October 20 to November 27, 2007

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Artists Borrow from Film

Opening Reception October 20 from 6-8 pm. Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by a selection of contemporary artists all of whom have borrowed ideas, visual tropes, and modes of working from the movies.  The show examines the centrality of the cinema in contemporary culture and has a particular focus on the popular mythology surrounding the making of movies.  This is not a film and video show.  This is a show about the impact of filmmaking on contemporary art and the many ways that artists have drawn on our collective knowledge of film culture to extend the aesthetic possibilities of existing artistic forms. The exhibition includes work by Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, David Levinthal, Richard Prince, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Jan de Cock, Josh Shaddock, Ryan McGinley, Matthew Cusick and Jeremy Blake.

The exhibition is anchored by two vintage prints from screen-tests by Andy Warhol.  In Warhol’s early foray into filmmaking he characteristically eschews all narrative, editing, and camera movement and instead re-creates a piece of the old Hollywood studio system. The screen-test was the divining rod of the early moguls, a mythical contrivance used in the ‘discovery’ of stars--Warhol’s cool re-deployment of this device sets the standard for all artists who would later borrow from the filmmaker’s behind-the-scenes toolkit.

The show includes work by a quartet of contemporary masters who have revolutionized current art practice through direct engagement with our collective visual culture, especially images and ideas from film. Cindy Sherman has made some of the most iconic artworks of the late 20th century by applying a (fictional) filmic context to her photographs. Her Film Stills imbue static images with suggestions of narrative, character and dramatic action. David Levinthal was among the first artists to forge a new postmodernist photographic tradition. Like the old Hollywood FX wizards who could create a naval battle in a bathtub, Levinthal stages scenes with miniature figures and suggests vast cinematic tableau through the playful application of camera effects from the cinematographer’s bag of tricks. Likewise, Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s career has been a continual investigation of photographic tradition, using staged scenes and studio lighting to both undermine and reinvigorate documentary and verite modes of working. Richard Prince is the master appropriationist, borrowing liberally from society’s image bank and putting the mythologies operant in film and advertising to subversive new uses.

Also included are five emerging artists who are now expanding on this tradition of borrowing tools and techniques from film culture. Jeremy Blake, his career now cut-short by his tragic suicide, had been exploring the possibilities opened when painterly abstraction acquired film’s added dimension of movement and time.  Jan de Cock, subject of an upcoming exhibition at MoMA, juxtaposes objects and installs sculptural elements as framing devices in existing environments. By mimicking the framing and montage techniques of a film director his installations alter one’s experience of real time and space. Josh Shaddock uses a sound designer’s methodology to make a piece of visual slapstick about the telling of jokes and Matthew Cusick went into the editing studio to create a you-are-there thrill ride of vehicular mayhem that simultaneously functions as a seven-minute historical survey of escapism and wish fulfillment in the movies. Ryan McGinley’s lush images of transfixed fans at Morrissey concerts rely on an implied ‘soundtrack’ to go with the photographs and thereby change their aesthetic content to something beyond the merely documentary. Instead, the series becomes a meditation on a phenomenon well known any cinephile: that emotional transport we experience singly even as we sit amongst the crowd of a theater.