A Panel Discussion, with live demonstration
Panel: Noam M. Elcott, Chrissie Iles, and Andrew Uroskie
Performers: Bradley Eros, Rachael Guma, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, and Joel Schlemowitz
Microscope is very pleased to present a panel discussion with Noam M. Elcott (Columbia University), Chrissie Iles (Whitney Museum of American Art), and Andrew Uroskie (Stony Brook University) on Kurt Schwerdtfeger’s “Reflektorische Farblichtspiele” (Reflecting Color-Light-Play) of 1922/66, a light sculpture for performance first presented at the home of Wassily Kandinsky in connection with the Bauhaus Lantern Festival, when the artist was a 25-year-old Bauhaus student in Weimar.
The evening will also include a live demo of the work by Bradley Eros, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Rachael Guma, and Joel Schlemowitz, all artists whose practices include live expanded cinema, which — as it has been argued in recent years — finds Schwerdtfeger’s “Reflektorische Farblichtspiele" among its origins.
The piece — which has recently received wider recognition as a groundbreaking work of the Bauhaus movement and of 20th century film, sculpture, mixed-media and expanded cinema — utilizes a large, hand-built cube projection apparatus in which performers, who are unseen by the audience, activate panels of cut-out shapes and a switchboard of colored lights to form a complex, abstract light play, composed of several movements, appearing on its screen surface.
“While conceptualizing a shadow play titled “Days of Genesis” for a Lantern Festival it seemed necessary to use not only shadow figures but color shapes on black as well. At that very moment I perceived the idea of color-light plays in abstract form with free-moving, superimposed shapes of colored light moving in time.” – Kurt Schwerdtfeger, 1962
The current apparatus was reconstructed by the gallery in collaboration with artist Daniel Wapner in 2016 for the first re-staging of the work in 50 years in “Dreamlands: Expanded,” a series of live expanded cinema performances presented at the gallery as part of the Whitney Museum’s exhibition “Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema & Art, 1905-2016,” curated by Chrissie Iles, during which it was performed once and only briefly on view for the audience in attendance that night.
The event is talking place as part of the current exhibition at the gallery “Reflektorische Farblichtspiele”, on view through March 22nd. It is the first time the work has been on exhibition in the US and coincides with the return of the piece to the US after a year of exhibitions at Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, Germany and at Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland as part of the international exhibition “bauhaus imaginista,” curated by Marion Von Osten and Grant Watson in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus.
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Noam M. Elcott is Associate Professor for the history of modern art and media in the Columbia University Department of Art History and Archaeology, the Sobel-Dunn Chair for Art Humanities, an editor of the journal Grey Room, and co-director of The August Sander Project (MoMA/Columbia). He is the author of the award-winning book Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2016; paperback 2018), as well as essays on art, film, and media, published in leading journals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogues. His current book project is Art in the First Screen Age: László Moholy-Nagy and the Cinefication of the Arts (University of Chicago Press).
Chrissie Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she focuses on contemporary art, film and video, and art of the 1960s and 70s. Notable shows curated by Iles at the Whitney include “Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art 1910-2016” (2016-17) and “Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977” (2001). She also co-curated the 2004 and 2006 Whitney Biennials. Iles teaches in the Fine Art Department at Columbia University and is a member of the Graduate Committee at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and the Integrated Media Arts Advisory Board at Hunter College. She publishes widely, and in 2015 was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Department of Art History at her alma mater, Bristol University, England.
Andrew V. Uroskie is Associate Professor of Modern Art History & Criticism at Stony Brook University in New York. His writing explores how durational media have helped to reframe traditional models of aesthetic production, exhibition, spectatorship, and objecthood. He has published widely on modern art, cinema, music, and performance – most recently, for Expanding Cinema: Theorizing Film through Contemporary Art, with Amsterdam, and for the Jewish Museum’s Jonas Mekas retrospective with Yale – and his writing has so far been translated into five languages. His first book, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago, 2014) is currently being translated into Korean and Spanish, and he is currently engaged in two new book projects: The Kinetic Imaginary, a revisionary history of Kinetic Art oriented around the interdisciplinary practices of Robert Breer, was selected for the 2018 Andy Warhol/Arts Writers Foundation book award; and Remaking Reality, which focuses on issues of narrativity, affect, fictionality, and spectatorship within 21st century practices of video installation.