Blaffer Art Museum :: Exhibitions :: Johan Grimonprez: It’s a Poor Sort of Memory that Only Works Backwards

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Exhibitions

Johan Grimonprez: It’s a Poor Sort of Memory that Only Works Backwards

January 15 – April 2, 2011

Johan Grimonprez’s critically acclaimed films and video installations dance on the border of art and cinema, documentary and fiction, practice and theory. Mixing reality and fiction in an innovative fashion and presenting history as a construct readily open to manipulation, Grimonprez asks us every so often to pause, do a double take, and to reconsider our assumptions. Acting as a media archeologist and suggesting new narratives through which to tell our histories, the artist emphasizes the co-existence of a multiplicity of realities.

Eerily foreshadowing the events of September 11th, 2001, dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) charts how media accounts of airplane hijackings effectively changed the course of news reporting. By appropriating media images and adopting visual strategies of newsmakers, Grimonprez investigates the history of airplane hijacking as a televised political gesture that created, and in turn catered to, a culture hooked on catastrophe and death. Double Take (2009)uses the imagery of Alfred Hitchcock to navigate the dueling terrains of cinema and television, capitalism and communism, and commercials and warfare. The film addresses the global rise of fear-as-commodity in a tale of odd couples and double deals that casts Hitchcock’s work and persona as central to and reflective of a world in flux.

Hitchcock is also at the center of Hitchcock Didn’t Have a Belly Button: Interview with Karen Black (2010), a sound recording of the American actress in conversation with Grimonprez as he steers her through a series of recollections about her work on Family Plot with the notorious director. Recounting details about their collaboration while repeatedly impersonating him, Karen Black creates an intimate double portrait that reveals as much about the director as it does about his star. The ongoing Maybe the Sky is Really Green and We're Just Colorblind (1995-2011) offers a glimpse into Grimonprez's creative process:composed of found footage drawn from the media archives and the internet, this ever-changing compilation of clips functions like a sketchbook for ideas and themes yet to be explored.

Dedicated to the first encounter between western explorers and highland villagers on New Guinea, Grimonprez’s earliest film Kobarweng or Where is Your Helicopter? (1992), and the related five-channel projection It will be all right if you come again, only next time, don’t bring any gear, except a tea kettle (1994/2003) presented upstairs, offer a meditation on post-colonial anthropological discourse as one of poetic misrepresentation of the respective “other.”

Johan Grimonprez was born in Roeselare, Belgium in 1962. He studied at the School of Visual Arts and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. He lives and works in Brussels and New York.

Organized by Blaffer director and chief curator Claudia Schmuckli, the exhibition is accompanied by a reader composed of collected and newly commissioned texts and interviews and published in collaboration with the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, and S.M.A.K., Ghent, with additional support from ARTIST ROOMS.

Screening Times:

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y
10:10 a.m.
11:25 a.m.
12:40 p.m.
1:55 p.m.
3:10 p.m.

Double Take
10 a.m.
11:25 a.m.
12:50 p.m.
2:15 p.m.
3:40 p.m.

Further Reading:
Foreword to the Exhibition Catalogue
Douglas Britt in Houston Chronicle/29-95, "Blaffer Explores Johan Grimonprez's Media Archeology" (Feb. 17, 2011)
Benjamin Lima's review in Art Papers (May/June 2011)

Johan Grimonprez: It’s a Poor Sort of Memory that Only Works Backwards is organized by Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston. The exhibition is made possible, in part, by The Cecil Amelia Blaffer von Furstenberg Endowment for Exhibitions and Programs and Houston Endowment Inc. In kind support is provided by United Airlines.

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