In the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s collection of 16,000 works, only 35 are moving images or video works. Since 1984 — when Bill Olander, former director and curator of the AMAM, left for the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City — the AMAM’s collection has lacked an effort to showcase video artwork, with the exception of some isolated exhibitions.
This year, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Sam Adams and College third-year Arts Administration and Curatorial Studies student assistant Dlisah Lapidus have created what is called Video Space, located in the northwest ambulatory of the AMAM.
The inaugural presentation features two works: Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79) and Kalup Linzy’s Lollypop (2006). The Video Space will be open for four semesters and will spotlight a variety of video art, starkly juxtaposed beside a beheaded limestone sculpture from the 12th century.
The works entered the AMAM’s collection almost 40 years apart. Birnbaum’s work was an acquisition of Olander in 1984, and Linzy’s piece was a gift to the AMAM in 2023 from Driek and Michael Zirinsky, OC ’65 and ’64, respectively.
“In preparing this exhibition, we’re really thinking about how we’re conserving and also presenting video works in the collection, especially with a collection that spans from VHS — which is no longer really used — [to] CDs, which have been replaced by thumb drives, which have been replaced by the cloud,” Lapidus said. “When working with video and with time-based media in general, we need to be forward-thinking — kind of predictive — of what would be the next thing.”
Video art is by no means a new artistic form — the earliest surviving film in existence is Louis Le Prince’s Roundhay Garden Scene from 1888.
“Video art has been a cornerstone of artistic production since the ’90s,” Adams said. “A strategy for narrative-based artwork is one way to ascribe the way that contemporary artists use video. Over the last 10 years, there have been so many things: like virtual reality headsets or NFTs or other modes that contemporary artists have explored. None of them have stuck around, but video art has.”
For Adams and Lapidus, video art should exist as a cornerstone of contemporary art exhibits. However, when a curator acquires video art, the artist often requires a specific installation to be put in place, whether it’s vintage equipment, a sound-proof room, or a large projection screen. Therefore, video art presentations often become financially implausible due to their expensive nature. At the AMAM in particular, given that it’s a relatively small museum, curators have run into the problem of a lack of space for displaying the artwork.
“Dlisah and I put our heads together and we made a space so we no longer have that excuse,” Adams said. “With video art, there’s also this question of duration and attention. There’s studies [that say] people look at a painting for 30 seconds and walk away. A video work can be intimidating, because you’re like, ‘Do I want to commit to sitting down?’ or ‘I don’t like to put headphones on because it ruins my hair.’ So we’ve tried to make it as low-stakes as possible.”
In the past, the Video Space has been used for other experimental installations.
“I did a small exhibition on sexual assault in artworks and how we deal with implicating the viewer in that dynamic,” Adams said. “It’s works that make us a little uncomfortable. Rather than sweeping them under the rug, we take this space to address them, almost always working really closely with students and leading on Oberlin students’ interpretations to drive the project. This is also an experiment — we’re a teaching museum and our mandate is to use the collection in the Oberlin College curriculum.”
The two works on display both highlight humor as a means to transcend and confront race, gender, and sexuality as they are commonly understood in mass media. Though from different decades, the works thematically intertwine with one another and create a unique viewing experience that totals to just over nine minutes, and must be seen if only for the catchy song at the end of Birnbaum’s work.
“If we look at the histories of other reproducible mediums, like photography, you can draw parallels between the stigmatization of the medium because it is accessible and you don’t necessarily need the fanciest education or the nicest paints,” Lapidus said. “It’s the medium of the people which we see today in our phones. Moving images teach empathy.”
