Works from the entire film and video collection of the Generali Foundation can now be individually selected.
For the first time, the entire film and video collection of the Generali Foundation can be watched in Dan Graham’s installation "New Design for Showing Videos". On six terminals, visitors can directly select from more than 400 videos (and video transfers from film) by internationally renowned artists. For the current collection exhibition, "New Design for Showing Videos" has been equipped with a computer system which enables the presentation of this extensive film and video collection. The reference room, which is open to the public for free, will be equally equipped and constantly updated with video documentations of events from the accompanying program at the Generali Foundation.
The Generali Foundation Video Collection
The Generali Foundation has been collecting art videos professionally for about 15 years. The collection, which has in the meantime grown to more than 400 titles, includes videos by artists ranging from Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, and Bruce Nauman to Ursula Biemann, Elke Krystufek, and Heimo Zobernig. The collection thus comprises the beginnings of video art in the early 1970s as well as the contemporary artistic use of the medium since the 1990s. A number of artists, including important positions such as VALIE EXPORT, Gordon Matta-Clark, or Harun Farocki are represented by their entire oeuvre, and their films are available in the form of video transfer as well.
The Generali Foundation is Vienna’s only institution to keep such an extensive video collection permanently accessible to the public. When the video viewing space designed by Dan Graham is not in use, as it is during the current exhibition from the collection, the video collection is accessible in the study room on the 2nd floor during exhibition opening ours.
"New Design for Showing Videos" by Dan Graham, the architectural and social environment for showing videos designed especially for the Generali Foundation Video Collection, is being shown again at the Generali Foundation’s own exhibition space after many years "on tour" through the museums of Europe. For the first time, it is used to show the Generali Foundation’s entire video collection. A new technical solution now enables viewers to select videos individually. A search screen permits the selection of videos by artist or title and even full-text searches.
Dan Graham
1942 Urbana, Illinois/USA – New York/USA
New Design for Showing Videos, 1995
Installation
9 oak wood frames, glass, two-way mirrors, hole-punched aluminum
6 video players, 6 video monitors on shelves, floor cushions
"New Design for Showing Videos" was designed by Dan Graham for the presentation of his own videos at his retrospective and for the video collection of the Generali Foundation. This functional sculpture or installation—a room for social gatherings to watch videos—ties in with a series of earlier pavilions and is Graham’s largest video showroom to date.
Dan Graham about an earlier version with the title "Three Linked Cubes/Interior Design for Space Showing Videos" (1986):
Placed outside, it is an opened pavilion illuminated by the sun; placed indoors, it is transformed into "Interior Design for Space Showing Videos". Here, various video monitors and speakers are placed to allow three separate programs for audiences subdivided into six groups. The effects of the changing illumination from the video images reflected on the glass panels affect the mirror 'ghosts' of audience members seen in other enclosed bays on the divider. The work is both a functional exhibition design and an optical artwork, displaying both the video images and the spectators’ reactions to the video-viewing process in the social space of the video exhibition situation.
This "New Design for Showing Videos" uses besides glass punched aluminum (two aluminum sheets with small holes). The small holes relate to the small pixels on the video image. They are semi-transparent when seen nearby and completely transparent when the viewer presses his eyes to look directly through a hole. This is in relation to the transparency and shifting semi-reflectiveness/ transparency on the two-way mirror panels, a shift caused by changes in the projected video images. The spectators’ images of themselves and others observing the videos and each other/and their own gazes and "other spectators’" gazes are the content of the intersubjective philosophical aspect of the structure.