scene I wouldn’t spoil
even for my worst enemy.
Dynasty was an ironic reference for the collaborative
Group Material. In 1992, the group produced an edition
of a laminated publicity photo of the Dynasty
cast, titled Family Photo. Group Material also used
that photograph in its 1991 newspaper intervention,
Cash Prize. Felix Gonzalez-Torres famously employed
the same photo in a slide lecture about his work;
the Dynasty image stubbornly appeared every time the
artist said, “next slide please.” (JA)
V e r a
2003. USA. Jason Simon. 25 min.
The protagonist of Jason Simon’s riveting
documentary is an attractive and vibrant
young woman grappling with the transition
between a history of daunting debt, due
to her habit of pathologically collecting
high-end clothes and accessories (what she
regards as the “artistry of acquisition”),
and her new, restrained behavior that
reflects her desire to control spending and
get control of her life (“Now, it’s a
matter of one-day escapades as opposed to
a way of life.”).
At the outset of Vera, Simon poses questions
offscreen, gently guiding the course of
Vera Saverino’s rapid-fire monologue of frequently
unfinished sentences. Nevertheless,
Simon’s offscreen questions go silent after
the first few minutes. The filmmaker does
not present any pictorial spectacle of
Vera’s material accumulation, but instead
focuses on her abundant verbiage—an impressive
stream of self-observation that is
as remarkably good-natured as it is critically
reflective. In Simon’s treatment,
Vera’s obsessive-compulsive excess takes
verbal form, metaphorically standing in for
the tens of thousands of dollars she narrates
having shelled out in order to satisfy
her acquisitive hunger. Vera’s affection
for and struggle against overindulgent shopping
expresses an overarching ambivalence
that appears to be shared by Simon, who,
as director, exercises a light touch that
is seemingly without judgment. Simon’s mode
here essentially allows Vera to speak for
herself; he simply facilitates her self-portraiture.
C h a r l i e A h e a r n :
A r t i s t P o r t r a i t
V i d e o s ( M a r t i n W o n g )
1998. USA. Charlie Ahearn. 18 min.
S h o r t E y e s
1977. USA. Robert M. Young. 100 min.
After completing Wild Style, his groundbreaking
and celebrated 1982 feature on hip-hop, Charlie
Ahearn began producing short video portraits
of artists living in New York. The resulting
series of works are intimate studies of friends
whose work and lives Ahearn lived with closely.
Friendship and prescience maintained Ahearn’s
video portraiture over a decade, and among them
the video featuring Martin Wong stands as one of
the only documents of an artist who is now being
rediscovered, thanks in part to Julie Ault,
Danh Vo, and their curatorial work with his
estate. Shot in New York and San Francisco, the
video travels from Wong’s crammed, walk-up studio
in a Chinatown SRO to his bedside at his
mother’s house in San Francisco while enduring
symptoms of HIV.
In New York, Wong describes his friendship
with Miguel Pinero, whose 1974
prison play Short Eyes was filmed in
1977 by Robert Young. Short Eyes is a
brutal drama that details how the arrest
of a white, middle-class pedophile
disrupts the social order of The Tombs,
New York’s notorious city jail. Pinero
himself plays a hustling inmate intent
on exploiting the block’s few vulnerabilities,
including weaker convicts.
As predators become prey, and few hopes
remain, one element breaks the pall:
Freddy Fender and Curtis Mayfield make
brief appearances in which they both
sing. Fender offers an extraordinary a
cappella live on camera, while Mayfield
lip-synchs a funk theme song written
for the film. If Fender was an ex-con,
has no lines, but sings knowingly, Mayfield
has an only slightly larger role
and yet his character is more remote.
Both figures bring the film back to the
stage in their moments of stagecraft,
a musical interlude that resets the
cinematic — and while the violent drama
is typical of 1970s-era urban filmic
realism, the play and the music are
not. (JS)
The head and shoulders shots of Vera take
place in an generic space that could be
the living room of her parent’s house, where
due to financial necessity she continues to
live, or, for that matter, the wood-paneled
office of a psychiatrist. The set up of
Vera is reminiscent of a free-form therapy
session caught on tape, with the titular
subject and protagonist incessantly psychoanalyzing
herself. Desires fluctuate as Vera
articulates her internal struggle, excitedly
announcing that she still wants to be
able to get what she wants, only without
succumbing to financial ruin. (JA)

Tuesday, 12. March 19.00 h Elaine MGK
Wednesday, 20. March 19.00 h Elaine MGK
H o u s e : A f t e r F i v e
Y e a r s o f L i v i n g
1955. USA. Office of Charles
and Ray Eames. 11 min.
