On View: January 16
The Kitchen at Westbeth and livestreamed on The Kitchen ON AIR (thekitchen.org)
Time: 6:30-9pm
Two Moon July documents a dramatized day-in-the-life of The Kitchen, portraying the institution’s signature range of activities spanning video, music, dance, performance, and film in a style that merges aspects of a variety show and a documentary. The special is one of several artworks The Kitchen produced for broadcast in the 1980s, during a time when various art centers were experimenting with television as a mode of distribution that could present avant-garde art to wider audiences nationally and internationally.
Following a screening of the work, Barry and Fitzgerald will reflect on their respective engagements with television during this era. Examples discussed will include Barry's 1989 essay "This is Not a Paradox," which explores how video artists worked with broadcast media throughout the decade, and Fitzgerald's works of video art that circulated over the airwaves, such as Olympic Fragments (made with John Sanborn, 1980), an excerpt of which appears in Two Moon July. In conversation with Fateman, the artists take up questions about the possibilities—and pitfalls—of television as a platform for artistic expression in the 1980s, while also considering the evolving relationship between art and mass media into the present day.
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