Catherine Sullivan, video still from Triangle of Need, 2007. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, and Metro Pictures, New York.

Guy Ben-Ner, Video still from Wild Boy, 2004. Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York.

Guy Ben-Ner, Video still from Wild Boy, 2004. Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York.

Guy Ben-Ner, Video still from Moby Dick, 2000. Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York.

Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation, Photographic still from The Rape of the Sabine Women (Disintegration at Hydra), 2005. Photo by Ricoh Gerbl, courtesy Roebling Hall, New York.

Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation, Photographic still from The Rape of the Sabine Women (Disintegration at Hydra), 2005. Photo by Ricoh Gerbl, courtesy Roebling Hall, New York.

Arturo Herrera, source drawing from Les Noces, 2007. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Arturo Herrera, source drawing from Les Noces, 2007. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Catherine Sullivan, Poor Little Sanya: Economic Parable, 2004, 7 black-and-white photographs, 8 x 10" each. Performers: Alva Loomis, George Ducker, © Catherine Sullivan.

Smart Museum of Art
University of Chicago
5550 S. Greenwood Avenue
773-702-0200
Chicago
Adaptation:
Video Installations by Ben-Ner,
Herrera, Sullivan, and Eve Sussman
& The Rufus Corporation
January 31-May 4, 2008

While adaptation is a common practice in popular culture — familiar to moviegoers and booklovers who debate endlessly whether the film version is superior to the novel — it is perhaps less well known as a practice in contemporary art. This exhibition looks at the use of adaptation in the recent work of four artists: Guy Ben-Ner, Arturo Herrera, Catherine Sullivan, and Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation. They have transformed source material to make their own work, re-envisioning classic literature, painting, film, ballet, and even e-mail as new video installations. While addressing questions of fidelity and creativity, the exhibition generates new understanding of the use of adaptation as a practice in contemporary art.

Adaptation is accompanied by an online publication and significant programming, including collaborations extending its themes into film and theater. Adaptation features the first U.S. museum exhibition of Sussman and Rufus Corporation’s The Rape of the Sabine Women and Les Noces, Herrera's first video installation.

Adaptation is a tightly focused exhibition: each of the four artists is represented by one or two significant video installations. The works include Guy Ben-Ner’s Moby Dick (2000) and Wild Boy (2004), respectively adapted from Herman Melville’s classic novel and François Truffaut’s film L’enfant sauvage (The Wild Child); Arturo Herrera’s Les Noces (The Wedding, 2007), an animated adaptation of the ballet of the same name by Igor Stravinsky; Catherine Sullivan’s Triangle of Need (2007), developed in collaboration with composer Sean Griffin and choreographer Dylan Skybrook, as well as a smaller-scale new work developed in collaboration with students from the University of Chicago; and Eve Sussman and The Rufus Corporation’s The Rape of the Sabine Women (2006), inspired in part by Jacques Louis David’s 1799 painting, The Intervention of the Sabine Women.

Together, these works offer a complementary range of source materials, methods of presentation, and approaches to adaptation. Building on familiar notions of adaptation — and a substantial body of scholarship in the fields of literature, theater, and film — the exhibition generates an interdisciplinary conversation about use of adaptation in contemporary art.

Guy Ben-Ner
Since the early 1990s, Guy Ben-Ner has filmed a series of short videos starring himself and his family, often using the intimate spaces of their home as ad-hoc set, studio, and fantastical playroom. For several of these videos, Ben-Ner has adapted classic films and novels into playful and profound investigations of his intertwined roles as artist and father. In doing so he exploits conventions of narrative film: he knows how to tell a story, to hook an audience, to keep them entertained. His videos also brim with witty intertextual cross-references not only to particular aspects of his sources but also to specific episodes and genres within the histories of cinema, video, and performance. Ben-Ner provides layered points of entry into his videos by combining such references with comedic bits of slapstick, an affectionate and humane sensibility, and a gently surreal visual style that includes both sophisticated cinematic devices and crafty, do-it-yourself elements.

Ben-Ner’s adaptations entertain with their clever retellings of familiar tales, but that’s only part of the story. His videos probe the frustrations, pleasures, and ongoing negotiations of individual identity that comprise relationships between parent and child. They also address the complexities of the creative process. Like any artist, Ben-Ner has to navigate constraints that might hinder his practice; here he ingeniously makes space for art within, rather than in spite of, the demands of day-to-day domesticity. By adapting classic sources in fresh and personal ways, he also models a central process within artistic development: investigating the art of prior generations and choosing some attributes to carry forward, some to abandon, and others to re-imagine on one’s own terms.

