Whitney Museum of American Art: Recent pages: Exhibitions

Werner Herzog

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:37:22 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial/WernerHerzog

Seventeenth-century Dutch artist Hercules Segers (c. 1590–1638), a contemporary of Rembrandt, is all but unknown today. For the filmmaker Werner Herzog, though, Segers signifies nothing less than the beginning of modernity.

When approached by the Whitney to participate in the 2012 Biennial, Herzog, whose films are regularly cited as an inspiration to many younger visual artists, proposed an installation of Segers’s work. The images projected here, produced around 1630 and paired with the music of Dutch musician Ernst Reijseger (b. 1954), demonstrate the imaginative power of Segers’s landscapes. The vastness of the imagery, bordering on abstraction, is met with the artist’s representation of interiority—a combination heralding an approach to image-making that would not become widespread for hundreds of years. Herzog has said of Segers, “His landscapes are not landscapes at all; they are states of mind; full of angst, desolation, solitude, a state of dreamlike vision.” These images create, for Herzog, “an illumination inside of us, and we instantly know that this is not a factual truth, but an ecstatic one.”

Yayoi Kusama

Whitney Museum of American Art — Tue, 22 May 2012 17:58:02 -0400

Exhibitions/YayoiKusama

Well known for her use of dense patterns of polka dots and nets, as well as her intense, large-scale environments, Yayoi Kusama’s art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance, and immersive installation. Born in Matsumoto, Japan in 1929, Kusama came to the U.S. in 1957 and quickly found herself at the epicenter of the 1960s avant-garde art world in New York. After achieving fame and notoriety with groundbreaking exhibitions, art happenings, and events, she returned to her native country in 1973 and is now Japan’s most prominent contemporary artist. This retrospective features works across many mediums from the full chronology of Kusama’s career.

Yayoi Kusama’S Fireflies On The Water

Whitney Museum of American Art — Tue, 22 May 2012 17:57:43 -0400

Exhibitions/FirefliesOnTheWater

Yayoi Kusama’s obsession with the depiction of infinite space has held a central focus within her artistic career. The Museum’s Fireflies on the Water (2002)—with its controlled environment of lights, mirrors, and pool of water—is one of the outstanding examples of these installations that permit the individual viewer to suspend one’s sense of self and accompany the artist on her ongoing journey of self-obliteration.

Upcoming Exhibitions

Whitney Museum of American Art — Tue, 22 May 2012 10:16:37 -0400

Exhibitions/Upcoming

Wade Guyton
Opens October 4, 2012

Richard Artschwager!
October 25, 2012–February 3, 2013

Sinister Pop
November 5, 2012–March 2013

Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective
February 28–June 2, 2013

Blues for Smoke
February–April 2013

Exhibitions

Whitney Museum of American Art — Tue, 22 May 2012 10:16:23 -0400

Wade Guyton
Opens October 4, 2012

Richard Artschwager!
October 25, 2012–February 3, 2013

Sinister Pop
November 15, 2012–March 2013

Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective
February 28–June 2, 2013

Blues for Smoke
February–April 2013

Alicia Hall Moran And Jason Moran

Whitney Museum of American Art — Tue, 22 May 2012 10:07:42 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial/AliciaHallMoranAndJasonMoran

For their Biennial residency, Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran present five days of live music, exploring the power of performance to cross barriers and challenge assumptions, as their title, BLEED, suggests. With a line-up of concerts and events spanning music, dance, theater, and literature, as well as an exhibition of past video collaborations with Glenn Ligon, Joan Jonas, Kara Walker, and Simone Leigh and Liz Magic Laser—and a new video by the cultural historian Maurice Berger—BLEED is a celebration of surprising synergy across the visual arts and music.

The Morans’ decade-long artistic partnership is perhaps the most poetic “sound bleed” of all. Alicia Hall Moran is a Broadway musical actress and classically trained mezzo-soprano of extraordinary warmth and eloquence; Jason Moran, a MacArthur Fellow and the artistic adviser for jazz at the Kennedy Center, is an acclaimed pianist/composer whose innovative style provides an influential vision of what jazz can be in the twenty-first century.

