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Stop. Look. Listen:
An Exhibition of Video Works
October 13 – December 23
 Janet Biggs American, born 1959 Water Training, 1997 Acquired with funds from the Herbert F. Johnson Endowment, and from the Warner L. Overton Acquisition Fund
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The Johnson will end 2007 with video works in all temporary exhibition galleries, as well as in the lobby and on the façade, marking five years of concentrated collecting in the area of video and continuing the Museum’s commitment to video as a vital part of its program.
In the short history of video art, there have been two primary modes of expression, “feedback” and “immersion.” Early closed-circuit video feeds were used as an electronic mirror, instantaneously reflecting whatever came into the camera’s gaze. More recently, there has been a shift as many contemporary artists use a more cinematic, “immersion”–style approach in installations with one or more projected images.
This exhibition considers the connections between these two prevalent expressions in video from the last fifteen years, focusing on works that have a significant relationship between sound and image, such as those by Salla Tykkä and Jesper Just that make use of existing soundtracks, or Mircea Cantor’s Deeparture that is purposefully silent. Within this treatment of sound and image artists also address issues related to looking and the body, such as the floating bodies in Janet Biggs’s Water Training, the stumbling body in Patty Chang’s Losing Ground, and Janine Antoni’s balancing act in Touch, the last of which will be projected onto the Museum’s façade.
Using examples of work by sixteen artists from around the world, the exhibition will show that a response to the moving image can occur on many sensory levels within both “feedback” and “immersion” practices; many of the works try to break down the traditional opposition between viewer and viewed by emphasizing a more inclusive interaction.
Other artists represented in the exhibition will include Burt Barr, Johanna Billing, Slater Bradley, Amy Globus, Amy Jenkins, Mads Lynnerup, Christian Marclay, Rodney McMillian, Anri Sala, and Saskia Olde Wolbers.
This project was realized in part with financial support from the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam. The exhibition has been funded in part by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. Additional support was provided by the the Fifth Floor Foundation,Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, Hermès, and the Cornell Council for the Arts.