FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY – DAY

Mar 03 - May 19 2016

TornCurtainMP27

Danai Anesiadou, Nairy Baghramian, Michael Bell-Smith, Dora Budor, Heman Chong, Mike Cooter, Brice Dellsperger, Casey Jane Ellison, GALA Committee, Mario García Torres, Mathis Gasser, Alex Israel, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Bertrand Lavier, William Leavitt, Christian Marclay, Rodrigo Matheus, Allan McCollum, Henrique Medina, Carissa Rodriguez, Cindy Sherman, Amie Siegel, Scott Stark, Thirteen Black Cats, Albert Whitlock

Recasting the gallery as a set for dramatic scenes, FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY – DAY explores the role that art plays in narrative film and television. FADE IN features the work of 25 artists and considers a history of art as seen in classic movies, soap operas, science fiction, pornography and musicals. These works have been sourced, reproduced and created in response to artworks that have been made to appear on-screen, whether as props, set dressings, plot devices, or character cues.

The nature of the exhibition is such that sculptures, paintings and installations transition from prop to image to art object, staging an enquiry into whether these fictional depictions in mass media ultimately have greater influence in defining a collective understanding of art than art itself does. Certain preoccupations with artworks are established early on in cinematic history: the preciousness of art objects anchors their roles as plot drivers, and anxieties intensify regarding the vitality of artworks and their perceived abilities to wield power over viewers or to capture spirits. Such themes were famously explored in the 1945 film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, from which Cindy Sherman has sourced the original portrait painted for the production. Across genres, the character of the artist is habitually portrayed as a volatile, mercurial figure with license to subvert societal norms, who is thereby ridiculed, feared and revered. From many such narratives, FADE IN draws out the art objects, granting them the status only previously achieved on-screen, whilst pointing to moments in which one form of media wrangles with the power of another.

The exhibition includes new commissions from Danai Anesiadou, Michael Bell-Smith, Dora Budor, Heman Chong, Mike Cooter, Brice Dellsperger, Mathis Gasser, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Bertrand Lavier, Christian Marclay, Rodrigo Matheus, Carissa Rodriguez and Amie Siegel, as well as newly commissioned performances and public programs from Alex Israel, Casey Jane-Ellison and Thirteen Black Cats. Source material ranges widely from The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Teorema (1968) through 9 ½ Weeks (1986) and The Princess Diaries (2001), to the The Twilight Zone (1959-64), Melrose Place (1992-99) and The X-Files (1993-2002).

***

SWISS INSTITUTE PROGRAMMING IS MADE POSSIBLE IN PART WITH PUBLIC FUNDS FROM PRO HELVETIA, SWISS ARTS COUNCIL, THE NEW YORK STATE COUNCIL ON THE ARTS, WITH THE SUPPORT OF GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO AND THE NEW YORK STATE LEGISLATURE, AND THE NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE CITY COUNCIL. MAIN SPONSORS INCLUDE LUMA FOUNDATION, THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, AND FRIENDS OF SWISS INSTITUTE (FOSI), LEADING PARTNERS INCLUDE UBS AND VICTORINOX. SWISS INSTITUTE GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGES STELLA ARTOIS AS BENEFACTOR, SWISS RE AS PUBLIC PROGRAMS SPONSOR, AND SWISS AS TRAVEL PARTNER. SPECIAL THANKS FOR SUPPORT FROM THE FADE IN EXHIBITION CIRCLE: RIBORDY CONTEMPORARY, KURIMANZUTTO, GALERIA FORTES VILAÇA, AND FOXY PRODUCTIONS. SWISS INSTITUTE THANKS CHISWELL LANGHORNE FOR THE OPENING SCENE SCREENPLAY; NEW GALERIE, PARIS FOR PRODUCTION SUPPORT; AND THE LENDERS TO THE EXHIBITION: WERNER DOHMEN, GRAPHICSTUDIO AND UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA, MICHAEL HEINS, NBCUNIVERSAL ARCHIVES & COLLECTIONS, MARGRETHE AND ANDREAS SCHMEER, GABY AND WILHELM SCHÜRMAN, MARC SELWYN FINE ART.

