John Baldessari

This online selection of videos by Darrin Martin stems from the artist’s research seeking disability representation in EAI’s collection—both intentional and unintentional. The titles span early conceptual video to contemporary performance, engaging themes of perceptual difference, semiotic play, and embodiment, and present an array of strategies for access. In Shape of a Right Statement, Wu Tsang re-performs text by the late disability rights activist Mel Baggs. Phyllis Baldino’s Absence is Present: MayJuneJuly and Absence is Present: Dead Nature in the Dark overlay handheld footage with a fuzzy, floating orb meant to represent a blindspot experienced by the artist following open heart surgery. Lawrence Andrews’ Birthday and Anal Denial explore the titular prompts through simultaneous on-screen text and spoken monologue. In John Baldessari’s The Meaning of Various News Photos to Ed Henderson, the artist dissects the semiotics of news media while prompting his interlocutor to verbally describe isolated newspaper clippings. Cecilia Vicuña’s Fire Over Water hauntingly addresses industrial climate disaster through a poetic rendering of the artist’s experience watching Gasland 2. Finally, Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines 6 problematizes the incomplete promise of wellness culture to make its subjects feel whole. The videos are closed captioned. Baldessari and Moulton’s works are presented with open captions in a window-boxed format to minimize interference with the image. Baldino’s works are included with and without audio descriptions, which were written by EAI staff in collaboration with the artist. Available through April 28.

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Image: Still from Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines 6, 2006. An incomplete jigsaw puzzle is presented on a green table marbled with black veins. A hand pressing pieces in place is pictured coming in from the side. Enough of the puzzle is complete to reveal a waterfall descending from a cliff that ends in a rainbow and mist into the forest below.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to present a screening and discussion lead by artist and educator Darrin Martin, whose video, performance, and print-based installations have considered the synesthetic qualities of perception, and notions of accessibility through the use of tactility, sonic analogies, and audio descriptions.

Beginning in 2010, Martin started to explore EAI’s collection with two goals in mind: to search for disability representation, and in pursuit of experimental video work that considers disability access at its inception—even if it might not have been the impetus for its making. As an extension of this project, Martin has assembled a program of works by six artists whose practices span from early conceptual video to contemporary performance, each uniquely engaging the themes of perceptual difference, semiotic play, and embodiment. This event will feature open captioning and live ASL interpretation. A free, closed-captioned online streaming version of this event will be available in mid-April.

Martin writes: “The works in (Mis)Reading the Image are never what they appear to be at face value and/or have found new perspectives within and against each other in time. Their relationship to language, text, and image is built upon shifts in context whether through the performative work of Wu Tsang embodying the words of a late autism rights activist Mel Baggs, an attempt to audio describe images removed from newspaper clippings in John Baldessari’s The Meaning of Various News Photos to Ed Henderson, or in the stuttering poetic plea of Cecilia Vicuña’s emotional summary of a film that rings the alarm over specific man-made environmental catastrophes. Woven throughout the program are selections from Phyllis Baldino’s Absence is Present which manifests her experience with a blind spot and two works from Lawrence Andrews’ Selections from the Library, which take the approach of building an image within the viewer using text and sound that resists simple approaches to reification. Finally, Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines 6 places the viewer as witness to the trajectory of her alter ego Cynthia’s attempt to find wholeness in a world of image fragmentation and missing pieces.

Darrin Martin creates videos and installations that engage qualities of perception mediated through the lens of both obsolete and new technologies. His latest projects consider ways in which meaning is layered and performative using sonic analogies and audio descriptions. Through collaborations with artist Torsten Zenas Burns, they build speculative fictions around re-imagined educational practices and dystopian cosplay paradigms. Martin is a Professor in the Art and Art History Department at University California, Davis.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have questions about access, please contact cstrange@eai.org in advance of the event.

EAI and The Sagamore Hotel in Miami Beach presented Screen Play: Moving Image Art, a special exhibition of moving image artworks for the public spaces of the hotel during Art Basel Miami Beach. Screen Play, guest curated by Lori Zippay, EAI's Executive Director, brought together video, film, and digital artworks drawn from the EAI collection across six decades. These works highlighted the cross-disciplinary relation of the moving image to other artistic media and forms—performance, photography, painting, drawing, sculpture—while also exploring the distinctive vocabularies of video, film, and digital media. The public encountered artists' moving image works in multiple public spaces of the hotel, as well as a dedicated "EAI TV Channel" for the hotel guest rooms. Screen Play featured moving image works by artists including Michael Bell-Smith, Takeshi Murata, Leslie Thornton, Jacolby Satterwhite, Joan Jonas, Merce Cunningham, Alex Hubbard, Dara Birnbaum, Shana Moulton, Lawrence Weiner, Steina, and John Baldessari.

ESSAY
CHECKLIST
EXHIBITION BROCHURE
INSTALLATION VIEWS
CONVERSATIONS AT DIA:BEACON: Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas, Anthony Ramos, and Paul Ryan with Lori Zippay
PRESS: New York Times, Frieze Magazine, Bullett
PHOTOS: Circa 1971 Gallery Talk with Lori Zippay, February 2012

Dia Art Foundation presented Circa 1971: Early Video & Film from the EAI Archive at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries. Circa 1971 brought together 20 moving image works from EAI's collection of over 3,500 media artworks. Celebrating EAI's 40th anniversary, the exhibition was organized by guest curator Lori Zippay, Executive Director of EAI.