2012 Biennial

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 21 May 2012 09:17:00 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial

Sculpture, painting, installations, and photography—as well as dance, theater, music, and film—fill the galleries of the Whitney Museum of American Art in the latest edition of the Whitney Biennial. With a roster of artists at all points in their careers the Biennial provides a look at the current state of contemporary art in America. This is the seventy-sixth in the ongoing series of Biennials and Annuals presented by the Whitney since 1932, two years after the Museum was founded.

The 2012 Biennial takes over most of the Whitney from March 1 through May 27, with portions of the exhibition and some programs continuing through June 10. The 2012 Biennial is in constant flux, with artists, works, and experiences varying over the course of the exhibition.

The participating artists were selected by Elisabeth Sussman, Curator/Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney, and Jay Sanders, a freelance curator and writer who has spent the past ten years working both in the gallery world and on independent curatorial projects. Sussman and Sanders co-curated the Biennial’s film program with Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, the co-founders of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn

Wu Tsang

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:00:30 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial/WuTsang

Wu Tsang is interested in blurring the lines between public and private space and, within the specific context of a museum, between the spaces occupied by artworks and those intended to be functional and “supportive” of the art. In GREEN ROOM, Tsang has created a private space, outfitted with customdesigned furniture, mirrors, linoleum, and carpet, to serve as a dressing room for the dancers, actors, and musicians participating in the Biennial. When not being utilized for this purpose, the space is open to Museum visitors, to be experienced as both an art installation and a lounge area. As GREEN ROOM oscillates between these two modes, it gradually loses the pristine qualities typically associated with a work of art, acquiring instead the wear and tear of use.

When open to the public, Tsang’s installation presents a two-channel video environment. Through the story of the central character, a transgender woman who recounts leaving the persecution of Honduras for Los Angeles and finding haven in a local bar, the video explores the concept of “safe space.” Narrative elements and talking head–style interviews are interwoven with atmospheric shots of the bar, the Silver Platter, as it transitions from day to night. The artist has positioned the screens on perpendicular walls, bringing the viewing experience into three-dimensional space. Inspired by the interior of the Silver Platter, the simple decor throughout the room reiterates the environment that offered a sense of sanctuary.

Rooted in the tropical underground of Los Angeles nightlife, art, and music, WILDNESS presents a portrait of the Silver Platter, a historic landmark bar on the east side of Los Angeles that has provided a home for Latin/LGBT immigrant communities since 1963. Through a magical-realist lens, in which the bar itself becomes a character in the film, WILDNESS depicts the creativity and conflict that ensues when a group of young, queer artists of color—including Wu Tsang and DJs NGUZUNGUZU and Total Freedom—organize an experimental performance art party called Wildness on Tuesday nights at the bar. The film explores the concept of a “safespace,” teasing apart what it can mean for different/marginalized groups of people and what kind of protection it can provide, as well as its limits and failures. Through this exploration, Tsang documents the complicated and beautiful coalitions across groups and generations that took place at the Silver Platter.

GREEN ROOM, together with Tsang’s feature documentary WILDNESS and his essay in the exhibition catalogue, make up parts of a larger work, revealing how the interpretation of a single subject can vary as perspective and audience change.

Mike Kelley

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 04 May 2012 10:36:11 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial/MikeKelley

In 2005, Mike Kelley was approached by the UK-based Artangel organization, which commissions and produces site-specific artwork, to propose what would be their first commission in the United States. In response, Kelley suggested that he build a replica of his childhood home in the Detroit suburb of Westland that would be repositioned in the city of Detroit and utilized as a community gallery. While the facade of the house would be removable and “street legal” so that it could be driven around the Detroit area to provide various sorts of public services, a complex of “secret” tunnels and rooms would be built beneath the structure at its “home” on the grounds of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (MOCAD), and used for private activities organized by the artist.

