"New babies just home from the hospital, children cavorting
under the Christmas tree; weddings, receptions, birthday
parties--these and many other happy memories live on through the
magic of color slides." --Kodak instruction manual, 1967
Interview with Darsie Alexander, Curator, BMA, August 2004
Since the Renaissance, most art has been prized because of the
prodigious skills that went into its making. Why would any artist
choose to work with slides?
It's tempting to see slide projection as quick and easy. Indeed,
many artists cite these qualities when explaining their initial
attraction to the medium. But the process can be complicated,
involving not only the creation of the transparency itself but also
its arrangement, projected scale, and timing. A single carousel may
contain as many as eighty images that must be numbered and ordered,
a task that grows all the more complicated with the addition of
each new slide grouping. When we rediscovered a piece by one of the
performance artists in the exhibition, I thought he was going to
cry. The prospect of putting the whole complex thing back together
was painful, even though he was delighted to see his work again. Of
course, slide projection is low-tech and notoriously
accident-prone. But I think the medium owes a lot of its immediacy
to its tendency as an apparatus to jam, to burn out a bulb, to turn
a well-planned show into a logistical nightmare. Good art often
courts disaster.
Is the development of slide art connected to the ferment of the
60s?
During the 1960s and 1970s, public projection of slides became a
vehicle for social and political activism. Slide projection's
portability made this possible, enabling artists (Krzysztof
Wodiczko, for example) to project powerful, challenging images onto
public buildings. When Lucy Lippard wanted to publicize the
exclusion of women from the Whitney Annual of 1970, she projected
slides against the surface of the museum to protest its curatorial
policies. This application of slides as critical commentary had
historical precedents: in the 1880s, the photographer Jacob Riis
used slides of the urban poor to arouse the concern of people who
might have been able to help.
Did the strong associations of slides with family entertainment
have any impact on the ways artists adapted the medium?
The fact that the medium promotes a collective viewing
experience is important for both artists and popular users. The act
of looking at images, especially still photographs, generally
involves a single spectator and a stationary object, but with
slides you are often sitting in the same room with other people,
sharing the experience with them. People who watch Nan Goldin's The
Ballad of Sexual Dependency, for example, find themselves on the
same emotional roller coaster. It's like the family slide show in a
way; people participate in a joint emotional response to images of
past events. Of course, the memories and feelings such a work
stimulates are different for everyone, and that is the reason The
Ballad is such a great piece. Marcel Proust as well as Ingmar
Bergman have called attention to the mesmerizing power of the magic
lantern shows they saw as children.
Is there any connection between those shows and slide shows by
such artists as Dennis Oppenheim or James Coleman?
Projection is a mysterious process that evokes all kinds of
fantasies. The ancient meaning of the term "to project" is related
to the alchemical process for changing base metal into gold. Nearly
every artist I interviewed remembers being fascinated by shadows on
the wall as a kid, or lying in the dark using the beam of a
flashlight to make patterns in the darkness. An artist like James
Coleman extends this magical experience to viewers by manipulating
the transformative properties of slides as images that are not
quite real; indeed, the projections themselves are totally
intangible. But all the works in the exhibition invite viewers to
read meaning into translucent pictures.
Is slide technology a thing of the past?
Over the past five years, at least, PowerPoint presentations
have supplanted slide shows. PowerPoint facilitates overlays,
dissolves, syncopated fades, and collage. As consumers, we have
become accustomed to a barrage of images and are easily bored. No
matter how fancy your equipment, slide projection will always seem
a slower, more regulated process. Slides and slide projectors are
generally a monocular form of vision and, though users can combine
projectors to multiply the frames they project, it is rare that
people--including artists--use more than two. And please remember:
anyone who would like to use a projector must go to the secondhand
market. The last slide projector was manufactured in September
2004.
How does the book SlideShow relate to the SlideShow
exhibition?
I am not trying to replicate the exhibition in a book; that's
impossible The book cannot but give its reader a visual experience
radically different from that afforded viewers of the exhibition. I
think of the book SlideShow as a document, an expansion, a
reflection, an interrogation of SlideShow the exhibition.
General
Imprint: |
Pennsylvania State University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
March 2005 |
First published: |
2005 |
Editors: |
Darsie Alexander
• Charles Harrison
• Robert Storr
|
Dimensions: |
241 x 222 x 18mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
192 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-271-02541-4 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-271-02541-7 |
Barcode: |
9780271025414 |
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