Film Studies & History of Art

From the primitive cinema to today’s geographic data extraction, experimental methods and the city have been intertwined. This Roundtable explores experimental cinematic techniques over the past thirty-five years, ranging from video-era, activist updates of early experimental forms like the city symphony, to the experimental narrative potential of commercial mapping technologies, to the expressive capacities of new technology like drones. An overarching theme is the ways in which the changing face of experimental cinema – which may no longer be cinematic in any way – reveals new dimensions of the urban, and vice versa.

Today the Museum of Modern Art is widely recognized for establishing the canon of modern art; yet in its early years, the museum considered modern art part of a still unfolding experiment in contemporary visual production. By bracketing MoMA’s early history from its later reputation, this book explores the ways the Museum acted as a laboratory to set an ambitious agenda for the exhibition of a multidisciplinary idea of modern art.

Between its founding in 1929 and its 20th anniversary in 1949, MoMA created the first museum departments of architecture and design, film, and photography in the country, marshaled modern art as a political tool, and brought consumer culture into a versatile yet institutional context. Encompassing 14 essays that investigate the diversity of modern art, this volume demonstrates how MoMA’s programming shaped a version of modern art that was not elitist but fundamentally intertwined with all levels of cultural production.

Book co-editors: Austin Porter, Sandra Zalman

Some artists and exhibitions can be summarized into a set of statements, the fundamentals of the work distilled. Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts is not among those. Surveying the massive retrospective that spans MoMA's midtown building as well as PS1 in Long Island City, however, the main challenge is surfeit. It is a stellar curatorial achievement long in the making. Helmed by Kathy Halbreich and aided by Magnus Schaefer and Taylor Walsh, all of MoMA; in collaboration with Heidi Naef and Isabelle Friedli of the Schaulager Basel, the retrospective brings together nearly 170 works spanning painting, drawing, architectural assemblages, sculpture, installation, light, sound, and the moving image (film and video) from Nauman's decades-long career. Just about a third of the exhibition is installed on the sixth floor of MoMA, while the majority is at PS1 in Long Island City. The curators have framed the exhibition more or less chronologically along thematic lines of creative withdrawal and corporeal disappearance. While this provides some welcome guidance, any attempt to categorize often ends up underscoring how the artist's work continually spills over, resisting even the most generous attempts.

Article focuses on Alfredo Jaar’s “Lament of the Images” (2002) to contextualize the Chilean-born, New York-based artist’s practice since the mid-1990s. Moving across the photographic, the cinematic, and the architectural, Jaar’s work in this period anticipated present crises of visual and documentary excess, searching for an ethics—and the ends—of representation itself.