SPECIAL THANKS TO SURI BIELER, ECLECTIC/ENCORE PROPERTIES, INC, NEW YORK; JOHN M. CAHOON, SEAVER CENTRE FOR WESTERN HISTORY RESEARCH, NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM OF LOS ANGELES COUNTY; EDWARD COMSTOCK, USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS, LOS ANGELES; TONY DYKES, BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE, LONDON; JULIE GRAHAM, UCLA LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, LOS ANGELES; ROBERT GREENFIELD, WARNER BROS. PROPERTY DEPT. WARNER BROTHERS, LOS ANGELES; JESSICA HEYMAN, ART FOR FILM, NEW YORK; LOUISE HILTON, FAYE THOMPSON, MARGARET HERRICK LIBRARY, ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURES ARTS AND SCIENCES, LOS ANGELES; STEVEN JACOBS; ROSEMARIE KNOPKA, ART DIRECTORS GUILD, LOS ANGELES; ROBERT M. RUBIN; BRETT SERVICE, USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS – WARNER BROTHERS ARCHIVES, LOS ANGELES; DEIDRE THIEMAN, NBC UNIVERSAL PRODUCTION ARCHIVES, LOS ANGELES; ALLESE THOMSON, UTA; RANDALL THROPP, PARAMOUNT PRODUCTION ARCHIVES, LOS ANGELES; BETTY UYEDA, SEAVER CENTRE FOR WESTERN HISTORY RESEARCH, NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM OF LOS ANGELES COUNTY; EMILY WITTENBERG AT LOUIS B. MAYER LIBRARY, AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE, LOS ANGELES.

Media Contact: Dan Tanzilli / Peter Kaiser, Third Eye
dan@hellothirdeye.com / peter@hellothirdeye.com, +1 646-593-8713

Image Credit: Albert Whitlock, Museen Ze Berlin Matte Painting, Torn Curtain, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Universal Pictures, 1966.

Related

FADE IN, Exhibition Guide

Heman Chong, I WANT TO BELIEVE, 2016



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Press

Allan McCollum FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
Allan McCollum, Lands of Shadow and Substance, 2014. Archival pigment prints. 11 of 27 from edition 2/3. Courtesy of the artist and Graphicstudio/University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida.

Allan McCollum viewed the original Twilight Zone episodes from 1959 to 1964 on his laptop computer, capturing screenshots of scenes that included landscape paintings. Images of those paintings were digitally edited, printed, and custom framed to create the series entitled Lands of Shadow and Substance.
Albert Whitlock, Museen Ze Berlin Matte Painting (replica), made for Torn Curtain, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Universal Pictures, 1966. Courtesy of NBCUniversal Archives & Collections.

Traditional matte paintings, composed of pastels or paint on glass, were used to stand in for sets that did not exist, could not be built, or could not be shot as locations. Albert Whitlock was a frequent collaborator of Director Alfred Hitchcock and served as head of Universal’s matte department from 1961 until his retirement in 1985. In this scene from Torn Curtain, Professor Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) is trying to lose a man tailing him by entering the museum and then exiting out the back door. The live action of Paul Newman walking is combined with the painting to make it appear as though he enters this gallery first.
William Leavitt FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
William Leavitt, Set for The Tropics with Jaguar (from "The Tropics") 1974. Oil on canvas, stage flat, couch, side table, plant, lamp, picture light, ashtray. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali.

Since the 1960s, Los Angeles-based artist William Leavitt has focused on a variety of dramatic narrative forms, often drawing on the proximity of the Hollywood studios where he worked building sets and making props as a young man. A number of his works refer to The Tropics, a script written by Leavitt, which changes form here as it moves across a set, a text and a photographic triptych.
William Leavitt FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
William Leavitt, The Tropics, 1974. Three black and white photographs, text. Courtesy Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles.

Since the 1960s, Los Angeles-based artist William Leavitt has focused on a variety of dramatic narrative forms, often drawing on the proximity of the Hollywood studios where he worked building sets and making props as a young man. A number of his works refer to The Tropics, a script written by Leavitt, which changes form here as it moves across a set, a text and a photographic triptych.
Installation View FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY – DAY, installation view.
Mike Cooter FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
Mike Cooter, MacGuffin: some archetypes towards a definition, 2016. Silver gelatin prints, vinyl, clay, valchromat. Incorporating the manifold quasi-object - The Maltese Falcon (Warner Brothers, 1941), set reference photograph courtesy of the USC Warner Brothers Archive; the seductive hypothesis - Laura (20th Century Fox, 1944), production stills courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the negative pole – Kiss Me Deadly (United Artists, 1955), production still courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ United Artists Collection; the revelation of history – Cat People (RKO, 1942), production still courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ RKO Stills Collection; structural definition (practical socialism) –You and Me (1938, Paramount Pictures), vinyl and King John of Serbia, depicted on horseback with raised sword and impaled panther, 2008, courtesy of the artist.

