Pace On Screen: Sixty Years: Five Film Screenings for Fall Season Presented
Online October to December
Pace Gallery is pleased to announce its inaugural online film series, Pace On Screen: Sixty Years. The series, curated by Pace Curatorial Director Mark Beasley, presents five film screenings focused on Pace artists that reflect the legacy, innovative thinking, and radical lineage of Pace Gallery from its founding in 1960 to today. Pace On Screen: Sixty Years contextualizes the practices of the following five artists within the worlds in which they were working: Jean Dubuffet, Lynda Benglis, Louise Nevelson, Vito Acconci, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Over the course of five online screening days—launching October 12, 2020 and subsequently airing every other Monday following—the series demonstrates the role of film in capturing the evolving history of a progressive Modernism through a series of singular, yet interconnected, artistic experiences.
Inaugurating the series, The Artist’s Studio (2010) invites viewers to follow Jean Dubuffet in his realization of the seminal performance piece Coucou Bazar (1973), as painting is transformed into architecture and environment. This initial film coincides with Pace’s New York presentation of Le cirque, a habitable environment on view through October 24, 2020 that Dubuffet—a foundational artist for Pace, who the gallery has represented since 1967—first conceived and sculpted in 1970.
Environment, engineering, and public art meet in Islands (1987), a Maysles Brothers’ documentary that reveals the steps taken by Christo and Jeanne-Claude to encircle eleven islands in Miami’s Biscayne Bay with 6.5 million square feet of pink fabric. The sculpture and pioneering thinking of Louise Nevelson, as evidenced in her site-specific and installation works, are captured in Nevelson in Process (1977). Pictured in the film is Pace Founder Arne Glimcher, with whom Nevelson shared a decades-long friendship since Pace began representing her in 1963. The early groundbreaking
video works of Lynda Benglis challenge notions of what it was to be a woman and an artist at the height of the feminist movement. Capturing New York in the ‘70s, Acconci’s The Red Tapes (1976) records the diaristic musings of the artist in a “topography of the self” constructed using video and self-portraiture to define the artist as revolutionary.
Additional screening information and details about each film follow below. Pace Gallery will host all screenings on the gallery’s YouTube channel here at 7:00 PM EDT/EST. The films will be available for viewing for 24 hours to enable a global audience to engage with the program.
Jean Dubuffet – The Artist’s Studio
Monday, October 12, 2020
2010 / 36 min. / color, Directed by Michael Blackwood, Courtesy of Michael Blackwood Productions
In the fall of 1973, Michael Blackwood visited Jean Dubuffet in his studio while he was at work on a detail for his musical theater piece Coucou Bazar—this film documents Blackwood’s visit with Dubuffet and his work on Coucou Bazar. The piece, which Dubuffet saw as an animated painting, featured performers in costumes resembling figures in his paintings and sculptures. Coucou Bazar had a successful premiere at New York’s Guggenheim earlier that year, alongside a retrospective
of Dubuffet’s previous works, and later would open at the Grand Palais under the auspices of the annual Festival d’Automne. Though Dubuffet once suffered a period of doubt surrounding his art, he returned to the practice with an impersonal and primitive touch, becoming more and more influenced by works that had no connection to mainstream art, for which he coined the term Art Brut.
Jean Dubuffet’s inaugural exhibition with Pace took place in 1968, after the artist met the gallery’s founder Arne Glimcher for the first time in Paris in 1966 and began working with him the following year. A foundational figure in the gallery’s history, Dubuffet’s work has been the subject of more than 20 solo exhibitions at Pace since 1968 and has been featured in countless dual and group exhibitions.
Lynda Benglis – Now + Female Sensibility
Monday, October 26, 2020
Now – 1973 / 11 min. / color, Courtesy of Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Her first color tape, Now features Lynda Benglis experimenting with the effect of unnatural color, turning up the levels until the colors are high and artificial and in turn diffusing the idea of video as an impartial or “direct” medium. Throughout the film, Benglis interacts with images of herself displayed on a monitor, asking “Now?” and “Do you wish to direct me?” and repeats commands
like “Start the camera” and “I said start recording.” The word “now”, used as both question and command, focuses attention on the deceptive “real” time of video, and reveals the structure underlying her presence in the video.