S u p e r s u r f a c e :
A n A l t e r n a t i v e M o d e l
F o r L i F e O n T h e E a r t h
1972. Italy. Superstudio. 10 min.
T h e W o r l d o f
L i b e r a c e
1972. USA. Tony Palmer. 55 min.
The continuing influence of Charles and Ray
Eames seems only to grow in economies that are
increasingly design-driven. That the Eames’s
work was so heavily invested in film and photography
is perhaps less known:
6
M e a t J o y
(excerpt)
1964/1965. France/USA.
Carolee Schneemann. 5 min.
color, sound, 16mm
T r i o A
(excerpt)
1970. USA. Performed by Grand
Union at The People’s Flag Show,
Judson Church. Yvonne Rainer.
5 min., b&w, sound, 1/2” video
3 T e e n s K i l l 4
“ L i v e ” a t t h e
P e p p e r m i n t L o u n g e
(excerpt)
1980. USA. David Wojnarowicz
and others. 5 min. color, sound,
3/4” Umatic video
J o h n S e x
I n t e r v i e w o n C N N
1986. USA. CNN broadcast.
John Sex. 7 min. color,
sound, video
B e e h i v e
1985. USA. Frank Moore and
Jim Self. 16 min. color,
sound, 16mm film
l e t ’ s j u s t k i s s
+ s a y g o o d b y e
1995. USA. Robert Blanchon,
edited by Suzie Silver. 9 min.
color, b&w, sound, video
Marvin J. Taylor, Director of the Fales Library
and Special Collections at New York University
and Founding Curator of the Downtown New York
Collection, will discuss the collection and
present a selection of short films and videos.
The Fales Library is the primary special collections
division of the NYU Libraries. The Downtown
Collection, founded by Taylor in 1994,
documents the downtown New York arts scenes
from the early 1970s to the early 1990s as SoHo
and the East Village exploded with creativity.
From postmodern dance to punk rock to performance
art and experimental theater, the downtown
collection is the largest archive of this
vibrant scene. The collection comprises 15,000
printed items; 10,000 linear feet of archives;
and more than 70,000 media elements. Some collections
include the papers of David Wojnarowicz,
Martin Wong, Frank Moore, Martha Wilson,
Lynne Tillman, Gary Indiana, Dennis Cooper,
Group Material, and Richard Foreman, and the
archives of Judson Memorial Church, Creative
Time, Mabou Mines, Artists Space, Exit Art,
A.I.R. Gallery, Fashion Moda, Paper Tiger Television
and many, many others. (MT)
http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/
fales/index.html
Charles and Ray saw everything through the
camera. This accounts for the astonishing
continuity between work in so many different
scales. If the eye is the eye of a camera,
size is not fixed but continuously shifting.…
they also made design decisions on the basis
of what they saw through the lens… Not by
chance, the Eames’s 1955 film House: After
Five Years of Living is made up entirely
of thousands of slides. Every aspect of the
house is scrutinized by these all-too-intimate
eyes. The camera moves up close to every
surface, every detail. But these are not the
details of the building as such, they are the
details of the everyday life that the building
makes possible.
—Beatriz Colomina, “Reflections on
the Eames House,” in Anyhow
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
House: After Five Years of Living (1955), as well
as Supersurface: An Alternative Model For Life On The
Earth (1972), were screened together in Julie Ault
and Martin Beck’s collaborative exhibition Outdoor
Systems, Indoor Distribution, at the Neue Gesellschaft
für Bildende Kunst, Berlin, Germany, in the
summer of 2000. In the catalog accompanying the show,
Ault and Beck give a concise background to the Superstudio
film as follows:
The Superstudio group, founded in Florence in
1966 and composed of Aldolfo Natalini, Cristiano
Toraldo di Fancia, Robert Magris, Piero Fassinelli,
Alessandro Magris, and Alessandro Poli,
carried out, until 1978, an activity of theoretic
research on architecture and system design. The
work of Superstudio was born out of the organization,
together with Archizoom, of the show “Superarchitecttura”
(1966) and it continued over the
course of the years in diverse fields, from design
to films to utopian projects. For example, “Supersurface,”
depicting a continuous infinite grid
on which humanity acts and lives nomadically, is
transferred to numerous media including film,
photographic montages, and manufactured laminate
surface to be applied to tables, desks, and
other furniture.