For his installation MacGuffin: some archetypes towards a definition, Mike Cooter has gathered together a collection of production stills, predominantly from film noir, including an enlarged image from Fritz Lang’s You and Me (1938) in which a benevolent department store owner is seen to subconsciously imitate the posture of a large Socialist Realist public sculpture seen through his office window. Other production photographs include those of important objects in Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and The Maltese Falcon (1941), two stills from Laura (1944) in which a portrait of the ‘dead’ Laura hangs over the sleeping detective, and a ceramic sculpture from Cat People (1942) Cooter previously remade (in a work from 2008) that plays a key role in the generation of the narrative.
Mike Cooter FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
Mike Cooter, MacGuffin: some archetypes towards a definition, 2016, detail. Silver gelatin prints, vinyl, clay, valchromat.

For his installation MacGuffin: some archetypes towards a definition, Mike Cooter has gathered together a collection of production stills, predominantly from film noir, including an enlarged image from Fritz Lang’s You and Me (1938) in which a benevolent department store owner is seen to subconsciously imitate the posture of a large Socialist Realist public sculpture seen through his office window. Other production photographs include those of important objects in Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and The Maltese Falcon (1941), two stills from Laura (1944) in which a portrait of the ‘dead’ Laura hangs over the sleeping detective, and a ceramic sculpture from Cat People (1942) Cooter previously remade (in a work from 2008) that plays a key role in the generation of the narrative.
Nairy Baghramian FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
Nairy Baghramian, B 75, BH, Mod. NB, Ref. CO, MM, 2012. Stainless steel, concrete, plaster, cotton thread, rubber, paper. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

Based on Claes Oldenburg’s Ghost Wardrobe (for M. M.) (1967), a work gesturing to the absence of Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe, Nairy Baghramian condenses and further reduces Oldenburg’s sculpture to a pared-down art historical vocabulary. Despite the fact that fragile rubber constructions hanging from a concrete hanger suggest the actress’s bras, the work proposes that references to other artworks might be a form of bait, not unlike scanty lingerie.
Carissa Rodriguez, La Collectioneuse, 2016. Glazed ceramics, razorblades. Courtesy of the artist and Karma International.

Carissa Rodriguez has created several versions of a sculpture from Eric Rohmer’s film La Collectioneuse (1967), in which the vacation of an artist and his dealer is disturbed and excited by the presence of a young, free-spirited woman. The sculpture in question – a paint tin with razorblades attached to it – is gestured to in a conversation with the artist and dealer, as they discuss the violent nature of the artist and his presence in society.
FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY – DAY, installation view.
Rodrigo Matheus, Scene Game, 2016, detail. Curtains, carpet, faux marble painting and props. Courtesy of the artist.

For Rodrigo Matheus’s architectural intervention along Swiss Institute’s upper and lower levels, he has borrowed a series of prop objects from a popular New York prop house. Ranging from candlestick holders to chess pieces to cultish statues, the structure point to these objects’ potential to gain status through context and display, whether in a prop closet, film, or art installation.
Cindy Sherman Fade IN Int. Art Gallery Day Swiss Institute Flash Art
Left: Henrique Medina, Portrait of Hurd Hatfield as Dorian Gray, 1945. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Right: Cindy Sherman, The Evil Twin, 2016. Hidden painting, black velvet. Courtesy of the artist.

In line with her career-long scrutiny of cinematic representation, Cindy Sherman chose to display Henrique Medina’s Portrait of Hurd Hatfield as Dorian Gray, painted for the 1945 film The Picture of Dorian Gray. Based on the Oscar Wilde 1890 novel of the same name, the black and white motion picture featured the rare appearances of Dorian Gray’s evolving portrait in Technicolor inserts. Medina’s work, which depicts the ever-youthful Dorian Gray of the film’s beginning, is shown here next to a twin painting covered by a cloth, mimicking the way the character conceals his increasingly hideous portrait.
Danai Anesiadou FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
Danai Anesiadou, Vesica Piscis: Down with all States. Down with all Churches. Long live this Painter, 2016. Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist.

