Read more
Informationen zum Autor Darsie Alexander is Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at The Baltimore Museum of Art. A specialist in contemporary and vernacular photography, she has written on the development of posed photographs, representations of the body, and the role of documentation photographs in 1970s performance art. Charles Harrison is Professor of History and Theory of Art at the Open University, London. From 1966 to 1975, he was a contributing editor to a leading contemporary art journal, Studio International , and he has published extensively on Conceptualism. He is a member of the artists' group Art & Language. Robert Storr is Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He is the curator of Site Santa Fe (2004); his exhibitions also include international retrospectiveson Tony Smith, Chuck Close, Gerhard Richter, and Robert Ryman. Klappentext "New babies just home from the hospital, children cavorting under the Christmas tree; weddings, receptions, birthday parties--these and many other happy memories live on through the magic of color slides." --Kodak instruction manual, 1967 Interview with Darsie Alexander, Curator, BMA, August 2004 Since the Renaissance, most art has been prized because of the prodigious skills that went into its making. Why would any artist choose to work with slides? It's tempting to see slide projection as quick and easy. Indeed, many artists cite these qualities when explaining their initial attraction to the medium. But the process can be complicated, involving not only the creation of the transparency itself but also its arrangement, projected scale, and timing. A single carousel may contain as many as eighty images that must be numbered and ordered, a task that grows all the more complicated with the addition of each new slide grouping. When we rediscovered a piece by one of the performance artists in the exhibition, I thought he was going to cry. The prospect of putting the whole complex thing back together was painful, even though he was delighted to see his work again. Of course, slide projection is low-tech and notoriously accident-prone. But I think the medium owes a lot of its immediacy to its tendency as an apparatus to jam, to burn out a bulb, to turn a well-planned show into a logistical nightmare. Good art often courts disaster. Is the development of slide art connected to the ferment of the 60s? During the 1960s and 1970s, public projection of slides became a vehicle for social and political activism. Slide projection's portability made this possible, enabling artists (Krzysztof Wodiczko, for example) to project powerful, challenging images onto public buildings. When Lucy Lippard wanted to publicize the exclusion of women from the Whitney Annual of 1970, she projected slides against the surface of the museum to protest its curatorial policies. This application of slides as critical commentary had historical precedents: in the 1880s, the photographer Jacob Riis used slides of the urban poor to arouse the concern of people who might have been able to help. Did the strong associations of slides with family entertainment have any impact on the ways artists adapted the medium? The fact that the medium promotes a collective viewing experience is important for both artists and popular users. The act of looking at images, especially still photographs, generally involves a single spectator and a stationary object, but with slides you are often sitting in the same room with other people, sharing the experience with them. People who watch Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency , for example, find themselves on the same emotional roller coaster. It's like the family slide show in a way; people participate in a joint emotional response to images of past events. Of course, the memories and feelings such a work stimulates are d...
