Hotbed: Video Cultivation Beside the Getty Gardens!
The Getty Museum is currently hosting “California Video,” a survey of 40 years of video art made in California. To complement this show, the IML’s Anne Bray has curated a stellar program of cutting edge videos from 1980 forward called “Hotbed: Video Cultivation Beside the Getty Gardens"; it will feature 20 videos projected outside on the walls of the Getty in a spectacular and unprecedented display this Friday, May 9 (7:00 - 9:00 p.m.). The show continues on Saturday, but this conflicts with the IMD thesis show opening, so plan accordingly!
The videos center on the nature/culture divide, asking what constitutes the natural and the cultural - is gender natural or cultural? What about race? Videos include East/West, by Su-Chen Hung, which is about the challenges of uniting different cultural heritages in a single self, illustrated deftly with the image of a divided mouth (seen above). Howie Cherman’s Flying I (below) takes us into the impossible through the digital, exploring the ineffable permutations of time, perpetual motion and the body within the image. Flying like this, vibrating in an impossible moment of suspension, can only happen through an image constructed via digital manipulation; and yet that manipulation aligns so closely with real experiences of time and the body in the urgent pace of contemporary culture.
This expansive show offers a rare chance to see powerful, volatile, courageous work produced at a moment when the culture wars demanded a response, not just in terms of giving voice to disparate communities and points of views, but in formal terms as a radical message demanded radical form. The event is free; parking is $8.