—Julie Ault and Martin Beck
To these key points of intersection with Ault and
Beck’s Outdoor Systems, and its examination of
the morphing of culture in public space, Tell It To
My Heart is pleased to add the The World of Liberace,
a 1972 public-television portrait of the Las Vegas
entertainer and actor, who here conducts a tour
of his Las Vegas and Palm Springs homes. A visual
catalog of his most prized possessions is intercut
with highlights of his shows: playfully virtuosic
piano renditions, camp dance routines that are more
drag than grace, and hilarious exchanges with his
audience about just how rich he is. “You want to
see my jewelry? Why not — you bought it!” Both cautionary
spectacle and an emersion in the sheer passion
of an artist-collector, the excesses of Liberace
are surprisingly sentimental and directed. Obliged
to maintain an inventory of piano kitsch that were a
mainstay of his nightly performances in the casino
hotels (his moniker was “Mr. Showmanship”), he
was also an astute designer of a variation of Vegas
glamour unique to him alone. (JS)

Tuesday, 26. March 19.00 h Elaine MGK
Wednesday, 3. April 20.00 h Elaine MGK
I n P a r t s
2012. USA. Sadie Benning. 28 min.
A P l a c e C a l l e d L o v e l y
1991. USA. Sadie Benning. 14 min.
Sadie Benning’s In Parts, premiering in Tell It
To My Heart, explores American landscapes through
the recent acquisition of a vintage black-andwhite
tube-video camera, a technology dating from
the earliest days of portable video equipment.
Shot in the American Southwest and New York, the
video begins with a single-shot study of a leopard
pacing in its cage, framed by bars and
glass and concrete; it is an extended take on
the need to move. What follows this is a journey
through the Joshua Tree environs of Julie Ault
and Martin Beck, where some of the collection
in Tell It To My Heart resides, before a return
East. The images are burned in flares, and feature
vignetting at the frame’s edge and highfidelity
sound, recalling Benning’s PixelVision
videos of the 1980s and ’90s in their attention
to primal technologies as philosophical tools.
In Parts is followed by Benning’s A Place Called
Lovely, from the collection of the Kunstmuseum
Basel. The following interview excerpt is
from Retrospective/Sadie Benning, Wexner Center
for the Arts, February 2004:
Solveig Nelson: The examination of fear… is also
present in A Place Called Lovely.
Sadie Benning: Well, I made A Place Called Lovely
for a lot of reasons. I was really affected
by the Atlanta child murders, even though
it wasn’t my family, it wasn’t me, but I
identified with a fear of being stolen or
murdered.
Solveig Nelson: Were you also questioning the
ways that people try to feel safe — for example,
through a notion of innocence?
Sadie Benning: There’s this thing I say in the
video about my Grandma, she always wanted me
to be like some people’s idea of what is
right or good in the world, which is this
white girl, you know, blond hair and innocent.
She thought maybe that would protect
me. When I had nightmares, she told me that
bad things happen to bad people. I just knew
even as a child that that wasn’t right, that
tragedy can happen to anyone… I feel like a
lot of childhood is about being lied to,
about the censoring of truth about history,
and just about keeping you innocent. (JS)
G o l u b
1988. USA. Jerry Blumenthal
and Gordon Quinn. 56 min.
N a n c y S p e r o :
A n I n t e r v i e w
1982. USA. Lyn Blumenthal
and Kate Horsfield. 35 min.
8
Jerry Blumenthal and Gordon Quinn’s Golub makes
the case for painting’s role as a direct political
art form through the personage of Leon
Golub and his transposing of global brutalities
to museum audiences. The inevitable comparisons
to Goya come early in the film, with news
broadcasts of 1980s-era South African Apartheid
and Central American Contra violence standing
in for our more contemporary Inquisitions. Golub
remains implacable in the film—his task as he
sees it is to speak truth to power, and his
language is painting. Golub follows the development
of his largest and most imposing series
depicting mercenaries and torturers, but in
Tell It To My Heart only the artist’s smallest
and most diminutive paintings appear — each in
the shape of a penis.
A third Golub work, a lithograph entitled The
Brank (1984), is also included in the exhibition,
and in its subject and style extends a reach to
Nancy Spero within the galleries. Spero and Golub
were collaborators and life partners, married
in 1950, and often paired in public recognition
of their concurrent activism, style, and gracious
care for the art of others. In Spero’s interview,
conducted by Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsefield
in their founding Video Data Bank series,
Spero speaks to the fundamental decision to allow
political events to determine what she chose to
paint and why. In response to the violence of
the war in Vietnam and the global, Cold War
threat of nuclear arms, Spero describes developing
a sexualized figurative vocabulary to
vulgarize, rather than humanize, the destructive
obscenity of war. From this war series, Spero
discovered Antonin Artaud, and thus developed her
Codex Artaud, in which she famously glued paper
into scrolls and incorporated Artaud’s language
with quoted text and cut-out figures, a work that
became perhaps the signature of her practice.
