Occupying the Collection

Abstract

A New Gneration. Albright-Knox Art Gallery Buffalo July 1-October 9, 2011 first media art exhibition initiated by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in over a decade, Videosphere: A New Generation represented a significant achievement for Buffalo's modern and contemporary art museum. gallery last showcased time-based art in 1996, when it organized Being & Time: Emergence of Video Projection. Curated by Marc Mayer, who today heads the National Gallery of Canada, the landmark exhibit included monumental installations such as Gary Hill's Tall Ships (1992) and Bill Viola's The Greeting (1995). Of the six artists featured in Being & Time, Bruce Nauman, Tony Oursler, and Viola reappeared among twenty-four artists represented in Videosphere. Organized by Holly E. Hughes, Curator for the Collection, as neither a comprehensive survey nor an evaluation of emerging trends, Videosphere reflected the gallery's efforts to bolster its collection of time-based art, works that it did not acquire until the 1990s. Given its resonance with artists of recent generations, Hughes writes, this genre of work has become an increasingly integral component of strategies surrounding collections of contemporary art. (1) Intergenerational and interdisciplinary, Hughes's selection of works connected the creative impulses motivating the artists' use of technology to longstanding aesthetic themes. A rigorous project. Videosphere filled the museum's second-floor galleries and also included recent media art acquisitions among the paintings and sculptures from its permanent collection on view in the 1962 Knox Building. John F. Simon Jr.'s Endless Victory (2005), a real-time or generative work driven by the artist's computer code, was installed in proximity to the work of Piet Mondrian, whose unfinished painting Victory Boogie Woogie (1942-44) served as inspiration. Mod Lang (2001), an abstract digital animation by Jeremy Blake, serves as a visualization of the late artist's reverence for the masters of modernism looming close by. Removed from its implied, nonfigurative narrative, the work becomes riddled by its service to ambiance, reflecting a Rothko behind it. A majority of the works on view in Videosphere were acquired after 2007, when the gallery de-accessioned objects from its collection to support an endowment for new purchases. (2) show was the debut for these acquisitions, including the earliest work on view, Nauman's video installation Green Horses (1988). (3) Thus, while many museums today are choosing to curate from within in order to reign in expenses, the Albright-Knox spared little to none when it launched Videospheres, choosing instead to reinvest in its collection by installing several monolithic; acquisitions. Of the twenty-six works on view, I've focused my attention on three. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] At the center of the exhibition, Isaac Julien's Western Union: Small Boats (2007) was positioned amid the classical Greek architecture in the gallery's sculpture court at the core of the 1905 Albright Building. final installment of his expeditions trilogy, Cast No Shadow, (4) the multi-channel video installation is the British experimental filmmaker's meditation on cinema. Acquired by the Gallery in 2009, Western Union is a series of vignettes that serve as a meditation on Luchino Visconti's 1963 film Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), about the nineteenth-century Sicilian aristocracy and social upheaval, based on a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Julien uses iconography and choreography to explore currents of the modern African diaspora and to reconsider the Mediterranean island's role in contemporary migration. By staging sequences in the same palatial settings used by Visconti, the artist returns to these traditional Baroque spaces representing an odyssey informed by both desire and trauma. …