Revisions – Zen for Film, Bard Graduate Center, NY

Revisions—Zen for Film
Bard Graduate Center, New York
September 18, 2015–January 10, 2016
How do works of art endure over time in the face of aging materials and changing interpretations of their meaning? How do decay, technological obsolescence, and the blending of old and new media affect what an artwork is and can become? And how can changeable artworks encourage us to rethink our assumptions of a work of art as fixed and static? Revisions—Zen for Film, on view this fall and winter in the Bard Graduate Center Focus Gallery in New York, explores these questions through Zen for Film, one of the most evocative artworks by the Korean-American artist Nam June Paik (1932- 2006). Created during the early 1960s, Zen for Film consists of the screening of blank film leader for several minutes. As the film ages and wears in the projector, the viewer is confronted with a constantly evolving work. Revisions—Zen for Film provides a fresh perspective on an artwork with a rich history of display by asking precisely what, how, and when is Zen for Film?
Developed during a two-year Andrew W. Mellon “Cultures of Conservation” Fellowship at Bard Graduate Center, Revisions—Zen for Film offers a unique and intimately focused encounter with the materiality of Paik’s work, present here in one specific instance in a series stretch­ing back to the early 1960s.The rationale behind the project is to critically revise—and question—some assumptions about Zen for Film so as to foster a broad reflection not only about media that refuse simple classifications but also about artworks radically shaped by curatorial, conservation, and presentation deci­sions.
The digital interactive with contributions by BGC master’s students frames Zen for Film through conceptual associations that correspond to viewers’ experiences of it—boredom, chance, materiality, nothingness, silence, time, and trace. Through these concepts, Zen for Film is linked with a number of artworks that can be viewed as potential inspirations, antecedents, or contemporaries. Together these suggest issues of appropriation and continual reinterpretation. Included in the digital interactive are artworks by Cory Arcangel, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, John Cage, Com&Com, Tony Conrad, Merce Cunningham, Guy Debord, Marcel Duchamp, Ceal Floyer, Ken Friedman, Yves Klein, Imi Knoebel, JODI (Joan Heemskerk / Dirk Paesmans), Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov, Peter Kubelka, Kasimir Malevich, Christian Marclay, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray, Robert Ryman, Paul Sharits, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Mungo Thompson, Michel Verjux, Lawrence Weiner, and Andy Warhol.
The exhibition was curated by Hanna Hölling, Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor, Cultures of Conservation, at Bard Graduate Center.
The exhibition is accompanied by Revisions: Zen for Film—a fully illustrated book by Hölling that offers an in-depth analysis of Zen for Film by con­structing a sequence of ten thematically ordered chapters, or “revisions,” spanning a theoretical-historical context and the frameworks of exhibition, dissemina­tion, and continuation.
Visit bgc.bard.edu/revisions for more information about the exhibition, to access the interactive and to find out about related public programs.  A symposium Revisions: Object—Event—Performance—Process since the 1960s with participating international scholars in film, performance, and curatorial and conservation studies will take place on September 21, 11:15am-6pm.
On September 24, 6:30pm-8:00pm, Curator’s Corner: On Curating Nam June Paik will focus on some of challenges posed by technology-based media in the extended field of conservation and curatorial practice (with Hanna Hölling and Michelle Yun).
Location
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall: symposium and public programs
18 West 86th Street, Focus Gallery: exhibition