field notes

Field Notes

News from Around the Country and Abroad

In conjunction with the International Film Festival, Rotterdam, which runs January 28-February 8, the Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art is presenting Home Screen Home, a series of video works made for television. Ranging from avant-garde tapes of the 60s and 70s to recent music videos and commercials, the programming includes works by such artists as Sadie Benning, Atom Egoyan, Robert Frank, Joan Jonas and Peter Wollen. Also on view: 4 RMS W VU: wallpaper, flowerpots, lamps, NEW, an installation on the theme of living-room TV-watching by John Baldessari. For more information, contact the Witte de With at http://wwww.dw.nl, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam at http://www.iffrotterdam.nl.

This year's Montreal International Festival of Films on Art runs March 10-15. A special preview gala evening on March 9 features De Venise à Versailles, Le Repas chez Simon de Véronèse (From Venice to Versailles, The Feast at the House of Simon by Veronese), a depiction of the intrigues and negotiations behind Louis XIV's acquisition of the famous painting. Also on the schedule: a tribute to opera singer Maria Callas. For more information, check http://www.maniacom.com/fifa.html

Museums and the Web, an international conference sponsored by the Canadian Heritage Information Network and coordinated by Archive and Museum Informatics, takes place April 22-25 in Toronto. The conference program features over 60 speakers from 16 countries, in workshops, sessions, and exhibitions of new technologies and services. For more information, check the Web site at http://www.archimuse.com/mw98.

News from Paris: AVICOM, the media and technology committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), is holding a series of soirées multimédia at the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires. Upcoming topics include Multimedia and Music (February 26), Multimedia, Science and Technology (March 26), and Multimedia and Cultural Patrimony (April 23). Admission is free. For further information, contact Claude-Nicole Hocquard, AVICOM (Tel: (33) 1-44-17-60-42; Fax: (33) 1-44-17-60-60).

Presented by the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, Circuits@nys, the Governor's Conference on Arts & Technology is scheduled for March 27-29 in Palisades, NY. But youll have to hurry--pre-registration is required, and must be received by January 30. For more information, check the conference site: http://www.circuitsnys.org.

The Society of Architectural Historians holds its annual meeting April 15-19 in Los Angeles, and will focus on the city's historic movie theaters. The conference kicks off with the annual Historic Preservation Colloquium, co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Conservancy, and includes a tour of the downtown movie theater district. For more information: or E-mail: info@sah.org.

Beginning February 6, 1998 and running through December 1999 MoMA is featuring Big as Life: An American History of 8mm Films. With more than 50 programs featuring over 120 artists, the two-year series reintroduces audiences to an overlooked--and in some cases, all but lost--genre of American filmmaking. Programs feature works by such renowned avant-garde artists and filmmakers as Vito Acconci, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, Takahiko Iimura, Ken Jacobs, and Carolee Schneeman. For more information, check the MoMA Web site at http://www.moma.org.

And at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the museum's director, David Ross, and film/video curator, Chrissie Iles, are presenting Video Culture: A Seminar on Video Art, a four-part series running January 29-February 19. For more information, check the Whitney Web site at http://www.echonyc.com/~whitney.

At New York's Museum of Modern Art, director, raconteur and devoted film fan Peter Bogdanovich holds forth with Who the Devil Made It?, a biweekly series of conversations and screenings. The series, which runs through June, opened with January screenings of George Cukor's Holiday (1932) and The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis, 1955). For more information, http://www.moma.org.

Visitors to The Getty Center won't want to miss, Art Works: Behind the Scenes of the Getty, a 27-minute film that introduces viewers to the full range of the Getty's activities around the world. The film is shown daily in the Center's Harold M. Williams Auditorium. Also screening regularly in the auditorium: Concert of Wills: Making the Getty Center, the feature-length cinema vérité film documenting the planning, design, and construction, produced by Maysles Films.

Warhol fans around the country can look forward to seeing more of his films and videos in the future. The Andy Warhol Foundation recently dispersed the artist's media archive to several museums and institutions around the country. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh is now the copyright holder for all of Warhol's media materials, and received prints of his films, videos of his television work, and the original video footage. In New York, The Museum of Modern Art received the original elements from Warhol's films, and will preserve and distribute them. Copies of Warhol's television shows have been given to The Museum of Television and Radio in New York and Los Angeles, and film prints have been donated to the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Ongoing grants to the Whitney Museum of American Art are funding continued research on a Warhol catalogue raisonné.

New Developments in Digital Image Databases and Museums. A number of new organizations are offering a variety of digital-image-related services to museums, educational institutions and the general public. Among them:

The Association of Art Museum Directors recently announced the formation of AMICO (the Art Museum Image Consortium). The not-for-profit organization will provide educational access to the multimedia digital libraries of over twenty North American museums--including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Toronto's National Gallery of Canada, and the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. The first phase of the project--a year-long test period--is now underway. For more information, check the AMICO Web site at http://www.amn.org/AMICO.

Another non-profit organization, The Museum Digital Licensing Collective, Inc. helps museums in the process of digitizing images of their collections with financial assistance, active management of image storage, distribution and licensing, and related technical services. Participants in the initial task force phase include the Amon Carter Museum, the Chicago Historical Society, The Children's Museum of Indianapolis, and the New York Public Library. For more information, click http://www.museumlicensing.org.

And for licensed images from museums around the world, there's Image Directory. A project of the Academic Press, Image Directory's Web site includes close to 100,000 visual arts images, from institutions that include the Rijksmuseum, the Smithsonian Institution, the Jewish Museum, and the Chicago Architecture Foundation. This spring, Image Directory will be demonstrated at the annual conferences of the College Art Association, (CAA), the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA), and American Association of Museums (AAM). For more information, check the Image Directory Web site at http://www.imagedir.com.

Focus On...	Reports and Opinion Pieces
Program Notes	News from the Program for Art on Film
Field Notes	News from colleagues around the country and abroad
Now Playing	Art & Architecture on a screen near you
Festival Round-up	Entry deadlines/Award winners
Close-Ups	Reviews of new films, videos, and CD-ROMs
The Bookshelf	New and recent books of interest
Archives	The October issue of E-News