Whitney includes film screenings in 'America is Hard to See'

Associated media

As part of the exhibition 'America Is Hard to See', the Whitney is screening a series showcasing films and videos from the Museum’s collection by approximately 50 artists. Programmes screen on select Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays in the Susan and John Hess Family Theater on the Museum’s third floor. Special Saturday evening events feature expanded cinema performances and rare screenings of works on film. Further information on the programmes and the individual works is available at whitney.org.

Screening schedule

Normal Love
July 3, 11 a.m.
August 22, 7 p.m.
September 6, 4 p.m.

In Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1962–63), David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly (1986–87), Nayland Blake’s Negative Bunny (1994), and Kenneth Anger’s Mouse Heaven (2005), intense desire is often expressed through indirect means, including role-playing and emulation or appropriation of popular culture.

Day Is Done

July 3, 2 p.m.
August 16, 11 a.m.
September 19, 1 p.m.

Mike Kelley based his 2005–6 Day is Done on a series of high school yearbook photographs of ‘extracurricular activities’, which Kelley transformed into a fractured, quasi-narrative musical that cycles through themes such as personal trauma, the structure of the institution, repressed memory, mass cultural ritual, and adolescence.

The Art of Vision

July 3, 8 p.m.
August 21, 11 a.m.
September 19, 5 p.m.

The programme includes Julie Murray’s Untitled (light) (2002), Sandra Gibson’s NYC Flower Film (2003), Stan Brakhage’s Chinese Series (2003), Bryan Frye’s Oona’s Veil (2000), Luis Recoder’sLinea (2002), and Matt Saunders’s Century Rolls (2012). Examining the material and formal conditions of film, video, and animation, these artists build on the tradition of American avant-garde filmmaking. On September 19, Sandra Gibson’s NYC Flower Film will be screened on film, and Gibson will be present.

Dream States

July 4, 11 a.m.
August 16, 3 p.m.
September 6, 2 p.m.

Made in the 1940s, Maya Deren’s At Land (1944) and Hans Richter’s Dreams that Money Can Buy (1947) draw on dream imagery and surrealism to produce non-narrative experimental cinema.

Inner and Outer Territories

July 4, 3 p.m.
August 21, 2 p.m.
September 6, 11 a.m.

The social and psychological space presented in Yvonne Rainer’s Five Easy Pieces (1966–69) and David Lamelas’s The Desert People (1974) is set against the landscape of the deserts of the American West represented in Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1978) and Walter De Maria’sHardcore (1969).

Radical Takes

July 4, 6 p.m.
August 23, 11 a.m.
August 30, 4 p.m.

Made at the height of the feminist movement, Howardena Pindell’s Free, White and 21 (1980), Cynthia Maughan’s sixteen selected videos (1973–78), and Suzanne Lacy’s Learn Where the Meat Comes From (1976) present frank, derisive, and at times humorous commentary on identity, including female subjectivity, and—in Pindell’s case—race.

Lyrical Observations

July 5, 11 a.m.
August 14, 7 p.m.
August 29, 11 a.m.

Robert Beavers’ Sotiros (1975–96), Kevin Jerome Everson’s Act One: Betty and the Candle (2010), Anna Gaskell’s SOSW Ballet (2011), and David Hartt’s Stray Light (2011) are intimate observations that become poetic—sometimes lyrical, sometimes pensive—in their sustained duration.

I Feel Your Pain (A Performa Commission)

July 5, 1 p.m.
August 22, 2 p.m.
September 18, 6 p.m.

Liz Magic Laser’s 2011 video I Feel Your Pain dramatizes recent political events and speeches, recasting them as a romance narrative. The performance was originally staged, performed, filmed, and edited in real time at a cinema in front of a live audience.

Lifted Frames

July 5, 5 p.m.
August 22, 6 p.m.
August 28, 11 a.m.

Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s Cowboy and ‘Indian’ Film (1957–58) and Morgan Fisher’s ( ) (2003) each make use of mainstream movie footage, remixing it in order to turn it against its narrative origins. Ortiz re-edits a classic Hollywood Western in a symbolic act of repatriation to the Native Americans. Fisher’s composition is a seemingly chance collection of interstitial moving pictures. The programme on August 22 will include a special screening of Christian Marclay’s Telephones (1995).

Mind Eye Body

July 10, 11 a.m.
August 23, 5 p.m.
August 29, 3 p.m.

Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964) and Michael Joo’s Salt Transfer Cycle (1994) each explore the ritual-like transformation of human energy through the body, movement, and the organic world. These works are shown with Stan Brakhage’s expressionistic abstract film Persian Series 13–18 (2001).

Structures and Gestures

July 10, 1 p.m.
August 30, 11 a.m.
September 20, 11 a.m.

Hollis Frampton’s nostalgia (HAPAXLEGOMENA I) (1973), Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting (1974), Peter Campus’s third tape (1976), and David Haxton’s Cube and Room Drawings (1976–77) each play with the structural properties of film. Following this formalist filmmaking lineage, Alex Hubbard uses the video frame to create a play in abstraction in Dos Nacionales (2008).

Popular Mechanics

July 12, 11 a.m.
August 21, 6 p.m.
September 5, 2 p.m.

Influenced by the rise of mass media, the works in this programme – Dara Birnbaum’s PM Magazine/Acid Rock (1982), Dan Graham’sRock My Religion (1982–84), Ericka Beckman’s You the Better (1983), and Charles Atlas’s Hail the New Puritan (1986)—examine popular culture, sub-culture, and imagined culture during the 1980s.

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