10 / AMAM.OBERLIN.EDU ON VIEW / NORTHWEST AMBULATORY / THROUGH DEC 21 MAKING SPACE FOR VIDEO ART Time-basedmedia encompasses film, video, sound art, performance, and other durational media. Since the turn of the millennium, art museums have grappled with how to preserve, store, and exhibit works in these categories. Each medium raises its own set of challenges. Film and video may have been produced on technologies that are no longer available, from fragile celluloid film to the discontinued software, Adobe Flash Player. Many museums’ acquisition budgets for time-based media now include an additional budget line for updating the equipment necessary to show it. Artists working with video often require a specific installation, which might be a set of rare vintage CRT monitors, a sound-proof black box, or a large projection screen. Due to high production cost, even short video works can be extremely expensive, with some institutions recently joining forces to co-acquire them. Prints, drawings, photographs, painting, and sculpture are media that the Allen has most actively acquired, exhibited, and integrated into the Oberlin College curriculum. Out of the museum’s more than 15,000 artworks, only 35 are moving-image works, ranging from 16 mm film to cassettes, DVDs, and NFTs. The pioneering video art curator WilliamOlander worked at the Allen from 1979 to 1984, before being hired by the NewMuseum for Contemporary Art in New York where he organized path-breaking exhibitions of video art. Olander was instrumental in acquiring several of the early video works in the Allen’s collection. In the intervening decades there have been numerous presentations of video works, but the acquisition and display of time-based media only became more consistent since 2012, with the acquisition of more than half of the museum’s holdings as gifts fromgenerous donors. Building the collection further would require long-term solutions, such as a future museum expansion that includes spaces dedicated to presenting time-basedmedia, as well as fundraising and budgeting for equipment and staff to maintain it. In the meantime, starting this fall we are using the Northwest Ambulatory as a space to present rotations of video works from the collection and to experiment with integrating the works into class visits and tours. Oberlin third-year student Dlisah Lapidus is working with the curator of modern and contemporary art to digitize the entire time-based collection. The inaugural presentation features Dara Birnbaum and Kalup Linzy. Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–1979) is among the most iconic works in the history of video art, glitching and altering televisual content to critique sexist representations of women. Linzy’s Lollypop (2006), made in collaboration with performance artist Shaun Leonardo, uses lip-sync to reframe a vintage blues song, originally performed by a man and a woman, as a queer flirtation between two Black men. Exploiting the mutability of video, Birnbaum and Linzy use humor to transcend stereotypes of race, gender, and sexuality in mass media and popular entertainment. The exhibtion Video Space: Dara Birnbaum and Kalup Linzy was organized by SamAdams, Ellen Johnson ’33 Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Dlisah Lapidus (OC 2026). Top left: Kalup Linzy (American, b. 1977), Lollypop (stills), 2006. Video (black and white, sound, 3:20min.). Gift of Driek (OC 1965) and Michael (OC 1964) Zirinsky, 2023.1.83. Bottom left: Dara Birnbaum (American, b. 1946), Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (stills), 1978–79. Video (color, sound, 5:50min.). Special Exhibitions Fund, 1984.35.
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