Spero and Golub had a unique place in the factionalized
1980s New York art world, sustaining
vibrantly engaged practices in a scene riven
with competing agendas and freighted with political,
philosophical, and market stakes. With their
Chicago roots, and having spent the late 1950s
and early 1960s living in Paris, the two were a
bridge to an earlier generation of leftist politics
for younger artists and writers, including
Group Material. (JS)

Wednesday, 17. April 19.00 h Elaine MGK
Wednesday, 24. April 19.00 h Elaine MGK
O n A r t a n d A r t i s t s
S e r i e s . J u l i e A u l t :
W h a t F o l l o w s …
1991. USA. University of Colorado. 29 min.
E v e r n e s s
2008. Uruguay. Alejandro Cesarco. 12 min.
L e s G o d d e s s e s
2011. USA. Moyra Davey. 61 min.
O n A r t a n d A r t i s t s
S e r i e s . A n d r e s S e r r a n o :
W h a t F o l l o w s …
1991. USA. University of Colorado. 31 min.
In January of 1991, Julie Ault and Andres Serrano
visited the University of Colorado at
Boulder at the invitation of Lucy Lippard, who
taught there intermittently for many years.
The visit was held on the occasion of the first
solo exhibit of Serrano’s “KKK Portraits,”
held at the Colorado University Gallery. The
exhibition was curated by Michael Crane, who
also conducts the video interviews in the manner
of a low-budget public-access cable-television
show—which it is. Group Material had by then
completed some of their most ambitious and influential
exhibitions, including The Castle
(Documenta 8, 1987), Democracy (Dia Art Foundation,
1988–1989) and AIDS Timeline (Wadsworth
Atheneum, 1990). Ault and Serrano were at the
end of their marriage, Ault was suffering from a
severe cold, and Group Material was in crisis
about if and how to move forward. Serrano was
not a member of GM, but his work appeared in
a number of their projects, and the visibility
of his images in the American “culture wars,”
particularly Piss Christ, was in dialogue with
GM projects that challenged and provoked debates
on art in the public sphere. Accordingly, this
pair of videos is a time capsule, or perhaps
a freeze-frame, of their diverging subjects.
In the role of both interviewer and curator of
Serrano’s work, Crane begins their respective
conversation by stating that little more can be
said that has not been said already. Avowedly
starstruck then, the interviewer proceeds
through a review of Serrano’s ‘oeuvre’. From the
fluid photographs (blood, milk, and urine, contained
or divided by Plexiglas) to the images
of meat to the portraits of Klu Klux Klan members,
Serrano discusses the degree to which
the political attacks upon his work by elected
and church officials at the time affected him
personally. On the KKK images, Serrano gives an
extended account of the development of the portraits,
the at times risky process by which
he was able to gain the trust of the Klan, and
his experiences in photographing the eight
Klan members who appear in the images in Tell It
To My Heart.
Alejandro Cesarco’s Everness is a fictional
short film that focuses on a heterosexual
couple. Nevertheless, the suggestion of a
narrative is suspended between spoken
thoughts on drama as a literary genre (from
a discourse on tragedy to the proposition
that we are seeing the conclusion of James
Joyce’s The Dead unfold in silence), as
well as the cinematic depiction of their
lives unfolding on the screen with tenderness,
sadness, and a silent breakfast.
Les Goddesses is the self-study by photographer
Moyra Davey on her readings and history
as an artist, and how the two connect in
the lives of various literary personages and
the lives of her subjects. As such, Les Goddesses
and Everness are both films in which
on-screen voices consider the possibility of
a “word that has the power to change one’s
life,” to quote one of Cesarco’s protagonists,
or a “literature that produces readers”.
In Davey’s film it is her reading
of Mary Wolstencraft and Goethe that leads
her back to her own adolescence among a punk
clan of Davey sisters, or “Les Goddesses,”
as Wolstencraft’s own daughters were called.
For both Davey and Cesarco, to be a reader
is to be a maker, texts are mirrors, and
these works are lights between the page and
the reflection. Two quotes concerning the
respective films, then:
“This culmination of Cesarco’s sensibility, methods,
and concentrations tills the ground from which a
multitude of thorny issues concerned with tragedy and
fate, the spirit of romantic passion, and the intricate
confines of the couple economy spring forth.”
—Julie Ault, 2009
“Les Goddesses began as an inquiry into the validity of
story-telling, specifically: telling one’s own story,
and the ambivalence surrounding this drive. The
‘story,’ or some part of it, is finally enabled by the
fabrication of a series of coincidences that connect
the lives and writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and her
daughters, and my five sisters, via a series of B&W
portraits I took of them in the early 1980s. Unexpectedly,
a meditation on the vicissitudes of photography,
as I’ve practiced it over three decades, becomes
a central theme of Les Goddesses.”
—Moyra Davey, 2012
(JS)
10
Serrano’s interview is a study in contrast with
Crane’s filmed conversation with Ault, who
rarely if ever is called upon to use the firstperson
pronoun. Indeed, near the end of the
tape, Ault says, “This is unusual, for me to
even be here representing Group Material by
myself: one of the things we try to do is always
represent ourselves as a group, just because of
what you’ve already mentioned, that art students
and people outside of art are never given any
model other than the individual heroic artist”—
of which no better example may have been found
in 1991 than Serrano himself. By then Ault was
the last remaining original member of GM, and in
her clear and profound telling of the group’s
process and impact, she offers the counter-model
at the core of Group Material’s workings. (JS)

Tuesday, 30. April 19.00 h Elaine MGK
“ U n t i t l e d ”
( A P o r t r a i t )
1991. USA. Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
5 min.
