Jeremy Deller, Still from The Battle of Orgreave, 2001. Image courtesy the artist and Artangel, London. Photo by Martin Jenkinson.

Runa Islam, Installation view of Tuin, 1998. Image courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube. Photo by Gerry Johansson.

Omer Fast, Still from Godville, 2005, from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden collection. Image courtesy the artist.

Christian Jankowski, Still from This I played tomorrow, 2003. Image courtesy the artist and Maccarone Inc., New York.

Kerry Tribe, Still from Double, 2001. Image courtesy the artist and 1301PE, Los Angeles.

Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden
Independence Avenue at Seventh Street SW
202-633-1000
Washington
The Cinema Effect, Illusion, Reality
and the Moving Image, Part II: Realisms
June 19-
September 7, 2008

The second part of the Hirshhorn’s two-part exploration of contemporary moving-image art, Realisms, looks at a decade of work that demonstrates how cinema — now encompassing such related moving-image media as television, home video and digital entertainment — is a pervasive artistic and social language that complicates rather than clarifies the relationship between fiction and reality. The works of 19 international artists examine some of the traditions and qualities of moving- image media, as well as cinema’s ability to invent new forms, functions and correspondences with the world at large.

“Realisms” is divided into two sections: the first focuses on works that quote global cinema, mainstream television and Hollywood production, while the second examines media representations of historical people, places and events, political propaganda and criminal trials. The exhibition is on view June 19 through Sept. 7 and is organized by Hirshhorn curators Anne Ellegood and Kristen Hileman.

In the first section, works by Candice Breitz, Julian Rosefeldt and Pierre Huyghe refer to, sample from and re-create other cinematic works. In The Third Memory (1999), Huyghe gives John Wojtowicz, the bank robber portrayed by Al Pacino in Sidney Lumet’s 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, a chance to recount his version of the events that inspired the film. Huyghe’s work reveals that, as time goes on, Wojtowicz’s memory of the actual robbery has become intertwined with the story as portrayed in Lumet’s film. Rosefeldt’s Lonely Planet (2006) tracks the journey of a Westerner in modern-day India, culminating with his participation in a musical number on the set of a Bollywood film.

Runa Islam’s Tuin (1998) serves as a transition between the first and second sections of the exhibition. She recreates a complex shot from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film Martha in which an unseen camera circles around a man and woman as they first encounter one another, conveying the dizziness of their fateful meeting. In Islam’s version, cameras and equipment are visible. Tuin exposes the techniques used to fabricate cinema’s spell-binding versions of physical and emotional reality.

In the second section of the exhibition, Michèle Magema, Jeremy Deller, Artur Zmijewski and others explore the confrontation between control and freedom in a cinematic age. These artists recreate historical happenings but enable non-actors to interfere with and or take control of cinema’s processes of storytelling and simulation, resulting in works that critique mass media’s filtering of events.

Artists Isaac Julien and Omer Fast look to montage and multiple screens to deconstruct media’s presentation of people, cultures and historic events. Their films do not use traditional narrative structures. Taking as his subject Colonial Williamsburg and its inhabitants, Fast deconstructs the interview format common within the documentary genre and makes apparent the way moving pictures are spaces where we construct and complicate identity and reality. Essential to the delivery of Julien’s montage is the presentation of characters and landscapes in 3-D space across four screens. This phenomenon of proliferating screens is, of course, occurring outside of gallery spaces as well, as moving-image content is presented on movie screens and televisions, as well as on computers, cell phones and other portable devices, expanding the impact of the cinema throughout daily life.

Realisms features the work of Candice Breitz, Matthew Buckingham, Paul Chan, Ian Charlesworth, Phil Collins, Jeremy Deller, Kota Ezawa, Omer Fast, Pierre Huyghe, Runa Islam, Christian Jankowski, Isaac Julien, Michèle Magema, Julian Rosefeldt, Corinna Schnitt, Mungo Thomson, Kerry Tribe, Francesco Vezzoli and Artur Zmijewski.