Modern Kids — Summer Flicks: Selected Short Films

Take a break from the Texas heat for Modern Kids — Summer Flicks! Share the art of the screen with your children as they watch stories unfold and ideas form in delightful and innovative films. The bonus for seeing these films at the Modern is the opportunity to visit the galleries before or after and experience the wonder of the paintings, sculptures, installations, and videos throughout the museum, including those in the special exhibitions Disappearing—California, c.

Film and video works from John Baldessari, Vito Acconci, and William Wegman

In an ironic intersection of two systems — arcane theoretical discourse and popular music — Baldessari sings a tract by Minimalist artist Sol LeWitt. Introducing this performance by noting that "these sentences have been hidden too long in exhibition catalogues," Baldessari sings Lewitt's forty-five-point tract on Conceptual Art to the tunes of The Star-Spangled Banner and Heaven, among other songs. Baldessari's witty "art aria" functions as a meta-conceptual exercise.  Electronic Art Intermix

Films and videos by Bruce Nauman

You have the repeated action, and at the same time, over a long period of time you have mistakes or at least chance, changes, and you get tired and all kinds of things happen, so there’s a certain tension that you can exploit once you begin to understand how those things function. And a lot of the videotapes were about that.  Bruce Nauman, quoted in How Did New York Change Bruce Nauman? Looking Back on a Radical Period in the Artist's Career, Artspace magazine, August 3, 2015

Bigfoot

The synchronous disappearances of Ader, Burden, and Goldstein have been given various justifications: the desire for the dematerialization of (art-) object and (artist-) subject inherent to conceptualism; the omnipresence of death in the context of the Vietnam War; the temptation of magic’s sleight of hand; and a fascination with the morbid and the sublime. Philipp Kaiser, Disappearance — California, c. 1970: Bas Jan Ader, Chris Burden, Jack Goldstein,

Faces

What Cassavetes has done is astonishing. He has made a film that tenderly, honestly and uncompromisingly examines the way we really live. Roger Ebert, December 19, 1968

Point Blank

What makes Point Blank so extraordinary, however, is not its departures from genre conventions, but Boorman’s virtuoso use of such unconventional avant-garde stylistics to saturate the proceedings with a classical noir mood of existential torpor and romanticized fatalism. Nick Schager, Slant, July 24, 2003

The Wild Bunch

[Peckinpah] got so wound up in the aesthetics of violence that what had begun as a realistic treatment — a deglamorization of warfare that would show how horribly gruesome killing really is — became instead an almost abstract fantasy about violence. Pauline Kael, New Yorker, April 4, 2016

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