Guy Ben-Ner (Israeli, born 1969) studied at Hamidrasha B.E.D. Art School in Israel and received his MFA from Columbia University in 2003. Recent major projects include a significant new work for Skulptur Projekte Muenster (2007), the Israeli Pavilion in the Venice Biennale (2005), and a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2005). His work has also been shown in P.S. 1’s Greater New York and in museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Herzliya Museum of Art, Israel; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Ben-Ner received a DAAD grant from the German government (2006–2007) and currently lives in Berlin.

Arturo Herrera
Arturo Herrera investigates multiple media, including painting, sculpture, collage, photography, and drawing, and in his new work for Adaptation, animation. His practice is deeply informed by the history of modernist abstraction not only as manifested in static two-dimensional media but also within music and dance. He has combined these elements within his first video installation, which will have its United States premiere at the Smart Museum. This two-channel video is based on Igor Stravinsky’s 1923 ballet composition, also titled Les Noces (The Wedding). Herrera digitally reworked and animated fragments of his earlier drawings and photographs into an ever-shifting dance of abstract black-and-white images set to Stravinksy’s music.

This animation of a classic piece of music clearly nods to Disney’s famous film Fantasia (1940). Herrera’s Les Noces diverges, however, from that popular model. Rather than simply creating images to accompany music, he takes the whole of the ballet’s 1923 Parisian premiere — an iconic modern production — as the object of his adaptation. The music is certainly central, for Herrera considers Stravinsky a key influence, almost a mentor. (For instance, the composer incorporated traces of Russian folk tunes into Les Noces and Herrera sees parallels between that method of abstraction and his own multi-layered processes of collage.) Herrera also invokes Bronislava Nijinka’s stylized choreography. His precisely structured sequences of abstract images include quick, almost mechanical edits, complex visual rhythms, and marks that recur in ways that hint at the recurring gestures of dancers. Similarly, his black-and-white palette pays tribute to Natalia Goncharova’s stark costumes and stage design.

Arturo Herrera (Venezualan, b. 1959) received his MFA from the University of Illinois, Chicago. Selected solo exhibitions of Herrera’s work include those held at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, United Kingdom (2007), Art Gallery of Ontario (2002), Whitney Museum of American Art (2001), UCLA Hammer Museum (2001), Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2000), Renaissance Society, University of Chicago (1998), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995). Selected group exhibitions include Comic Abstraction (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2007), The Moderns, Castello di Rivoli, Torino (2003), Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art (Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, 2003), Whitney Biennial (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002), The Americans (Barbican Art Centre, London, 2001), and Painting at the Edge of the World (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2001). Selected awards include a DAAD Fellowship (2003), Pollock-Krasner Foundation award (1998), and an ArtPace Fellowship (1998).

Catherine Sullivan
Catherine Sullivan cross-pollinates theater with dance and film to achieve a hybrid art she refers to as “second order dramas.” Trained as an actress, in the late 1990s she began to make multi-channel film installations. The production of these works involves many people, including large casts of actors who usually perform in a highly stylized manner devised by Sullivan. She and her actors develop exaggerated gestures that suggest events or emotional states, which Sullivan then choreographs into combinations that hint at narrative but rarely fully resolve. She also collaborates with film professionals to achieve high production values and uses specific technical choices — extremely long shots that track action, for instance — to support her ideas. Many of her prior works have used specific texts as points of departure, while also bringing in sources culled from the history of film and theater.

Sullivan, unlike the other artists in Adaptation, has culled one of her central sources from a debased aspect of our current culture rather than from classic works of the past. Triangle of Need builds from a notorious and ubiquitous type of mass e-mail scam letter in which the recipient is exhorted to take advantage of an African investment opportunity. The completed work suggests a surreal backstory for such e-mails while also drawing on a broad range of source material and subjects, including Neanderthals and Nigerian cinema. Developed in collaboration with composer Sean Griffin and choreographer Dylan Skybrook, the piece moves between a run-down Chicago apartment building and Vizcaya, an opulent historic home in Miami that the artist describes as “a primal scene of industrial wealth in America.”

