A Corpus Lives on

Abstract

VanDerBeek: MIT List Visual Arts Center Cambridge, Massachusetts February 4-April 3, 2011 It is imperative that we (the world's artists) invent a new world language ...--Stan VanDerBeek If we tend to see the present through a rearview mirror, as Marshall McLuhan observed, Stan VanDerBeek: Intercom revealed an artist who drove everywhere in reverse in order to perceive the future. A self-described fruit-picker,' the late VanDerBeek guided film and other time-based media into uncharted territory with an inner compass trained in equal measure to the vicissitudes of technological progress and the ways this progress would impact the human experience. A student at both Cooper Union and Black Mountain College, VanDerBeek began his artistic career as a painter in the 1940s. By the early 1950s had become an influential underground filmmaker, and by the end of that decade was a pioneer of what critic Gene Youngblood dubbed expanded cinema. As a result, through the variegated constellation of artistic thought and production on display in The Intercom, the viewer comes to appreciate just how long and indelible a shadow VanDerBeek cast across our present media-based artistic environment. The Intercom effectively integrated two core valences of the artist's work, one personal and the other global in scope. On one hand, a personal mythology and iconography permeate VanDerBeek's artistic production, foregrounding opinions, humor, dreams, visual incantations, and idiosyncrasies that arise from a culturally and historically conditioned human being. On the other hand, one senses an attempt to facilitate and manifest universal dialogue--by means of what VanDerBeek termed a non-verbal, international picture language--behind everything did. The world hangs by a thread of verbs and nouns, once proclaimed. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Indeed, all of VanDerBeek's work seems intent on freeing humanity from the snares of its own creativity; as critic Sheldon Renan observed, he sees a race between world destruction and world communication, with the lack of the latter accelerating the former.(1) Yet VanDerBeek's work is decidedly Utopian, exposing the social, political, and technological milieu in which lived, and at the same time striving to unify world cultures vis-a-vis a media-based, non-verbal means of communication--a strategy pitched as Culture Intercom. If this sounds old hat, the exhibition actually provided a wake-up call. At first glance, VanDerBeek's works, which often employed inchoate methods, may not seem all that groundbreaking. Yet they allow us to better perceive the lack of critical distance that characterizes today's cultures of connectivity and media convergence. Whether painted by his own hand, collaged and animated from various media sources, or produced in alliance with the logic of a Bell Labs computer program, VanDerBeek's artistic voice reverberated throughout The Intercom. A creative omnivore, VanDerBeek's sources of inspiration were legion and far-flung, ranging from dadaist collage and the staccato rhythms of the Beat Generation to the cinema of Georges Melies and Buster Keaton, the Utopian teachings of R. …