Cover, The George Kuchar Reader. Edited by Andrew Lampert.
CMOAFilm_Medium
Cover, The George Kuchar Reader. Edited by Andrew Lampert.

Carnegie Museum of Art Theater

December 11
6:30 – 8 p.m.

A compelling screening series launching at Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) is exploring the legacy of avant-garde film and video and its important ties to the Oakland institution, and sharing rarely seen works with the public.

Kicking off the second phase of CMOA’s new Time-Based Media Project, Double Exposure includes free talks and screenings that examine contemporary perspectives on modern film and video pioneers. Guest speakers include artists, preservationists, curators and scholars, who will discuss seminal avant-garde film and video works from the 1960s through the 1980s, while also showcasing CMOA’s significant permanent collection of nearly 1,000 time-based artworks.

Double Exposure kicks off on December 11th with a presentation by Jonathan Furmanski, who is an associate conservator at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. During his talk, The CRT Canvas: Television and Materiality, 1969–1983, Furmanski will present works from the first generation of groundbreaking artists working in video, including Bill Viola, William Wegman, Alan Kaprow and Wolfgang Stoerche. Audiences will discover the creative practice of these artists, and will also view two rare tapes by Cynthia Maughan (Gone with the Wind, 1976) and Dan Graham (Continuous Present Past(s), 1974). Furmanski is currently spearheading the preservation of the Long Beach Video Art archive, a collection of 3,000 tapes that is one of the earliest and most important archives of video art.

Established in 1970 during the first wave of museums to celebrate moving image work, CMOA played a critical role in legitimizing and validating film as an art form, while also hosting historical screenings, director’s retrospectives and monthly events with international avant-garde filmmakers. These activities at CMOA went on to help establish important time-based media collections in museums around the world. Among the conceptual goals of Double Exposure is a desire to “recapture some of the energy of that period, reexamining artists who played an important role in CMOA’s history and introducing the work of contemporary artists who have been influenced or inspired by their work.”

In addition to CMOA’s influential collection, the Burgh’s legacy in celluloid is certainly a rich one—from housing the first nickelodeon and having pioneering 20th-century experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton seeking inspiration in our city, to the longstanding Three Rivers Film Festival and the local film industry’s current rebirth.

Next up for Double Exposure will be Towering Turrets of Tomorrow Land: The Films and Writings of George Kuchar, presented by Anthology Film Archives curator Andrew Lampert on February 5th, followed by a talk with Los Angeles–based artist Jennifer West on March 5th.

Jennifer has worked at the Mattress Factory, Brooklyn Museum of Art and Dahesh Museum of Art and is co-author of Pittsburgh Signs Project: 250 Signs of Western Pennsylvania. She also is co-coordinator of Handmade Arcade. Musically, she is in a band called The Garment District and is a founding member of Brooklyn's The Ladybug Transistor.