Danai Anesiadou has drawn together artworks and characters from three films to construct a fictional space for contrasting artistic energies. Appropriated artworks by a tormented painter who tries to invent new, radical forms of art in Teorema (1968, dir. Pasolini), an aspiring artist who hopes to sell her painting in Minnie & Moskowitz(1971, dir. Cassavettes), and the same actress who pretends she is unable to speak, in order that she will not have to explain her artwork in 4 Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987, dir. Rohmer), create a constellation of overlapping artistic characters in Anesiadou’s installation.
FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY – DAY, installation view.
Brice Dellsperger FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
Brice Dellsperger, Background for Body Double 36, After Xanadu (1980), 2016. Acrylic wall painting by Zone90Graphics. Courtesy of Air de Paris, Paris and Team Gallery, New York.

For the 36th installment of his Body Double series, Brice Dellsperger has re-created the mural from the opening scene of Xanadu (1980, dir. Robert Greenwald). In the film, a frustrated artist toils away in his studio, tearing up his sketches. The scraps that he tosses from his window eventually reach the mural, seemingly giving life to the inanimate women painted in the foreground who break away from the painting to perform the musical number ‘I’m Alive’. During the exhibition, Dellsperger will make a film reenacting this scene.
FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY – DAY, installation view.
GALA Committee, In the Name of the Place, 1995-1997 (continuing through syndication), installation detail. Props inserted on the set of Melrose Place in collaboration with students, artists, critics, set decorators, producers.

Conceived as a viral, conceptual, public artwork to be conducted on primetime television, the GALA Committee’s project, entitled In the Name of the Place, was hosted by soap opera, Melrose Place. The GALA Committee was formed at the University of Georgia and California Institute of the Arts (“GA” for Georgia and “LA” for Los Angeles) to create props and make slight script revisions as “product placements” for Melrose Place, not in service to commercial interests but to initiate the possibility of using the medium to assist in the generational transfer of ideas. This project of covert insertion was not intended to be solely subversive, but to offer a blueprint on how artists can collaborate with commercial production from the “inside.”
GALA Committee FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
GALA Committee, TV Tube (after Johns) Bronze, steel. Courtesy of Schürmann Collection.

Conceived as a viral, conceptual, public artwork to be conducted on primetime television, the GALA Committee’s project, entitled In the Name of the Place, was hosted by soap opera, Melrose Place. The GALA Committee was formed at the University of Georgia and California Institute of the Arts (“GA” for Georgia and “LA” for Los Angeles) to create props and make slight script revisions as “product placements” for Melrose Place, not in service to commercial interests but to initiate the possibility of using the medium to assist in the generational transfer of ideas. This project of covert insertion was not intended to be solely subversive, but to offer a blueprint on how artists can collaborate with commercial production from the “inside.”
GALA Committee FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
GALA Committee, In the Name of the Place, 1995-1997 (continuing through syndication), installation detail. Props inserted on the set of Melrose Place in collaboration with students, artists, critics, set decorators, producers.

Conceived as a viral, conceptual, public artwork to be conducted on primetime television, the GALA Committee’s project, entitled In the Name of the Place, was hosted by soap opera, Melrose Place. The GALA Committee was formed at the University of Georgia and California Institute of the Arts (“GA” for Georgia and “LA” for Los Angeles) to create props and make slight script revisions as “product placements” for Melrose Place, not in service to commercial interests but to initiate the possibility of using the medium to assist in the generational transfer of ideas. This project of covert insertion was not intended to be solely subversive, but to offer a blueprint on how artists can collaborate with commercial production from the “inside.”
GALA Committee FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
GALA Committee, tv-phage. Cathode ray tube, deflection yoke, TV antennas. Courtesy of Mel Chin.

Conceived as a viral, conceptual, public artwork to be conducted on primetime television, the GALA Committee’s project, entitled In the Name of the Place, was hosted by soap opera, Melrose Place. The GALA Committee was formed at the University of Georgia and California Institute of the Arts (“GA” for Georgia and “LA” for Los Angeles) to create props and make slight script revisions as “product placements” for Melrose Place, not in service to commercial interests but to initiate the possibility of using the medium to assist in the generational transfer of ideas. This project of covert insertion was not intended to be solely subversive, but to offer a blueprint on how artists can collaborate with commercial production from the “inside.”
Mathis Gasser, Grasshopper (Mountain Scene), 2015-2016. Mixed Media. Courtesy ribordy contemporary, and Hester, New York. Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), Mountain Scene (1880-90), originally oil on paper. Gift of Mrs. J. Augustus Barnard, 1979. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image copyright: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. ‘The Grasshoppers Lies Heavy’ footage taken from The Man in the High Castle (2015-2016) in collaboration with Amazon Studios, Santa Monica.