The rarely seen video “Untitled” (A Portrait) presents
the titular portrait without specifying the
identity of its subject. Phrases that appear in white
letters, mostly at the bottom of the otherwise empty
blue ground, such as “a new lesion” and “a shortness
of breath,” seem specific to individual experience.
Such incidents intermingle with apparently far-reaching
proceedings — “a stock market crash,” “a rise
in unemployment” — thereby confounding the notion of
a simply personal episode, and dislodging the boundaries
of what is considered private and what is
considered public. In A Portrait disparate events
converge, assembling identity.
“Untitled” (A Portrait) invokes the mode Felix Gonzalez-Torres
used in his dateline Photostat works,
begun in 1987, which memorialize the collision of
market culture and historical memory, with a list of
non-chronological lists of events and dates typeset
in italicized Trump Mediaeval Bold letters, which are
reproduced in white at the bottom of a small-scale,
landscape-format black field.
Patty Hearst 1975 Jaws 1975 Vietnam
1975 Watergate 1973 Bruce Lee 1973
Munich 1972 Waterbeds 1971 Jackie 1968
Gonzalez-Torres’s video also summons to mind the text
portraits that he began making in 1989, beginning
with his own self-portrait, and thereafter composed
collaboratively by the artist and the portrait’s
“sitter.” The text portraits consist of terms that
denote benchmark events and dates, strung together to
create a portrait of an individual and, in some cases,
an institution. Those works also conflate signs
of personal and social histories.
“Untitled” (A Portrait) can be viewed in two different
forms. Most often it is screened in an installation
for which the video is played continuously on
a small monitor placed atop a pedestal. Located in
front of the monitor are two Arne Jacobsen chairs,
set side-by-side, suggesting the shared living experiences
that typify romantic unions. With permission
from the owner of the work, the video can also be
screened as a one-time event, specified for “educational
purpose.” (JA)
M e m o r i a s d e l
S u b d e s a r r o l l o
( M e m o r i e s o f
U n d e r d e v e l o p m e n t )
1968. Cuba. Tomas Gutierrez Alea. 93 min.
11
Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s Memorias del Subdesarrollo
was an important film to Felix Gonzalez-
Torres. It begins with an open-air dance scene
set to live Cuban music, which is punctuated
by gunshots that don’t disturb the musicians’
tempo. In fact, as the music continues to play,
it gets faster and livelier as the crowd begins
to show signs of recognition that a crime has
indeed taken place. A shot reveals that a young
boy has been killed, and he is slowly carried
out of the scene as people watch and the music
continues.
This is a film about the Cuban revolution and
the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion in
1961, but more than that, it is a film about the
complexity of political engagement in a “real”
political situation. To quote Sergio, the narrator
we meet in the next scene, thinking about
Picasso’s promised dove for the revolution, “it
is easy to be a Communist millionaire all the
way in Paris.” For Sergio, an educated and
wealthy Cuban who decides to stay in his native
country, the situation is far more complicated.
He says goodbye to his wife and his parents on
the same day. Eventually his best friend will
depart for the US as well.
In the following scenes, sexual, emotional, and
political desire become intertwined as Sergio
sets off in search of a woman to replace his
wife and self-consciously analyzes how each
woman he pursues personifies a different political
reality. Cuban Elena, for instance, is underdeveloped,
whereas German Hannah is Europeanized.
Yet this conflation of lovers and ideologies
only underscores how gray the social and
political reality is in Cuba beneath the blackand-white
sloganeering of the revolution. The
opening scene, for example, is never explained
or linked to anything in particular, yet it
returns and repeats again after Sergio leaves
a round-table discussion about Cuban literature
in the wake of independence. During the conversation,
an American stands up and asks in English:
“What is revolutionary about a round-table
discussion?” As tensions escalate and the newspaper
headlines proclaim Kennedy’s announcement
about the existence of ballistic missiles off
the coast of Cuba, the narrator moves from this
main headline to the next story of the day
about a dog with two hearts, and then to the
next, and so on.
Saturday, 4. May tbd Stadtkino Basel
T w o C a b i n s
2009. USA. James Benning.
30 min.
In the summer and fall of 2007, the filmmaker
James Benning—renowned for his filmic investigations
of place, landscape, the American West,
and the social histories of the United States—
built a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden
cabin on private land that he owns in the Sierra
Nevada mountains just north of Bakersfield,
California. The following spring, nearby but out
of sight of the Thoreau structure, Benning replicated
the small, one-room cabin built by Ted
Kaczynski near Lincoln, Montana, where Kaczynski
launched his bombing campaign (between 1978 and
1995) that targeted individuals who stood for
technological progress. Benning’s paired cabins
formed the armature for his long-term “Cabins
Project,” which artfully unfolds a complex articulation
of practices of dissent, unorthodox
modes of living, and the politics of solitude.