Catherine Sullivan (American, b. 1968) received a BFA in acting from the California Institute of the Arts (1992) and her MFA from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena (1997). Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions around the world, including The Chittendens, 2005-2006 (Secession Vienna, Metro Pictures, New York and Tate, London); Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land, 2004 (Gió Marconi, Milan and Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany); and Five Economies, 2002 (Renaissance Society, University of Chicago; Armand Hammer Museum, UCLA). Selected group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial (2004); Playlist, the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2004); Fast Forward, Media Art, Sammlung Goetz, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2003); and Cosima Von Bonin, Kunstverein Hamburg (2001). Sullivan is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Art, University of Chicago.

Eve Sussman
& The Rufus Corporation
Eve Sussman has worked primarily in film, video, and installation. Her two most recent projects have used canonical Western paintings as a base from which she and her collaborators in The Rufus Corporation improvise a narrative, resulting in grand, highly stylized filmic works. The first of these works, 89 Seconds at Alcazar (2004), brought together an ensemble of visual atmosphere, performance, and process set “within” Velasquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas (1656). Building on the success of that project, Sussman solidified her relationship with many of those involved in 89 Seconds and invited additional artists, dancers and musicians to form the Rufus Corporation.

Their latest project, an operatically scaled film, The Rape of the Sabine Women, is inspired by Jacques Louis David’s painting The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799). The painting depicts part of the foundational myth of Rome, in which Romans abducted women from a neighboring community in order to help populate their new city. David’s painting focuses on the moment when Sabine soldiers return to free the captives, who have in the meantime been won over by the Romans. In the midst of tumult, a woman extends her arms to separate two soldiers, seeking conciliation rather than further bloodshed.

In their new work, Sussman & The Rufus Corporation pick up key elements of David's imagery but move on to explore more complex interactions between men and women. Filmed in Germany and Greece and set to a score by Jonathan Bepler, the work intertwines several lines of imagery and loose narrative. Dark-suited men stride through the Pergamon Museum’s classical statuary or the baggage area of an airport; they observe and abduct the women from within a crowded meat market; they lounge around a sleek modern home in a post-party atmosphere of utter ennui. The work addresses the failure of the modern notion of “better living,” whether through design or any other means: the utopian moment of peaceful domestic coexistence collapses in the climactic battle scene that ends the work.

Eve Sussman’s work has been presented in exhibitions and installations at the American Academy, Rome, Italy; the 5th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey; the Mysliborz Regional Museum, Mysliborz, Poland; and the Espace Paul Ricard, Paris, France; among other venues. Screenings of The Rape of the Sabine Women have been supported by the Hamburger Banhof, Berlin (2007) and Creative Time, New York (2007); the rough cut of the work was screened at the Nasher Museum, Duke University (2006). Sussman’s 89 seconds at Alcazar has been shown in numerous international spaces including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museo Picasso, Barcelona; the Union Gallery, London; St. Johannes Evangelist-Kirche, Berlin; and The Reina Sofia, Madrid. Sussman is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Grant, the Jerome Foundation Grant, and, recently, the J F Costopoulos Foundation Grant.

Founded in 2003 during production of 89 seconds at Alcázar, The Rufus Corporation is an ad-hoc group of artists, dancers, actors and musicians who, under the direction of Eve Sussman, create videos, photographs, and live events. For The Rape of the Sabine Women, founding collaborators Eve Sussman, Nesbitt Blaisdell, Helen Pickett, Annette Previtti, Walter Sipser, Claudia de Serpa Soares, Jeff Wood, Karen Young, and Sofie Zamchick traveled to Greece to begin rehearsals and were joined by Popi Alkouli-Troianou, Kostas Beveratos, Marilisa Chronea, Stergios Ioanou, Grayson Millwood, Katerina Oikonomopoulou, Rosa Prodromou, Antonis Spinoulos, Christos Syrmakezis, and Sotiris Tsakomidis to create the work in improvisation along with the film and television star Themis Bazaka and acclaimed vocalist Savina Yannatou. Jonathan Bepler, who also scored 89 seconds at Alcázar, asked musicians Algis Kizys, Eric Hubel, Geoff Gersh, Craig Rodriguez, Scott Moore, and Bradford Reed to accompany the group to Greece for production, where they recorded the music live during the shoot. Photographers for the production were Benedikt Partenhiemer, Ricoh Gerbl, and Bobby Neel Adams.

Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation, Photographic still from The Rape of the Sabine Women (Disintegration at Hydra), 2005. Photo by Ricoh Gerbl, courtesy Roebling Hall, New York.