“Panels for the Walls of the World: Phase II” is an exhibition prompted by extensive new research into the original work in the artist’s papers. This presentation compliments the March 2022 exhibition at Document Gallery “Panels for the Walls of the World: Phase I” as well as the forthcoming installation of VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
To say that Stan VanDerBeek was prescient by decades of the Internet, and even social media, is incidental to why VanDerBeek’s work is profound and eminently relevant. He wasn’t interested in utopian or dystopian visions of technology and the future, although he consistently used the cutting edge of technology as a medium, but he was interested in media and intermediation as a new language, society, and culture. VanDerBeek explored media’s relationship with itself, posturing us, the viewer and participant, as its medium and intermediary.
In 1969 VanDerBeek was one of the first artists to be invited to be in-residence at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies in Cambridge, where he furthered his interest in feedback and two-way communication within art production. As part of his experimentation with fax technology, “Panels for the Walls of the World” was realized and transmitted from VanDerBeek’s studio at MIT to multiple locations in partnership with institutions including the Walker Art Center, Boston City Hall, Children’s Museum, and the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, among others.
The Box exhibition features the complete original collages for Phase II and Phase III as well as the original Phase II transmissions for the first time. In addition, new site-responsive transmissions, including Phase I and Phase III of Panels For the Walls of the World will be “performed” in the contemporaneous fashion of emailed PDFs from the VanDerBeek Archive and on-site desktop computer printing. This newly created Telephone Mural will be built up over the multi-week course of the exhibition in a playful reference to the original technology’s slow transmission speed (the original 153 panel mural took two weeks to transmit). The exhibition also includes a range of contextual works and experiments showing the thoroughness of VanDerBeek’s process.
Philosopher George Ulmer’s introduction of the term “electracy” in his book Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video (1989) parallels the underpinnings of VanDerBeek’s prodigious thought and experimentation. Electracy describes the skills necessary to exploit the full communicative potential of new electronic media, combining the words “electric” and “literacy.” To appreciate VanDerBeek’s poetic perspective, we have to consider ourselves as the medium. In the course of VanDerBeek’s spanning and complex works, involving technological, academic, and commercial institutions, he used transmitting as a means to abstract authorship. In this way we can see VanDerBeek experimenting with, and imploring, the reclaiming of our forthcoming loss.
at The Box LA
until November 5, 2022