On view in the 2012 Biennial are three videos produced by Kelley that document the first phase of Mobile Homestead: the project’s christening ceremony as well as the journey of the Mobile Homestead facade along Michigan Avenue from MOCAD in downtown Detroit to the original Kelley home in Westland and back again. The two documentaries of Mobile Homestead en route through the Detroit environs trace a remarkable variety of both urban and outlying areas, making apparent the socio-economic disparities among the communities through which Mobile Homestead passed. Along the way, interviews were conducted with shop owners and residents, including a motorcycle gang, strip-club dancers, church officials, the staff of socialservice organizations, and representatives of the Ford Motor Company. The third video documents the 2010 launch event of the mobile section of the project that occurred on the site at MOCAD where the completed project will eventually stand. Taken together, these videos convey Kelley’s critical eye on this American city that he knew so well.

Oskar Fischinger: Space Light Art—a Film Environment

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 03 May 2012 15:55:55 -0400

Exhibitions/OskarFischinger

This exhibition presents one of the first multimedia projections ever made—Oskar Fischinger’s Raumlichtkunst (Space Light Art), a recreation of his multiple-screen film events first shown in Germany in 1926, recently restored by the Center for Visual Music in Los Angeles. Radical in its format, its multiple screens of abstract shapes, color, and light produced an experience that, in Fischinger’s own description of his work, created “an intoxication by light from a thousand sources.”

Dawn Kasper

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 02 May 2012 11:11:56 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial/DawnKasper

Without a permanent studio since 2008, Kasper has developed what she calls her Nomadic Studio Practice Experiment: when invited to participate in an exhibition, she uses the gallery or museum space as her studio. THIS COULD BE SOMETHING IF I LET IT is composed of the entire contents of Kasper’s itinerant studio and much of her bedroom—packed up, shipped to the Whitney, and installed on the third floor of the Museum. Regarding the 2012 Biennial as a full-time job, Kasper is spending every day of its three-month run making new work, holding studio visits, and playing music while the Museum is open to the public.

By settling herself in—complete with props, musical instruments, costumes, make-up, drawings, photographs, and video—as a resident of the Whitney’s third-floor galleries, Kasper has created both a theatrical space and a living sculpture. She observes, “My time in process is very much an important part of my performance work, as is revealing that process publicly.” As she makes traditionally private acts public, Kasper conflates the distinction between preparation and performance, conducting all aspects of her practice in a single space and before an audience. Research, writing, thinking, and studio visits become just as important and worthwhile of viewers’ attention as formal performances and finished artworks. In disclosing her process in a group show for the first time, Kasper is consciously opening herself up to the ways in which the circumstances of her environment, including the Museum’s operating hours and security protocols, audience variations, and the dynamics of other artists’ works on view, will unpredictably impact her practice.

Lucy Raven

Whitney Museum of American Art — Tue, 01 May 2012 10:40:50 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial/LucyRaven

The test patterns and calibration charts featured in Lucy Raven’s 2012 Biennial installation are used by film projectionists to fine-tune focus, aspect ratio, resolution, and steadiness of image before loading a film for the audience. The charts include both contemporary and historical examples from film and digital cinema, each made as a standard to test a particular projector. To Raven, the test chart is also a formalist genre: an image reduced to the formal characteristics of its medium. intended only for the eyes of the projectionist, and the mechanical eye of the projector, these are images that you’re not supposed to see but which are created to make you see better; together, they pose questions about sight and its fidelity.

The player piano installed by Raven also examines the effect of digitization on analog processes. Player pianos operate via an early form of binary code: Holes punched into paper rolls function like 1s and 0s. The holes correspond to notes on the piano, which pumps air through the holes to sound the notes. The piano here plays three arrangements (composed by fellow Biennial artist Jason Moran) of a song by the band LCD Soundsystem (active 2001–2011). Through this juxtaposition of the old and the new, the instrument’s historical connection to digital technology comes to the fore.

Raven’s practice encompasses a wide variety of forms, including animated films, sculptural installations, performative lectures, curatorial projects, art criticism, and interventions into live television. Connecting all of these disparate strands is the artist’s continuing exploration into the effects of technology on the world.