The communicative reach of Benning’s private
project is investigated and articulated in the
book (FC) Two Cabins by JB (A.R.T. Press, 2011),
edited by Julie Ault. The “Cabins Project” is
structurally reminiscent of the dichotomy Benning
used in American Dreams. Similar to the
juxtaposition of Aaron and Bremer, Benning’s
Thoreau-Kaczynski equation reveals contradiction
and complexity, which is not initially apparent.
Benning’s 30-minute film Two Cabins (2009),
“pairs views out of my cabins’ windows with
field recordings taken in Lincoln, Montana, and
at Walden Pond—sites of the original constructions.”
Each of the equally timed, highly aesthetic
shots is stable, allowing viewers to
experience through Benning’s minimal means of
image and sound the character of the respective
cabins. This experiential quality also extends
to Thoreau and Kaczynski themselves, as well
as to their particular relationships to interiority
and exteriority, and to their natural
environs and the cultural encroachment upon it.
(JA)
A m e r i c a n D r e a m s
( l o s t a n d f o u n d )
1984. USA. James Benning. 55 min.
James Benning’s American Dreams is vigilantly structured
with close-up shots of baseball cards and
memorabilia, shown chronologically, that venerate the
career of the Milwaukee Braves’ Henry (Hank) Aaron,
beginning in 1954. In 1974, Aaron attained his goal
of 715 home runs, breaking the all-time record held
by Babe Ruth. As a black player in the major leagues,
which until 1946 had banned African-Americans, his
triumph was a correction to institutionalized racism.
The Aaron-related image-layer running throughout the
film is paired with the handwritten diary of wouldbe
assassin Arthur Bremer. The diary nearly begs to
be read as it moves from right to left at the bottom
of the screen, reminiscent of urgent news bulletins
that punctuated TV broadcasts in the 1960s. The
handwriting is Benning’s, who transcribed the diary,
including its spelling mistakes. Beginning on April
4, 1972, Bremer’s diary traces his movements, which
were determined by Nixon’s whereabouts as Bremer
tracks the president with intent to assassinate.
It ends May 15,1972, when, after failing to assassinate
Nixon, he shoots George Wallace instead.
Benning’s apparent hero-versus-villain construction
disperses quickly as Aaron and Bremer’s ambitions
are contextualized by the other’s, and by the competition-driven
American Cold War culture evoked in
the film via political speeches heard as we see the
fronts of the baseball cards, and excerpts from
popular songs of the period playing when we see their
backs. American Dreams is an absorbing intertextual
work that evokes a specific era. The individuated
narratives of Aaron and Bremer are both framed by
the same historical conjuncture of American culture
invoked by the broadcasts—economically stratified,
competitive, masculinist, polarized, imperialist,
and violent. (JA)
It is no wonder why this film appealed to Gonzalez-Torres:
Gutierrez Alea’s work asks questions
about how one is to act “revolutionarily,” and
how complicated and impossible it is to extricate
such a practice from everyday life. (AZ)

Saturday, 4. May tbd Stadtkino Basel
Tuesday, 7. May 19.00 h Elaine MGK
c a s t i n g a g l a n c e
2007. USA. James Benning. 80 min.
Notions of historical representation and
time are taken up in James Benning’s film,
casting a glance (2007), a close meditation
on Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970).
The film consists of 78 one-minute shots
filmed during sixteen trips made to see
the work in Great Salt Lake, Utah, between
2005 and 2007. Title cards offering dates
ranging from April 30, 1970, to May 15,
2007, are interspersed with images of the
work itself, thus highlighting the parallel
between water levels during Benning’s twoyear
period of shooting and Spiral Jetty’s
lifespan, in relationship to the shifting
level of the Great Salt Lake, which is
responsible for the earthwork’s alternating
periods of exposure and concealment.
Casting a glance fictionalizes the matching
chronology of shooting to a chronicle of
change in the conditions and appearance of
Smithson’s work, creating confusion in many
viewers who presume a one-to-one relationship
between the dates and the images exists,
and that Benning literally filmed the
Jetty over its lifespan. As Benning himself
explains, “The resulting film maps the
Jetty back onto its own thirty-seven-year
history—looking at and listening to its
recurring changes.”
Benning does not pronounce the film to be
history writing, but casting a glance is in
fact a sophisticated historical representation
that takes issue with other representations
of the Jetty. Smithson’s work first
went underwater in 1973, the year of the
artist’s death, and it did not reemerge,
except sporadically, until 2002. The Jetty’s
visibility since 2002 is mostly the result
of drought. During its period of invisibility,
Spiral Jetty became well known to
the art public through aerial images taken
in 1970 that pictured it basking in sunshine,
fully exposed above the waterline.
