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The Cinema Effect Part II: Realisms
The second part of the Hirshhorn’s exploration of contemporary moving-image art, Realisms, looks at a decade of film, video and digital works that investigate how cinema—now encompassing such related media as television, home video and digital entertainment—communicates, amuses and critiques by complicating the relationship between fiction and reality. Films and videos by nineteen international artists reveal a spirit of critical self-examination and invention that parallels cinema’s historical ability to imagine for itself other possible forms, functions, and correspondences with the world at large.
in depth
One of the most celebrated conceptual artists of his time, John Baldessari also taught at California Institute of the Arts for several decades. After abandoning traditional painting in the late 1960s, Baldessari began to explore the ways in which visual images establish and embody meaning. This investigation is manifested in painted words carefully chosen by the artist but rendered by a sign painter. As in
Exhibiting Paintings, these texts typically describe the processes of exhibiting and evaluating art, offering a visual manifestation of a theoretical discourse. Baldessari also creates sequences of photographs that question the nature of human perception, and his video and mixed media works investigate the associations between visual experience and language.
