The Jewish Museum Kicks Off 'REVOLUTION OF THE EYE' Summer Programs
By: BWW News Desk May. 14, 2015
In conjunction with the Jewish Museum's exhibition, Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television, on view through September 20, 2015, the Jewish Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Cooper Union are co-presenting a series of programs from May to July.
Highlights include a concert with the Bang on a Can All-Stars; a screening of Andy Warhol's rarely seen 1964 film, Soap Opera; a discussion with television scholars Lynn Spigel and Horace Newcomb; and intimate conversations with the exhibition's curator, Dr. Maurice Berger.
For further information regarding these programs, call 212.423.3200 or visit Thejewishmuseum.org/RevolutionOfTheEyeEvents.
PROGRAM SCHEDULE:
Concert: Bang on a Can: Revolution of the Eye
Featuring the Bang on a Can All-Stars
Tonight, May 14, 7:30pm
This performance will highlight the relationship between music and image. The All-Stars will present an acclaimed work by jazz giant Don Byron to accompany a screening of Eugene, an early television show by pioneering comedian Ernie Kovacs. In 2000, Bang on a Can commissioned Don Byron to write a score for the iconic show, which was completely silent and broadcast on national TV in 1961. The program will also include Fade to Slide, a music and video piece from the All-Stars' new Cantaloupe Music album Field Recordings (released on May 12) by visual artist Christian Marclay. In Fade to Slide, short fragments of films are edited into a rapid succession of events that the musicians use as a structure for their performance. Marclay's 24 hour film The Clock was installed last year at the Museum of Modern Art. Other works to be performed include Don Byron's Basquiat, David Lang's sunray, and Julia Wolfe's Lick.
This program is the fourth concert of the Jewish Museum and Bang on a Can's partnership to produce a series of dynamic musical performances at the Museum inspired by the Jewish Museum's diverse slate of exhibitions.
Formed in 1992, the Bang on a Can All-Stars (Ashley Bathgate, Cello; Robert Blac, Bass; Vicky Chow, Piano; David Cossin, Percussion; Mark Stewart, Electric Guitar; Ken Thomson, Clarinets/Saxophone) are recognized worldwide for their ultra-dynamic live performances and recordings of today's most innovative music. Freely crossing the boundaries between classical, jazz, rock, world and experimental music, this six-member amplified ensemble has consistently forged a distinct category-defying identity, taking music into uncharted territories. Performing each year throughout the U.S. and internationally, the All-Stars have shattered the definition of what concert music is today. The All-Stars were awarded Musical America's Ensemble of the Year in 2005 and have been heralded as "the country's most important vehicle for contemporary music" by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Tickets: $18 adults; $15 students and seniors; $12 Jewish Museum and Bang on a Can list members
Dialogue and Discourse: Horace Newcomb and Lynn Spigel
Thursday, May 28, 6:30pm
In the 1950s and 1960s, American television was a virtual gallery for new movements in the arts - from Abstract Expressionism to jazz to Pop Art. Dr. Horace Newcomb, former Lambdin Kay Chair for the Peabody Awards, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia, and Dr. Lynn Spigel, Frances E. Willard Professor of Screen Cultures, School of Communications, Northwestern University, discuss early television's role in popularizing modernism, and consider how TV continues to influence American tastes and ways of seeing the world. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition, Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television.
This program continues Dialogue and Discourse, a series of evening conversations inspired by current exhibitions and exploring artistic practice, global perspectives, and cultural issues.
Dr. Horace Newcomb is the author of TV: The Most Popular Art (Doubleday/Anchor, 1974), co-author of The Producer's Medium (Oxford University Press, 1983) and editor of seven editions of Television: The Critical View (Oxford University Press, 1976-2006). In 1973-74, while teaching full time, he was also the daily television columnist for the Baltimore Morning Sun. From 1994-96 he served as Curator for the Museum of Broadcast Communications (Chicago) with primary duties as editor of definitive library reference work and first-record for the study of television, The Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Television (Taylor & Francis, 2nd edition, 2004).
Dr. Lynn Spigel is author of Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 1992); Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Duke University Press, 2001); and TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (University of Chicago Press, 2009). She has also edited numerous volumes including Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Duke, 2004) and Electronic Elsewheres: Media and the Experience of Social Space (Minnesota: 2010). Dr. Spigel is the recipient of a 2012 Guggenheim fellowship and is currently working on a book about the history of the smart homes and digital designs for everyday life. She also continues to work on television and media history in the mid-century period.
Free with Pay-What-You-Wish Admission; RSVP Recommended
Revolution of the Eye Talk Backs
Tuesday, June 16, 5:45pm
Tuesday, July 14 5:45pm
Dr. Maurice Berger, curator of Revolution of the Eye, leads discussions about the exhibition in an intimate conversation format.
Maurice Bergeris Research Professor and Chief Curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Consulting Curator at The Jewish Museum in New York. Berger has curated more than thirty exhibitions. His critically acclaimed shows have appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, The New Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, International Center of Photography, Addison Gallery of American Art, Berkeley Art Museum, and the National Civil Rights Museum, and other national and international venues. He is the author of eleven books, including For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Yale, 2010), Masterworks of The Jewish Museum (Yale, 2004), and White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999). His honors and awards include a 2011 Emmy Award nomination from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, New York chapter, and curatorial awards from the Association of Art Museum Curators and the International Association of Art Critics. Berger's essay series, Race Stories, "a continuing exploration of the relationship of race to photographic portrayals of race," appears monthly on the Lens blog of The New York Times.
