PRESS RELEASE

Contact:
Whitney Museum of American Art
Mary Haus, Stephen Soba
(212) 570-3633
March 2001

WHITNEY TO PRESENT FIRST IN BLACK BOX/WHITE CUBE SERIES

IN SYNC: CINEMA AND SOUND IN THE WORK OF
JULIE BECKER AND CHRISTIAN MARCLAY



Inaugurating its new Black Box/White Cube series, the Whitney Museum of American Art will present a two-part video exhibition, In Sync: Cinema and Sound in the Work of Julie Becker and Christian Marclay. These two artists create video installations in which they re-imagine iconic films by juxtaposing well-known images with unexpected musical scores, creating an eloquent disjunction between image and sound. Pink Floyd meets Judy Garland in Julie Becker's Suburban Legend (1999), which will run from April 10 through May 20. This will be followed, from May 22 to July 1, by Up and Out (1998), a single-channel video by Christian Marclay in which Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup collides with Brian De Palma's Blow Out.

The Black Box/White Cube series will present a range of projected film or video works, some making use of the white cube of the gallery, and others requiring the black box of the theater. For In Sync, the first exhibition in this series, Suburban Legend will be shown in a gallery setting, while Up and Out is presented in a theater setting.

Julie Becker's Suburban Legend examines a popular underground myth, long circulated among suburban youth. "The hypothesis is that Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (1973) was composed as an alternate soundtrack for The Wizard of Oz," said Christopher Eamon, assistant curator of film and video at the Whitney. "In recreation rooms across America, teenagers have watched the film for decades with the sound turned off while playing the Pink Floyd album. In addition to the surprising correspondences discerned through this activity, the practice of pairing unrelated picture and soundtrack amounts to a performative work of art."

Christian Marclay's work, on the other hand, reveals an interest in aspects of the audio track in feature filmmaking and in the predominance of the visual over the auditory in our culture. In Up and Out, the soundtrack of Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981) is laid over the visuals of Antonioni's classic Blowup (1966). The driving force behind each of these suspense narratives is a clue to solving a murder. In Blowup the clue lies buried in a photograph while in Blow Out it is found recorded on tape. Marclay complicates interpretations of both films while creating an entirely new experience where the visual and auditory elements are perceived at times autonomously and at other times in apparent synchronization.