Signs &Amp; Symbols

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:39:07 -0400

Exhibitions/SignsAndSymbols

Drawn from the Museum’s deep holdings of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, and photographs, Signs & Symbols sheds new light on the development of American abstraction during the critical postwar period of the mid-1940s to the end of the 1950s. Many artists active in this period who are often overlooked—Will Barnet, Forrest Bess, Charles Seliger, and Mark Tobey, among others—developed abstract work that remains distinct from many of the concerns associated with the canonized Abstract Expressionists, including large-scale canvases and gestural brushwork. Instead, the exhibition presents a more nuanced narrative, focused on the figurative and calligraphic “signs and symbols” present in much of the highly controlled work from this period and included in this show. In many cases, this work drew inspiration from specifically American sources and sought to foster a national aesthetic distinct from European Surrealism and Cubism. These investigations formed an important foundation for a future generation of artists—including Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein—who later incorporated highly individualized systems of signs into their own work while embracing distinctly American subject matter.

Signs & Symbols is organized by Donna De Salvo, chief curator and deputy director for programs.

A Survey Is A Process Of Listening (Arika)

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 17:21:32 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial/ASurveyIsAProcessOfListening

A survey is a process of listening takes place on the Museum’s fourth floor May 2 through 6. All performances and events are free with Museum admission; no special ticketing is required.

. . . As Apple Pie

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:58:13 -0400

Exhibitions/AsApplePie

Images, like words, trigger a cultural and emotional knowledge of a shared national ethos. Artists have used this pictorial shorthand—sometimes straightforward, often obliquely—to comment on this country, its people, its political and social goals, its self-image. . . . as apple pie explores this phenomenon through a rotating installation drawn from the Museum’s holdings of works on paper by a diverse group of artists including William N. Copley, Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns, Elizabeth “Grandma” Layton, Willard Midgette, LeRoy Neiman, Joseph Pennell, Charles Ray, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Stow Wengenroth.

Whitney Biennial 2012

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:20:01 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial/ReadMore

Sculpture, painting, installations, and photography—as well as dance, theater, music, and film—will fill the galleries of the Whitney Museum of American Art in the latest edition of the Whitney Biennial. With a roster of artists at all points in their careers the Biennial provides a look at the current state of contemporary art in America. This is the seventy-sixth in the ongoing series of Biennials and Annuals presented by the Whitney since 1932, two years after the Museum was founded.

The 2012 Biennial takes over most of the Whitney from March 1 through May 27, with portions of the exhibition and some programs continuing through June 10. The participating artists were selected by Elisabeth Sussman, Curator/Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney, and Jay Sanders, a freelance curator and writer who has spent the past ten years working both in the gallery world and on independent curatorial projects. Sussman and Sanders co-curated the Biennial’s film program with Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, the co-founders of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn.

For the exhibition, the Whitney’s fourth-floor Emily Fisher Landau Galleries are being used as a dynamic, 6,000-square-foot performance space for music, dance, theater, and other events. This is the first Biennial in which nearly a full floor of the Museum has been given over to a changing season of performances, events, and residencies.

Sarah Michelson

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 15:50:02 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial/SarahMichelson

Sarah Michelson’s dances are realized through the simultaneous artistry of her choreography, scenography, costumes, and lighting design. Physical elements, whether sculptural lighting structures, floors, or costume details, often recur from dance to dance much like choreographic phrases. Through such formal repetitions and their echoes within her ever-expanding practice, Michelson overtly compels the audience to think about the complex of relationships that fundamentally exist in dance—between the choreographer, the work, the signature (style), and the artistic legacy. All of her work is thus engaged in a searching dialogue with the form and history of dance.

Devotion Study #1—The American Dancer has been developed specifically for the 2012 Biennial as re-investigation of her most recent dance, Devotion (2011). Devotion was inspired by a text written by the playwright and theater director Richard Maxwell, founder and artistic director of New York City Players and a fellow 2012 Biennial artist. Devotion Study #1—The American Dancer takes 1964 as a starting point and enacts a study of Michelson’s own dance-making history and that of the Whitney’s fourth floor.

