Video Description:
Episode 9: An Organized System of Instructions (Level 0, Lecture Hall, Apr 14, 2016, 6:30pm)
In his ongoing exhibition Program Martin Beck employs a series of explorative strategies that have simultaneously performed and critically reflected on the kinds of activity an institution uses to build, organize, and engage with its audiences. From the institution’s physical infrastructure to media relations, from its foundational curricular principles to visitor tallies, from building usage to welcome rituals, Beck has examined individual modes of institutional behaviors that collectively form institutional identity and unite to integrate audiences into a cohesive program of public address. In this penultimate episode, titled An Organized System of Instructions, Beck’s Program inhabits one of the most common and frequently utilized formats of public address—the artist lecture. An Organized System of Instructions approaches this format from three perspectives: as an informational event to present an artist’s work; as a specific mode of visual and verbal display that is regulated by the conventions of educational communication and infrastructure; and, as an institutional site for introducing people and topics untethered to the institution’s daily curricular framework.
Program by Martin Beck manifests through a sequence of interventions, installations, events, and publications that draw upon the exhibition histories and academic pursuits of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. This sequence—each node of which Beck considers an episode—lends particular attention to the founding program of the Carpenter Center, which sought to cultivate its position as simultaneously an iconic modernist building, school, and exhibition venue. In the early years of the program, exhibitions, public discussions, and screenings, ambitious in scope and depth, were regarded as integral to the pedagogical concept of a visual arts education. The Carpenter Center, in its entirety, performed an exhibition of education; a performance that occurred in both its educative framework and its public outreach. Beck’s work, Program, to unfold over the next two years, pulls this history into the present, reflecting the institution’s aspirations back onto itself.
Organized by James Voorhies, the John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director.