The Brooklyn Rail

As an aesthetic maneuver, collage has endured throughout visual practice for the last one hundred years. Although it has occasionally waned in high-brow favor, one could argue that it is a quintessential gesture of modernity in its resolution of difference. Collage has famously been a vehicle for ideological dissent and foundational in Surrealist dichotomies. The syntax of collage is embedded in photography when the frame assembles a pell-mell assortment of random stuff (and of course digital compositing and AI) and in film in the ubiquitous necessity of editing and montage. And as aural collage: the newly intrinsic “sampling” imbricated in popular music, the mash-up. The genre is a democratic endeavor that is embraced in popular taste for its ease, usage, and universal legibility.

Collage informs much of the work of the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek (1927–1984) whose work is gathered in a galloping and gregarious survey at Magenta Plains. As a resident artist at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies from 1969 to 1970, he was a pioneer in the fledgling conversation between art and technology, proposing that artists should work to infiltrate the newly rapid dissemination of information to, among other things, oppose the ever-expanding conflict in southeast Asia. (Meanwhile, technology and its research in academia in partnership with MIT, Xerox, IBM, and RAND was an asset of the state.) VanDerBeek is credited with coining the term “expanded cinema” to name the thinking that was accumulating in both the visual and performing arts, challenging the passivity of spectatorship, and encouraging a more participatory role for the viewer. Art-making as a collaborative venue was of particular significance for him, perhaps formed in his early twenties at the exuberantly interdisciplinary Black Mountain College. Moreover, the sixties avant-garde in New York was a bustling collective discourse uniting film, dance, poetry, and visual arts. The title of the show, Stan VanDerBeek: Transmissions, with its sense of passage and velocity, is particularly appropriate.

A centerpiece in the gallery is a monumental mural in both its original form and transmitted reproduction. Panels for the Walls of the World: Phase II (1970) is a grid of 153 sheets of paper totaling six feet by twenty. It was conceived to be transmitted from MIT as individual sheets of facsimile to its exhibition destination, long before “fax” became a commonplace verb (Xerox introduced the technology in the mid-1960s with advertising copy that read “Mail Letters Over the Phone!”) and daily implement.

Although a fairly conventional collage, its components—text headlines, consumer goods and their rhetoric of pleasure and unruly news images of political conflict (and some sexual brio common to both)—when placed together form an image of social contradiction. Densely compressed, and then scattered and drifting, are fragments of the ideological conversation: famine, space exploration, reproductive rights, the expansion of the war into Cambodia, cavorting bodies, and freedom of speech. Here, art became telephonic information, recusing the precious object attributes of modern art. At the host locations, the panels would be affixed to the wall over time as they gradually emerged from the fax appliance on site, a participatory and durational experience, and revised with input as it formed. It is an ambitious work that updates the mural as political narrative, a Diego Rivera for electronic relay, and its presence at the First National Bank in Minneapolis (arranged by the Walker Art center) was audacious and subversive.

There is much to absorb throughout the exhibition and supporting ephemera to remind one of the pleasures of the archive. Downstairs, two animated films as pulsing color-field elixir: Oh! (1968) proposes a primordial evolutionary narrative, one whose male figuration (presumably the artist) appears also in line-drawing collages that repeat throughout the exhibition, and Astral Man (1959), a diagram of voice and words and a drawn hand as a primal gesture of identity. A separate loop of collagist film, Skullduggery (1960), shuffles photojournalistic images of the (male) actors in 1960s political theater—Nixon, Nasser, Castro, Churchill, Eisenhower—with a rush of slapstick humor and parody that embroider all the works, reminding of VanDerBeek’s affection for Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and thus la comédie humaine.

Change—social, political, sexual, and technological—is VanDerBeek’s polemic. Paradoxically, one resists a tugging nostalgia for this bygone that feels scratchy and mechanical, this past when “mass media” consisted of three broadcast news platforms, and VanDerBeek’s “networking” had not yet become a global monolith. His prescience as an artist is remarkable. Regardless of the era’s urgent social churn and the conceptual adventure that drives the work, play and whimsy leaven what could have been a much more didactic and somber enterprise. VanDerBeek’s enthusiasms pair with a tenderness of touch, and together with his humor and pleasure, make palpable his generosity as an individual and artist. Perhaps any sense of nostalgia should be reserved for this.