Sharon Hayes: There’s So Much I Want To Say To You

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 11:55:48 -0400

Exhibitions/SharonHayes

Sharon Hayes (b. 1970) is a New York–based artist whose work in photography, film, video, sound, and performance examines the nexus between politics, history, speech, and desire. This exhibition, conceived by Hayes for the Whitney’s third floor galleries, brings together existing pieces and newly commissioned works, all of which articulate forms of what Hayes calls “speech acts.” The works are presented within an environment designed by Hayes in collaboration with artist Andrea Geyer.

Lutz Bacher

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 10:32:04 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial/LutzBacher

To create her work for the 2012 Biennial, Pipe Organ, Lutz Bacher has fitted an old Yamaha organ with corroded, discolored organ pipes and rigged it with bamboo “fingers.” The organ and pipes, controlled by a computer program, give voice to a random sequence of sudden sounds and pronounced silences that provide an unexpected rhythm to the exhibition. Bacher’s intervention adds new meaning to the organ’s already rich connotations. Here, associations of religious piety intersect with suggestions of destruction and the beautiful, perplexingly otherworldly tones themselves, evoking much yet deftly resisting clear articulation.

The framed pages that make up Bacher’s The Celestial Handbook were taken from found copies of a mid-century astronomy handbook. Each page ostensibly describes the unimaginable vastness of space, but the photographs and captions fall far short of the immense task. By disrupting the order of the book and scattering pages throughout the Museum, she further unsettles the already unsteady relationship between text and image.

Like much of Bacher’s practice, these works, as well as those on view on the fourth floor May 23–June 3, use readymades in unexpected ways to pose questions—but those questions remain inscrutable, and no answers are offered.

Laura Poitras

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 17:13:38 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial/LauraPoitras

In her documentary The Oath, Laura Poitras follows the lives of two men, both past associates of Osama Bin Laden. Salim Hamdan, Bin Laden’s former chauffeur, was imprisoned at Guantanámo Bay and, following a well-publicized court case, eventually released. His brother-inlaw, Abu Jandal, had once worked as Bin Laden’s bodyguard, and after his own, much shorter detention in Yemen, became a taxi driver to support his family. Hamdan’s story, which unfolds as a prolonged legal and political battle, is paralleled by interviews with Jandal as he works and goes about his daily routine. Passionate and charismatic, Jandal reveals himself as a complex and conflicted character, a man who now renounces violent terrorism, but still supports the goals of Al Qaeda. Poitras tells these interlocked stories without overt editorializing, allowing a picture of their lives to emerge through carefully framed details. The Oath is the second installment of a projected trilogy documenting America post 9/11; the first film, My Country, My Country (2006), covered post-invasion Iraq, and the third, now in progress, will show how the war has ultimately come home. For more information on Poitras and her films, visit Zeitgeist Films.

Forrest Bess (By Robert Gober)

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:55:50 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial/ForrestBess

Forrest Bess was a painter/fisherman who exhibited his work in a renowned New York gallery yet lived in poverty and isolation on an island off the Gulf Coast of Texas. Bess developed elaborate theories about the uniting of the male and the female within his own body, and performed operations on his own genitals that turned him into a pseudo-hermaphrodite. In his lifetime, Bess wanted to show his medical theories alongside his paintings, but his longtime dealer, Betty Parsons, always politely declined. As part of the 2012 Whitney Biennial, sculptor Robert Gober, working from Bess’s letters, curated a room of paintings and archival materials that realizes Bess’s wish.

Robert Gober is a New York–based sculptor who has curated exhibitions since 1986.

The Red Krayola

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:00:10 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial/TheRedKrayola

The work of psychedelic rock band The Red Krayola stretches beyond a single type of sound, and the band itself has moved in and out of the art world since its inception. For cofounder Mayo Thompson, the only member who has been part of the band since its beginnings in Houston in 1966, The Red Krayola’s purpose is to inhabit the rock genre while playfully prodding its boundaries, questioning its role in culture at large, and keeping alive the spirit of resistance that has long been its hallmark. This fluidity and resistance to playing by any codified set of rules has in many ways become a massive work in itself. The 2012 Biennial marks The Red Krayola’s first museum installation, although the band has collaborated and dialogued with visual artists since its inception. During the run of the exhibition, band members chat live daily with visitors via Skype; when they are not online, a loop of retrospective concert footage representing the breadth of the band’s career plays in the room. In the Museum’s Lower Gallery, visitors can view and supplement a wiki-style digital index (originally published in the Biennial exhibition catalogue) that traces the band’s numerous, intricately interconnected networks.