Circa 1971 included pieces by Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, Ant Farm, John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Shirley Clarke, Dan Graham, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Joan Jonas, Gordon Matta-Clark, Nam June Paik, Raindance, Anthony Ramos, Carolee Schneemann, TVTV, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and others.

Taking the year of EAI's founding as its point of departure, the exhibition set in dialogue a series of diverse works created in and around 1971, which are linked by alternative artistic and activist impulses. Circa 1971 exposed the generative encounters among these artists and influences and initiates unexpected correspondences between seemingly disparate works.

Sound Stage was a special Saturday afternoon screening program featuring artists' videos that are driven by music performance. Sound Stage was presented as part of Chelsea Sound: A Not-For-Profit Festival of Artists in Sound, organized jointly by Printed Matter Inc., Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, Electronic Arts Intermix and Family Business. Taking place in Chelsea's Gallery District on Saturday, October 27th, the collaboratively produced festival included a series of performances, sound installations, and video screenings throughout the day across four venues.

Featuring works from the last four decades by a diverse group of artists, Sound Stage presented a program of videos that foreground musical performance. The screening embraced artists' documentation of music performances, artists' performances that incorporate live music, and works created for the camera and screen in which musicians take center stage.

EAI presented a special screening of John Baldessari's early film and video works, introduced by the artist. The screening featured Baldessari's rarely seen films from the 1970s, including Title (1972) and Four Short Films (1972-73), as well as selected early video works.

EAI participated in The NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, organized by Printed Matter. EAI's project space, installed in MoMA PS1's basement vault, featured STAGED DIRECTIONS, a special ongoing program of early and recent videos by artists, including rarely seen works drawn from EAI's extensive archive. STAGED DIRECTIONS featured conceptual videos that involve rules, instructions, or tasks, incorporating the script or the instruction manual into the action and placing the artist's directions on stage and in front of the camera. The screening program included works by Vito Acconci, Cory Arcangel, John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, VALIE EXPORT, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Joan Jonas, Mike Kelley, Kristin Lucas, Kalup Linzy, Shana Moulton, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Seth Price, Anthony Ramos, Martha Rosler, Carolee Schneemann, Stuart Sherman and Lawrence Weiner, among others.

EAI presented 45 Years of Performance Video from EAI, a survey of four decades of artists' engagement with video and performance. This project is presented in conjunction with 100 Years, an exhibition on the history of performance art organized by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and Performa 09.

Playtime celebrates the sight gag and the visual pun. Engaging the medium, these works employ a purely visual mode of communication, one that depends on comic timing as well as space. The artists look not only to silent comedies for influence, but to the external storytelling of Jacques Tati, the surreal anthropomorphizations of Ernie Kovacks and the tradition of trick photography tracing back to the Lumiere Brothers. Aided by props and animals, the artists appear alone with their cameras, concocting vignettes of wit and expressiveness, without the use of dialogue. Playtime salutes the absurd, the wayward and the out of place. Included in the program are works by Stuart Sherman, VALIE EXPORT, Phyllis Baldino, George Kuchar, John Baldessari, William Wegman, Cynthia Maughan and James Byrne, among others.

EAI partnered with Y-3 to present a program of video works from the EAI collection on the exterior of Y-3's newly opened location in Miami's Design District. Inside the Y-3 store, in its second level event space, an indoor video program featuring the influential and provocative video works of Dara Birnbaum was on view.

During the PERFORMA07 performance biennial, EFA Gallery was transformed into a video lounge to host Electronic Arts Intermix's Viewing Room, a program that provides free public access to one of the foremost collections of video art in the world. Visitors to EFA Gallery were able to choose from a curated selection of major performance-based video works by over 30 artists from the EAI Collection. Viewers were able to watch these seminal performances and contemporary classics at their own pace in a comfortable viewing environment. During the opening reception on Friday, November 2nd, programs featuring selected works were installed throughout the gallery.

On the occasion of ediciónmadrid, EAI was pleased to present a selection of titles from the late 1960s and the 1970s. These early works represent the diverse art-making strategies of the time including body-based performance tapes, conceptual exercises, the video journal, and early image processing. Presented in three programs, works by Bruce Nauman, Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Shigeko Kubota, John Baldessari, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Nam June Paik will be featured.

As the keystone of EAI's 30th anniversary events, Museum of Modern Art presented First Decade: Video from the EAI Archives, a major retrospective that looked at the early days of video through EAI's historical collection. Featuring 60 works, the twelve-part program explored themes and issues ranging from performance and the body; narrative; cultural essays; activism, and poetics.

Mediated Presence: Three Decades of Artists' Video from Electronic Arts Intermix is a three-part survey, spanning the years 1967 to 1997, that explores the rich and diverse modes by which artists use video to investigate self. Tracing how artists have articulated a mediated relationship with the viewer and technology, this program re-visits notions of performance and gesture within the framework of three decades of artists' video, and provides a historical context for recent works.