The first major exhibition in the US to focus on the dynamic relationship between cinema and the visual arts, Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945 included approximately one hundred and seventy-five objects, sixty films and film excerpts, fifteen installations, and a film series jointly organized by MOCA and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. The exhibition examined how artists and filmmakers deconstructed popular forms of cinema, combined art and film into novel forms of expression, and urged a new relationship between viewers and moving image media.
Hall of Mirrors comprised three roughly chronological sections. The first, beginning in 1945, examined an early period of experimentation that emerged in the decline of Hollywood’s “Golden Age,” in which artists and filmmakers began to cast a more fatalistic, critical eye on the phenomenon of Hollywood stardom—as in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). The second, focusing on the 1960s and early 1970s, featured reductive dissections of the film apparatus itself, including Tony Conrad’s and Paul Sharits’s structuralist film art; or “expanded” film works that merged with performance and installation, as in Carolee Schneeman’s videos. The final section assembled a constellation of themes: voyeurism, the cinematic tableau, and the aesthetics of blankness or loss.
Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945 traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio; Palazzo Delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue.
Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945 was organized by Kerry Brougher, Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.