Free with Museum Admission; please note that space is limited; advance reservation required
The Wind Up: Revolution of the Eye
Thursday, June 25, 8-11pm
The Museum's after-hours series featuring art making, live performance, and gallery tours celebrates the visual power and cultural impact of television on view in Revolution of the Eye. Activities include Op Art-inspired screen-printing, DJ Louis XIV and an open bar with beer and wine.
Tickets: $13 Advance; $18 Day of Event
Writers and Artists Respond: Alexander Tochilovsky
Thursday, July 23, 6:30pm
Alexander Tochilovsky, Curator, Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography and Adjunct Professor, The Cooper Union, speaks about the archival graphic design-related material in Revolution of the Eye. This program continues the series Writers and Artists Respond, thought-provoking discussions and performances led by artists, musicians, and writers in the Museum's exhibition galleries.
Alexander Tochilovsky was born in Odessa, USSR, (presently Ukraine) in 1977. He was curator of the Lubalin Center exhibitions, Appetite: A Reciprocal Relationship Between Food and Design (2010) and Pharma (2011), and runs a design studio, The Studio of ME/AT, with Mike Essl.
Free with Pay-What-You-Wish Admission; Advance RSVP Required
Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan
Screening and Discussion: Andy Warhol's Soap Opera
Andy Warhol. Soap Opera, 1964. 16mm, black-and-white; preserved version 46 min.
Susan and John Hess Family Theater, 3rd Floor
Warhol's 1964 film Soap Opera, starring Baby Jane Holzer and Sam Green, among others, intercuts actual television commercials with silent domestic scenes shot by Warhol. Rarely screened, it is a key example of the artist's radical experimentation with and dismantling of television as both a technological medium and an affective apparatus. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the artist Alex Bag and Bruce Jenkins, professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and co-author of the forthcoming of second volume of the catalogue raisonné of Andy Warhol's films, moderated by Claire K. Henry, senior curatorial assistant, The Andy Warhol Film Project.
This program is a collaboration between the Whitney's Education Department and The Andy Warhol Film Project
Tickets: $8/$6 seniors and students/free for members
Program at The Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography, The Cooper Union, 41 Cooper Square, Room LL119, New York
Archive Visit and Presentation: Alexander Tochilovsky
Thursday, July 30, 6:30pm
The Herb Lubalin Study Center is an archive of graphic design ephemera based in New York City and housed within Cooper Union. The Center's curator, Alexander Tochilovsky, will present materials from the collection which relate to Revolution of the Eye. Design ephemera by its nature covers a wide area of culture and captures history in an elegant way, by looking at those materials we can gain a greater insight into particular themes or periods in time. The event will present participants with a rare opportunity to see and handle all of the ephemera.
Free with RSVP; please note that space is limited; advance reservation required
About Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television - From the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, the pioneers of American television - many of them young, Jewish, and aesthetically adventurous - adopted modernism as a source of inspiration. Revolution of the Eye looks at how the dynamic new medium, in its risk-taking and aesthetic experimentation, paralleled and embraced cutting-edge art and design. Highlighting the visual revolution ushered in by American television and modernist art and design of the 1950s and 1960s, the exhibition features over 260 art objects, artifacts, and clips. Fine art and graphic design, including works by Saul Bass, Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, , Georgia O'Keefe, and Andy Warhol, as well as ephemera, television memorabilia, and clips from film and television, including Batman, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Ernie Kovacs Show, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, and The Twilight Zone will be on view. Revolution of the Eye also examines television's promotion of avant-garde ideals and aesthetics; its facility as a promotional platform for modern artists, designers, and critics; its role as a committed patron of the work of modern artists and designers; and as a medium whose relevance in contemporary culture was validated by the Museum of Modern Art's historic Television Project (1952-55).
Public programs are made possible by endowment support from the William Petschek Family, the Trustees of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation, Barbara and Benjamin Zucker, the late William W. Hallo, the late Susanne Hallo Kalem, the late Ruth Hallo Landman, the Marshall M. Weinberg Fund, with additional support from Marshall M. Weinberg, the Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Foundation, the Saul and Harriet M. Rothkopf Family Foundation and Ellen Liman. Additional support is provided by Lorraine and Martin Beitler and through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
About the Jewish Museum - Located on Museum Mile at Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street, the Jewish Museum is one of the world's preeminent institutions devoted to exploring art and Jewish culture from ancient to contemporary, offering intellectually engaging and educational exhibitions and programs for people of all ages and backgrounds. The Museum was established in 1904, when Judge Mayer Sulzberger donated 26 ceremonial objects to The Jewish Theological Seminary as the core of a museum collection. Today, the Museum maintains a collection of over 30,000 works of art, artifacts, and broadcast media reflecting global Jewish identity, and presents a diverse schedule of internationally acclaimed temporary exhibitions.
The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, New York City. Museum hours are Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, 11am to 5:45pm; Thursday, 11am to 8pm; and Friday, 11am to 4pm. Museum admission is $15.00 for adults, $12.00 for senior citizens, $7.50 for students, free for visitors 18 and under and Jewish Museum members. Admission is Pay What You Wish on Thursdays from 5pm to 8pm and free on Saturdays. For information on the Jewish Museum, the public may call 212.423.3200 or visit the website at www.thejewishmuseum.org.
Pictured: Installation view of Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television. © The Jewish Museum, NY. Photo by: David Heald.
Videos