Jonas Mekas "The Destruction Quartet"

James Fuentes LLC

poster for Jonas Mekas "The Destruction Quartet"

This event has ended.

"The Destruction Quartet" is a four channel video installation by Jonas Mekas. "The Destruction Quartet" features four simultaneously running yet unsynchronized films that bring together fragments of symbolic and real acts of destruction. The videos consist of footage from the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1990, Danius Kesminas' 1991 fire sculpture, (New York) Consequence, a 1997 Nam June Paik performance in which Paik wrecks a piano, and the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center from the roof of Mekas' SoHo apartment building.

While the soundtracks in the first three films create an ambient backdrop to the filmed events, increasingly incredulous comments by a second observer in the 9/11 footage bring a chill to the whole installation. Mekas disconnects 9/11 from its defining date, tying it in to other moments of destruction, those planned, hoped-for, or controlled, to introduce the idea of timelessness and metaphor in an attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible.

Jonas Mekas was born in 1922 in Lithuania and migrated to New York in
1949. He played a central role in the establishment of the Filmmaker's Cooperative in 1962, the Filmmaker's Cinémathèque in 1964 and the Anthology Film Archive in 1972. He also launched the magazine Film Culture in 1954 and started writing a weekly column for Village Voice in 1958. In 2005 he represented Lithuania at the 51st Venice Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, the Baltic Art Center Visby, Kunsthaus Zurich, Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The Destruction Quartet was developed for the exhibition "Jonas Mekas: Celebration of the small and personal in the times of bigness", at the Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne and was curated by Liutauras Psibilskis & Lolita Jablonskiene. The Jonas Mekas Visual Art Center opened on November 10, 2007 in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Media

Schedule

from October 28, 2009 to November 22, 2009

Artist(s)

Jonas Mekas

  • Facebook

    Reviews

    All content on this site is © their respective owner(s).
    New York Art Beat (2008) - About - Contact - Privacy - Terms of Use