Noting that the same landscape painting, Mountain Scene (1880-90) by Hudson River School painter Albert Bierstadt, appeared in scenes in both nineteenth-century period drama The Age of Innocence (1993) and The Hunger Games (2012), Mathis Gasser has reproduced the painting twice at its original scale to emphasize its position as a marker of power and status in fictional pasts and futures. Anchoring these images is a reel of ‘The Grasshopper Lies Heavy’ footage from a recent television adaptation of The Man in the High Castle, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick. The secret reels, a plot driver in the narrative, depict an alternate reality to the one the characters are living in, in which the Axis powers won World War 2, but the footage in which the Allied forces won the war depicts another alternate present.
Scott Stark FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
Scott Stark, Noema, 1999. Videotape, color, sound. 11 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.

Set to a strident musical score, Scott Stark’s Noema cuts together hardcore pornography clips with a focus on the awkward physical interactions that occur within them. These quick, syncopated edits are frequently paired with camera pans to quotidian art objects such as polite landscape pictures and garden statues. Intended to serve the practical purpose of guiding towards a scene’s conclusion, these camera motions reveal the voyeuristic presence of artworks.
Installation View FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY – DAY, installation view.
Bertrand Lavier, Walt Disney Productions 2001-2016 (The Princess Diaries), 2016. Acrylic on canvas, balloons, darts. Courtesy the artist.

For the series, Walt Disney Productions, Bertrand Lavier mines Mickey and Minnie Mouse comic strips for images of abstract and modern art and recreates these cartoon objects as paintings and sculptures. For this exhibition, Lavier explored the inclusion of art to live-action Disney films, appropriating the “balloon painting” from The Princess Diaries (2001, dir. Garry Marshall). A vague homage to Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Shooting Picture” series from the early ‘60s, the creation of the painting, made by throwing darts at paint-filled balloons, provides an opportunity for the film’s teenage protagonist to bond with her eccentric artist mother.
Dora Budor FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
Dora Budor, A woman passing on the street said, 'a decongestant, an antihistamine, a cough suppressant, a pain reliever.' 2016. Tempered glass, steel, polystyrene foam, aqua resin, rocks, soil, sand, epoxy resin, acrylic polymer with pigment suspension, replica of ‘Instruments for Operating on Mutant Women’ from “Dead Ringers” (1988), medical threads from surgical suture on artist’s left hand. Courtesy the artist and New Galerie, Paris.

Dora Budor has created a sculptural installation based on a series of speculative ‘instruments for performing gynecological experiments on mutant women’ which feature in David Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers (1988). The objects appear in the movie not only as medical instruments, but also as artifacts or art objects in a museum. Budor has imagined a third context for the objects as well: fossilized remains that pre-exist events of the narrative as relics of an imagined past, presented as though they might be ancient artifacts in a museum of natural history.
Jamian Juliano-Villani FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
Jamian Juliano-Villani, Dillinger, 2016. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and JTT.

Jamian Juliano-Villani’s paintings layer imagery sourced from popular culture, art history, and esoterica in a characteristic vivid and flattened pictorial style. For Dillinger, Juliano-Villani references Marco Ferrari’s absurd depiction of a night in the life of an Italian gas mask designer in the film, Dillinger is Dead (1969), specifically a key scene in which the main character paints a found gun red with polka dots while a laminated Roy Lichtenstein cover for Time magazine dangles from the ceiling on a rope. Shot in the home of Italian pop-artist Mario Schifano, the painter’s works and mod style contribute to the visual tone for the film.
Rodrigo Matheus, Scene Game, 2016, detail. Curtains, carpet, faux marble painting and props. Courtesy of the artist.

For Rodrigo Matheus’s architectural intervention along Swiss Institute’s upper and lower levels, he has borrowed a series of prop objects from a popular New York prop house. Ranging from candlestick holders to chess pieces to cultish statues, the structure point to these objects’ potential to gain status through context and display, whether in a prop closet, film, or art installation.
Rodrigo Matheus FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
Rodrigo Matheus, Scene Game, 2016, detail. Curtains, carpet, faux marble painting and props. Courtesy of the artist.

