You can't get there from here but you can get here from there

Courtenay Finn

Borrowing its title from artist Bruce Nauman, You can’t get there from here but you can get here from there (YCGT) diverts and redirects Nauman’s investigation of the relationship between written language and physical behavior. YCGT explores the relationship between the act of reading and the act of residing. Nauman’s sixty-minute video Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) shows the artist walking back and forth in his studio, the pattern of his movements following an obsessive compulsive set of rules influenced by the behavior of the protagonist of a Beckett novel. Nauman uses his physical body to gain insight into the text, rendering his reading into an action. Using this work as a starting point YCGT investigates the transportation of the reader into the fictional text and what occurs when the world of the text literally begins to intrude onto the world of the reader.

The artist Pierre Huyghe once said, “to actualize a narrative, one must inhabit it.” Huyghe’s assertion brings to mind textualization; the narrative becomes real because the reader literally has taken up residence within the text. YCGT attempts to illustrate the space where fiction collides with reality, evoking the state of being in two worlds at once, in the book and outside of the book. The exhibition readdresses Nauman’s investigation of language and physical action within the context of the reader, emphasizing the corporeal nature of reading in contemporary art while invoking a “paraliterary” space; a space in which the book becomes the background upon which all things rest. Matthew Buckingham’s installation A Man of the Crowd presents a visual setting for Edgar Allen Poe’s story of the same name. Poe’s story of a man who secretly follows a stranger takes place in 1840’s London, yet Poe never saw the London of 1840 in which he set his story. Buckingham’s A Man of the Crowd transposes Poe’s imagined London to present-day Vienna and inserts another character within the tale, that of the reader. The viewer becomes a witness to Buckingham’s reading of the story. In From the Travel of Jonathan Harker Joachim Koester follows the trail of the protagonist of Bram Stoker's Dracula through the Borgo Pass, comparing the Transylvania of Stoker’s imagination with the reality of failed suburban sprawl and illegal logging. In Sophie Calle’s Double Game, she discovers herself as a character in the novel Leviathan authored by Paul Auster. Auster used episodes of Calle’s life to create a fictional character, an artist named Maria Turner. Maria becomes the author of several of Calle’s well-known artworks, acting out Calle’s artistic practice within the context of Auster’s fictional world. In response Calle proceeds to use Leviathan as a handbook to create the fictional pieces attributed to her within the novel. Kris Martin’s piece Idiot, is 1,494 pages of text in which Martin hand copied Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, replacing the name of the novel’s protagonist, Myshkin, with his own.

YCGT presents a space where reality only makes sense in relation to fiction and fiction only works because it mimics the real. The exhibition emphasizes the role of reading in artistic practice, and transports Nauman’s investigation of language and physical action further into the realm of the reader.

 

Robert Gardner's Non-commercials

Gary Fogelson

"We do not regard the audience to be served simply an indiscriminate mass of viewers; nor do we believe that it is necessary to aim at a common denominator and especially the least common denominator."

Artist and filmmaker Robert Gardner was part of a small group of investors in the Boston/Cambridge area who successfully waged the largest, longest coup in FCC history - over a period of ten years Boston Broadcasters Incorporated (BBI), a collective of esteemed academics, local leaders and professionals, fought for and won the license of Boston's Channel 5, a network affiliate, against the current license holder, the enormously powerful Herald Traveler Corporation. In 1972 the new WCVB Channel 5 went on the air and was operated as any ABC affiliate station would run with the major exception of several programming changes initiated and encouraged by Gardner.

By taking a closer look at his 'non-commercials', one minute films of members of the community at work inserted as random commercial breaks; his suggestion of running the Bill of Rights on a 24-hour loop during the US bicentennial; his role in the creation of Chronicle, one of the first locally produced television 'magazines;' and, most importantly, the development of Screening Room a series of 90-minute program which introduced an audience of 3 million viewers to experimental and documentary filmmakers and animators (such as Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, Les Blank, and John Whitney), this show aims to place Gardner's attempts tp bring alternative culture-driven programs to a commercial television audience as an act of artistic subversion within mass culture.

Gardner's involvement in the acquisition of the station, and his role in and attempts at programming alternative cultural content for a mass audience will be the point of departure for an exhibition that revisits the story, and showcases his work as program director for nearly ten years. Multiple projections, text documents, photographs, and other archival material displayed within the gallery space will encourage visitors to consider Gardner's impact on his audience and to ask the question - Could something like this ever happen again? In addition, we propose to host a series of one-night events hosted by Gardner and former guests of Screening Room, including Jonas Mekas, George Griffin, Yvonne Rainer, and Peter Hutton which could involve showing and talking about their work.