Female Sensibility – 1973 / 13 min. / color, Courtesy of Video Data Bank at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, vdb.org
Produced by Lynda Benglis in 1973, Female Sensibility features the artist and her friend Marilyn Lenkowsky taking turns directing each other and submitting to each other’s kisses and caresses as it becomes increasingly obvious that the camera is their main point of focus. Read against feminist film theory of the “male gaze”, the action becomes a highly charged statement of the sexual politics of viewing and role-playing; and, as such, is a crucial text in the development of early feminist video.
Louise Nevelson – Nevelson in Process
Monday, November 9, 2020
1978 / 29 min. / color, Directed by Susan Fanshel and Jill Godlimow, Courtesy of WNET
Marking the first time Louise Nevelson was ever filmed while working, this film features the artist creating two sculptures—one made of metal and one made of wood— in her studio as she discusses her feelings for her art and creative output, providing viewers with a rare opportunity
to share in the unfolding of her unique sculptural process. The film presents a rewarding studio visit and rare look into Nevelson’s practice and personality.
Pace Gallery has represented Louise Nevelson and her estate since 1963. An integral figure in the gallery’s history, Nevelson and Pace Founder Arne Glimcher shared a close, decades-long relationship. The Nevelson Chapel at St Peter’s Lutheran Church in midtown Manhattan—the only remaining permanent, fully intact sculptural environment by Louise Nevelson comprising nine wall-mounted sculptures—is undergoing a major restoration project.
Vito Acconci – The Red Tapes
Monday, November 23, 2020
1976 / 141 min. / black and white, Courtesy of Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago
The Red Tapes is Acconci’s masterwork, a three-part epic that stands as one of the major works in video. Designed originally for video projection, the work is structured to merge video space—the close-up—with filmic space—the landscape. Acconci maps a topography of the self within a cultural and social context, locating personal identity through history, cultural artifacts, language and representation. Stating that the work moves “from Vito Acconci to a larger Americanism, between a psychological personal space and a cultural personal space,” he constructs a dense, poetic text in this search for self and America.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude – Islands
Monday, December 7, 2020
1986 / 56 min. / color, Directed by Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin, Courtesy of
Janus Films, Inc.
For two brief weeks in May of 1983, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s piece entitled Surrounded Islands
blossomed on the waters of Biscayne Bay, Florida. Eleven scrub-pine islands were surrounded by 6.5 million square feet of bright pink fabric. This film documents this process—a three-year struggle for the work of art, and a political drama interwoven with two other projects-in-progress: the wrapping of the Pont Neuf in Paris and the Reichstag in Berlin. This film will be screened timed to the online iteration of the annual Art Basel Miami Beach fair.
Pace is a leading contemporary art gallery representing many of the most significant international artists and estates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Under the leadership of President and CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace is a vital force within the art world and plays a critical role in shaping the history, creation, and engagement with modern and contemporary art. Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy for vibrant and dedicated relationships with renowned artists. As the gallery enters its seventh decade, Pace’s mission continues to be inspired by a drive to support the world’s most influential and innovative artists and to share their visionary work with people around the world.
Pace advances this mission through its dynamic global program, comprising ambitious exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances and interdisciplinary projects through Pace Live, and curatorial research and writing. Today, Pace has nine locations worldwide: two galleries in New York––including its newly opened headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street––as well as galleries in Palo Alto, London, Geneva, Hong Kong, and Seoul. In July 2020 Pace opened a temporary gallery space in East Hampton, New York that will be programmed through October 2021. Additionally, the gallery’s seasonal exhibition space in Palm Beach will be open from early November 2020 through spring 2021.