For Rodrigo Matheus’s architectural intervention along Swiss Institute’s upper and lower levels, he has borrowed a series of prop objects from a popular New York prop house. Ranging from candlestick holders to chess pieces to cultish statues, the structure point to these objects’ potential to gain status through context and display, whether in a prop closet, film, or art installation.
Installation View FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY – DAY, installation view.
Michael Bell-Smith, Covers, 2016. Prop magazine covers (front and back) from Earl Hayes Press, Sun Valley, CA. Courtesy of the artist and Foxy Production.

Michael Bell-Smith’s work consists of a grid of magazine covers that are designed and printed in house at Earl Hayes Press, a paper goods press that has been producing props for the motion picture industry for 100 years. As uncanny simulations that distill character signifiers and archetypes into an economy of images, Bell-Smith is particularly interested in how the covers are filled with details that point to the process and systems of their production such as repeated models in the stock photos and unrealistic image compositing. These objects are only functional as images for a brief shot, and nothing else.
Christian Marclay, Made to be Destroyed, FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
Christian Marclay, Made To Be Destroyed, 2016. Video, color, stereo, sound, 16:9 ration, mp4 with an H264 codec. 24 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

With MADE TO BE DESTROYED, Christian Marclay edits together a multitude of film clips in which artworks are destroyed. The minutia of the preliminary research and ensuing editing highlights a series of narrative and cultural patterns whereby art is the victim of violence. Whether sprayed (Batman, 1989), burnt (Equilibrium, 2002) or smashed (Le sang d’un poète, 1932 The Naked Gun, 1988), artworks are destroyed in moments that express rage against the self and others, the pain of loss, rebellion against a state or political power, or simply the perfect foil for a slapstick mishap.
Christian Marclay, Made to be Destroyed, FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
Christian Marclay, Made To Be Destroyed, 2016. Video, color, stereo, sound, 16:9 ration, mp4 with an H264 codec. 24 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

With MADE TO BE DESTROYED, Christian Marclay edits together a multitude of film clips in which artworks are destroyed. The minutia of the preliminary research and ensuing editing highlights a series of narrative and cultural patterns whereby art is the victim of violence. Whether sprayed (Batman, 1989), burnt (Equilibrium, 2002) or smashed (Le sang d’un poète, 1932 The Naked Gun, 1988), artworks are destroyed in moments that express rage against the self and others, the pain of loss, rebellion against a state or political power, or simply the perfect foil for a slapstick mishap.
FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY – DAY, installation view.
Heman Chong FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
Heman Chong, I WANT TO BELIEVE, 2016. Digital file, freely distributed. Courtesy of the artist and Wilkinson Gallery.

Heman Chong has taken inspiration from The X-Files creator Chris Carter’s comment that the poster hanging in the office of character Agent Fox Mulder famously reading ‘I WANT TO BELIEVE’ was inspired by the work of Ed Ruscha. In the spirit of fandom, Chong has created an ‘I WANT TO BELIEVE’ poster that will be free to download on X-Files fan sites and on the Swiss Institute website for the duration of the exhibition, in addition to hanging in the gallery.
Amie Siegel, 9 ½ Weeks, 2016. Color video projection, speakers, stool, chair, lamp. Courtesy of the artist and Simon Preston Gallery.

In Swiss Institute's Archive Room, in the basement of the building, Amie Siegel has created a viewing environment for watching a scene from 9 ½ Weeks (1986, dir. Adrian Lyne), an erotic drama in which Kim Basinger stars as a SoHo art gallery employee who begins a torrid affair with a dominating character played by Mickey Rourke. In a scene from its sequel, Another 9 ½ Weeks (1997, dir. Anne Goursaud), shown in Swiss Institute's Bookstore, Rourke is at an auction, attempting to purchase artworks from his former lover’s collection.
Amie Siegel FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY - DAY
Amie Siegel, Another 9 ½ Weeks, 2016. Color video screen. Courtesy of the artist and Simon Preston Gallery.

In Swiss Institute's Archive Room, in the basement of the building, Amie Siegel has created a viewing environment for watching a scene from 9 ½ Weeks (1986, dir. Adrian Lyne), an erotic drama in which Kim Basinger stars as a SoHo art gallery employee who begins a torrid affair with a dominating character played by Mickey Rourke. In a scene from its sequel, Another 9 ½ Weeks (1997, dir. Anne Goursaud), shown in Swiss Institute's Bookstore, Rourke is at an auction, attempting to purchase artworks from his former lover’s collection.