VALIE EXPORT

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.

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 celebrated the art of short-form video and film with a summer screening of works that clock in at two minutes or less. Between Yoko Ono's fifteen second Eye Blink (1966) and Leslie Thornton's two minute Let Me Count the Ways: Minus 6 (2006), the forty-five works in this forty-five minute screening demonstrated why a concise statement is so powerful. Ranging from analog video abstraction to quick visual comedy, conceptual exercises to formal experiments with duration, commissioned public service announcements to critiques of the quintessential short-form structure, the TV commercial, the works in this screening demonstrated the enormous possibilities that artists have found in less than one hundred and twenty seconds.

The screening included works by Dan Asher, Beth B, Phyllis Baldino, Michael Bell-Smith, Dara Birnbaum, Cheryl Donegan, VALIE EXPORT, Forcefield, Matthew Geller, Gran Fury, Gary Hill, Ken Jacobs, Tom Kalin, Kalup Linzy, George Maciunas, Charlotte Moorman, Shana Moulton, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Martha Rosler, Paul Sharits, Stuart Sherman, Shelly Silver, Michael Smith, Leslie Thornton, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Lawrence Weiner and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto.

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.

EAI participated in The NY Art Book Fair 2009, organized by Printed Matter at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. EAI's project space, installed in P.S.1's basement vault, presented FREE TRADE, a program of videos exploring economies of exchange in a globalized world: the circulation of art, ideas, information and capital. On view were new and historical works, drawn from EAI's extensive collection, by artists including Chris Burden, Bernadette Corporation, Martha Rosler, Dan Graham, VALIE EXPORT, Dara Birnbaum, Kalup Linzy, Seth Price, Lawrence Weiner, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Ken Jacobs, Gordon Matta-Clark, Muntadas, Takeshi Murata, Leslie Thornton and Ryan Trecartin.

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.

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.

EAI collaborated with the NADA Art fair to present a screening of videos by artists involving intervention, intrusion, and trespassing. Documenting literal, formal, or conceptual acts of breaking and entering, their works harness disruption and surprise. Artists in the program included Bernadette Corporation, Chris Burden, VALIE EXPORT, Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom, Dan Graham, Klara Liden, Rachel Mason, Takeshi Murata, Michael Smith, and Ryan Trecartin.

EAI curated the second manifestation of Smack Mellon's multi-screen video exhibition. MULTIPLEX 2 featured new and classic video works from the EAI collection, and was the inaugural exhibition of Smack Mellon's new gallery space.

EAI and Ocularis screened a program of works commemorating direct television interventions, in the spirit of Ant Farm's Media Burn. This classic performative work saw two members of the seminal collective drive a converted 1959 El Dorado through a burning pyramid of TV sets on the 4th of July, 1975. Other works shown included VALIE EXPORT's Facing a Family, Chris Burden's Big Wrench and videos by Michael Shamberg and TVTV.