On April 13 with its associates, The Familiar Ugly—a set of accomplices—the band will perform an evening comprising new songs, old songs, and free-form freakouts. On the following afternoon, selections from Victorine—an opera written in collaboration with the British conceptual artists Art & Language—will be premiered.

Georgia Sagri

Whitney Museum of American Art — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 17:18:44 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial/GeorgiaSagri

Through a series of performances within this evolving installation, Georgia Sagri will work toward making a book—albeit one that she never intends to realize in its traditional physical form—with the central theme of “working the no work.” By inviting philosophers, activists and organizers, artists, and laborers as well as the visiting public to help shape the book’s content by reflecting especially on the radical shifts in political and social life of the present day and recent past, Sagri acknowledges how the role of author has become diffused and the distinctions between individual and group, producer and product, are no longer relevant.

When not activated by performances, her installation—hanging costumes, a magnifying lens, custom-made doors, wooden stairs, the vinyl graphic on the floor and walls, scattered pillows—bears the imprint of the various functions it serves: as a space for book making, a stage for performances, and a setting where actions and interactions have taken place. Videos documenting the conversations and performances that have already occurred along with video clips, film fragments, and mass-media depictions of “work” are also projected in the space. Playing the role of designer/editor/illustrator in unexpected ways, Sagri dedicates herself to the creation of what she refers to as a “live book”—one that follows the editing process typical of book production, but is comprised of disparate elements each containing its own layers of references, all interacting with one another without the final result of finished object.

Whitney Biennial 2012:In The News

Whitney Museum of American Art — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:25:22 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial/News

“Enchanting.” —The New Yorker

Peter Schjeldahl’s audio slideshow on the Biennial. —The New Yorker

“[The Whitney Biennial] presents a new model that is broader, more contemporary and more sincere than anything that has come before it.” —T Magazine, New York Times

“One of the best Whitney Biennials in recent memory may or may not contain a lot more outstanding art than its predecessors, but that’s not the point. The 2012 incarnation is a new and exhilarating species of exhibition, an emerging curatorial life form, at least for New York.” —The New York Times

“Every two years, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City weighs in on what matters in the art world by mounting an exhibition that lays claim to showing the best, brightest and hippest that contemporary art has to offer. This Whitney Biennial, the 76th in the museum’s history, is no exception . . .” —NPR

“The 2012 Whitney Biennial is a quiet, incomplete manifesto. It reimagines what a biennial is and explores the ways artists are taking matters into their own hands, resetting the agenda, and fighting back against an art world that had been focused on selling, buzz, and bigness.” —New York Magazine

George Kuchar

Whitney Museum of American Art — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:22:54 -0400

Exhibitions/2012Biennial/GeorgeKuchar

A legendary figure within underground film, George Kuchar began his career in the late 1950s while a teenager in the Bronx, where he and his twin brother Mike started making wild 8mm burlesques of Hollywood productions (their titles—The Naked and the Nude, Lust for Ecstasy, I Was a Teenage Rumpot—are a window into their sensibility). Later, in the 1980s, he traded in film for Hi-8 video, a consumer-grade format whose formal possibilities he explored through numerous video diaries. Though crafted in the exaggerated, soap-operatic spirit of his earlier work, Kuchar’s lo-fi autobiographies engage more directly with quotidian realities. Screening at the Biennial is Kuchar’s epic cycle of Weather Diaries, which document his annual visits to the shabby El Reno motel in tornado-alley Oklahoma. Horny, bored, and on the lookout for gathering storms, he reveals, in a radically unpretentious manner, the humor of everyday indignities and the pathos of unsated appetites.