These photographs were instrumental in
transforming the work into an icon, particularly
as no documentation of Spiral Jetty
in its submerged state ever circulated.
Until the work’s resurfacing, it was publicly
perceived as static, frozen in time,
and was inadvertently objectified.
Benning regards Spiral Jetty as a vital
formation and wants to show how it changes
over time as a result of climate, season,
weather, daylight, industry, and tourism.
As such, casting a glance shows us Spiral
Jetty fully exposed, partially underwater,
and completely submerged, and in this way
restores its periodic vulnerability and
variety. While rehabilitating the representation
of the Jetty, casting a glance expresses
Benning’s twin philosophies of
“looking and listening” and “landscape as
a function of time.” (JA)
O n A r t a n d A r t i s t s
S e r i e s . L u c y L i p p a r d
1 9 7 4 : A n I n t e r v i e w
1974. USA. Lyn Blumenthal and
Kate Horsfield. 25 min.
O n A r t a n d A r t i s t s
S e r i e s . L u c y L i p p a r d
1 9 7 9 : A n I n t e r v i e w
1979. USA. Lyn Blumenthal and
Kate Horsfield. 63 min. 36 sec.
O n A r t a n d A r t i s t s
S e r i e s . L u c y L i p p a r d
1 9 8 7 : W h a t F o l l o w s …
1987. USA. University of Colorado.
18 min. 25 sec.
A Lucy Lippard Marathon! The earliest of these
interviews with writer, critic, feminist, and
art historian Lippard was conducted soon after
the appearance of her essential book on conceptual
art, the title of which, as it appears
on the cover, is worth repeating in full:
“Six Years: the dematerialization of the art
object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference
book of information on some esthetic boundaries
consisting of a bibliography into which
are inserted a fragmented text, art works,
documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged
chronologically and focused on so-called
conceptual or information or idea art with
mentions of such vaguely designated areas as
minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process
art, occurring now in the Americas,
Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with
occasional political overtones), edited and
annotated by Lucy R. Lippard.”
Six Years remains a touchstone of extraordinary
scope, while these videos, in keeping with the
medium’s purpose-driven roots, concentrate on
Lippard’s politics. Responding to the off-screen
questions by Lyn Blumenthal in the earliest
tape, and to the off-screen Kate Horsefield in
1979, Lippard sheds light on her role in feminist
groups ranging from WEB (West East Bag)
to The Art Workers Coalition to Heresies with
characteristic candor, discernment, and personal
honesty. To a question about changes after 1970,
for example, when she became an “active feminist,”
Lippard says the first impact was that
she suddenly had a lot more artists to write
about, and then she had to deal with her awareness
of her shame. Blumenthal and Horsefield
were art students themselves when they founded
the Video Data Bank (VDB) with this series, and
were fiercely partisan in their deployment of
voices to create a validating discourse of women
practitioners, beginning with Lippard, Agnes
Martin, and Joan Mitchell in 1974.
The third video in this program, from 1987, was
produced as part of the What Follows… series
of interviews with visiting artists and writers
to the department of art history at the Boulder
campus of the University of Colorado, and subsequently
folded into VDB’s “On Art and Artists”
series. Here, Lippard “performs” a reading,
drawing from the politicized writings and images
from an exhibition she co-curated called Risky
Business, which examined the diversified political
aspirations of artists in the 1980s. (JS)
J a m e s B e n n i n g :
A T r i b u t e a t
S t a d t k i n o B a s e l
( M a y 1 – 2 7 ) :
James Benning—Land Surveyor
and Landscape Painter
James Benning’s landscape films are
breathtakingly beautiful: the fields
and steppes of Southern California
stretching to the distant horizon
(El Valley Cento, 1999); the light,
the sun, and passing cloud formations
(Ten Skies, 2004); the roaring wind,
the rustling of waves, and the solemn
silence over Robert Smithson’s legendary
land art sculpture in Utah’s Great
Salt Lake (casting a glance, 2007).
In these “physical” landscapes, the
filmmaker, who was born in Milwaukee,
Wis., in 1942 and studied mathematics,
also shows us political landscapes.
Benning selects his deliberate glances
at the world with the greatest care.
“This scrutinizing and critical patience
ultimately lets the concatenation
of topographical standpoints
reveal something more than remote and
seemingly exotic sceneries, something
transcendental: an insight, a sum,
a judgment. As we watch, our attention
to seeing and hearing grows with
each shot.” (Hans Zischler, Die Zeit)
In collaboration with the
Museum für Gegenwartskunst
Basel and in conjunction with
the exhibition Tell It to
My Heart: Collected by Julie
Ault, Stadtkino Basel will
hold a retrospective of James
Benning’s work in May 2013.
