The Armory Show

Armory Film 2013: Curated by Moving Image

Film: High Noon (2008) compilation
Artist: Pavel Büchler
Duration 40:00
Gallery: Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin
Each of the 13 separate loops in Pavel Büchler’s video installation High Noon is made of stills harvested from a single Google image search. As with all of Büchler's film loop works, they are made from images found on the Internet and provide a reflection of the fragmented modes of reception that Internet browsing seems to encourage. Created as very basic animations of just one or two frames, the loops each use a different animation technique, resulting in works that evoke drama without maintaining a narrative. The screening will include other short loops by Büchler as well.

Film: The Show That Shook the World: Marcel Duchamp and the 1913 Armory Show
Duration: 1:00:00
Panel: Richard Miller (producer), Francis Naumann (scholar and art dealer) and Marilyn Kushner, Curator and Head, Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Drawings at the New-York Historical Society
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the original Armory Show, Armory Film is pleased to host the national debut of a new documentary on the famed International Exhibition of Modern Art. The one-hour film features a previously unknown illustrated talk by Marcel Duchamp. The object of much derision in 1913, Duchamp exhibits his famous candor as he gives us his take on the seminal event, including a critique of a number of iconic works. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the film’s producer, Richard Miller, led by Duchamp scholar Francis Naumann.

Film: The Armory Show Focus Group (2012-2013)
Artist: Liz Magic Laser
Duration: 30:00
Panel: Liz Magic Laser, focus group moderator Ben Allen (Labrador Agency), producer David Guinan (Polemic Media), student Justin Thornton, and dealer Esther Kim Varet (Various Small Fires)
As the commissioned artist for The Armory Show 2013, Liz Magic Laser conducted a series of six focus groups in November 2012 to determine the nature of her limited-edition artworks and the visual identity of the fair. She invited members of the art community—a range of collectors, curators, museum directors, advisers and critics—to participate in group discussions that would ultimately determine how she would lend her identity to The Armory Show. Laser enlisted professional moderator Ben Allen to lead these groups of “art world consumers", framing artistic decision-making as a matter of market research for the art fair. The resulting video, edited from twelve hours of focus group discussions, highlights the complex web of opportunities and compromises that define the relationship between market forces and artistic production today.

Laser’s The Armory Show Focus Group (2012-2013) will also be displayed throughout the course of the fair in the Various Small Fires (Los Angeles) booth in the Focus section curated by Eric Shiner. This film will be shown alongside the contractual documentation of the commission as well as the paraphernalia that ultimately gave form to the 2013 visual identity of The Armory Show.

Film: Fade to White / A Step on the Sun (2010 / 2012)
Artist: Janet Biggs
Duration: 9:05 / 12:28
Gallery: CONNERSMITH, Washington DC
These two films by Janet Biggs were shot in near opposite, yet equally inhospitable, locations: the frozen wasteland of the Arctic Circle and the hellish sulfur mine deep inside an active volcano in Indonesia. Fade to White was shot while Biggs was traveling aboard an ice-class, 2-masted schooner, built in 1910, and focuses on a crew member as he navigated the ship through iceberg -filled seas, and paddled a kayak past glacier walls and polar bears. In A Step On the Sun, the artist focuses on hardships overcome by a sulfur miner in the Ijen volcano. Amid clouds of toxic sulfur dioxide gas, he carries heavy loads up a steep, rocky path from the crater floor to the rim, then to a distant weigh-station.