The filmmaker will come to
Basel for the weekend of May
4–5 to present and discuss
his work at the museum and at
the Stadtkino Basel. The
tribute presents a unique
opportunity to see an extensive
selection of Benning’s
most important works.

P r o g r a m m ü b e r s i c h t
1
2
3
4
5
Tuesday
5. Feb
19.00 h
Elaine MGK
Friday
15. Feb
20.00 h
Elaine MGK
Thursday
28. Feb
19.00 h
Elaine MGK
Wednesday
6. Mar
19.00 h
Stadtkino
Basel
Tuesday
12. Mar
19.00 h
Elaine MGK
Kids of Survival: The Art and
Life of Tim Rollins & K.O.S.
1996, USA. Dayna Goldfine
and Dan Geller. 87 min.
Target City Hall
1989. USA. DIVA TV collective.
27 min.
Corita on Teaching and
Celebration: We Have No Art
1967. USA. Filmed at Immaculate
Heart College, Los Angeles.
Baylis Glascock. 26 min.
Corita on Teaching and
Celebration: Mary’s Day
1964. USA. Filmed at Immaculate
Heart College, Los Angeles.
Baylis Glascock. 12 min.
Dynasty, Season One, Episode Nine,
“Krystle’s Lie, Part One”
1981. USA. Don Medford and Philip
Leacock. 46 min.
Vera
2003. USA. Jason Simon. 25 min.
Charlie Ahearn: Artist Portrait
Videos (Martin Wong)
2007. USA. Charlie Ahearn.
18 min.
Short Eyes
1977. USA. Robert M. Young.
100 min.
Meat Joy (excerpt)
1964/1965. France/USA.
Carolee Schneemann. 5 min. color,
sound, 16mm
Trio A (excerpt)
1970. USA. Performed by Grand
Union at The People’s Flag Show,
Judson Church. Yvonne Rainer.
5 min., b&w, sound, 1/2” video
3 Teens Kill 4 “Live” at the
Peppermint Lounge (excerpt)
1980. USA. David Wojnarowicz
and others. 5 min. color, sound,
3/4” Umatic video
John Sex Interview on CNN
1986. USA. CNN broadcast.
John Sex. 7 min. color,
sound, video
Beehive
1985. USA. Frank Moore and
Jim Self. 16 min. color,
sound, 16mm film
let’s just kiss + say goodbye
1995. USA. Robert Blanchon,
edited by Suzie Silver. 9 min.
color, b&w, sound, video
6
Wednesday
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
20. Mar
19.00 h
Elaine MGK
Tuesday
26. Mar
19.00 h
Elaine MGK
Wednesday
3. Apr
19.00 h
Elaine MGK
Wednesday
17. Apr
19.00 h
Elaine MGK
Wednesday
24. Apr
19.00 h
Elaine MGK
Tuesday
30. Apr
19.00 h
Elaine MGK
Saturday
4. May
tbd
Stadtkino
Basel
Saturday
4. May
tbd
Stadtkino
Basel
Tuessday
7. May
19.00 h
Elaine MGK
House: After Five Years of Living
1955. USA. Office of Charles and
Ray Eames. 11 min.
Supersurface: An Alternative Model
For Life On The Earth
1972. Italy. Superstudio. 10 min.
The World of Liberace
1972. USA. Tony Palmer. 55 min.
In Parts
2012. USA. Sadie Benning. 28 min.
A Place Called Lovely
1991. USA. Sadie Benning. 14 min.
Golub
1988. USA. Jerry Blumenthal and
Gordon Quinn. 56 min.
Nancy Spero: An Interview
1982. USA. Lyn Blumenthal
and Kate Horsfield. 35 min.
On Art and Artists Series.
Julie Ault: What Follows…
1991. USA. University of
Colorado. 29 min. 20 sec.
On Art and Artists Series.
Andres Serrano: What Follows…
1991. USA. University of
Colorado. 31 min.
Everness
2008. Uruguay.
Alejandro Cesarco. 12 min.
Les Goddesses
2011. USA. Moyra Davey. 61 min.
Memories of Underdevelopment
1968. Cuba.
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. 97 min.
“Untitled” (A Portrait)
1991. USA.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. 5 min.
American Dreams (lost and found)
1984. USA. James Benning. 55 min.
Two Cabins
2009. USA. James Benning. 30 min.
casting a glance
2007. USA. James Benning.
80 min.
On Art and Artists Series.
Lucy Lippard 1974: An Interview
1974. USA. Lyn Blumenthal and Kate
Horsfield. 25 min.
On Art and Artists Series.
Lucy Lippard 1979: An Interview
1979. USA. Lyn Blumenthal and Kate
Horsfield. 63 min. 36 sec.
On Art and Artists Series.
Lucy Lippard: What Follows…
1987. USA. University of
Colorado. 18 min. 25 sec.