Photographic still from Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation’s The Rape of the Sabine Women (Disintegration at Hydra)), 2005, Photo by Ricoh Gerbl. Courtesy the artists and Roebling Hall.
Re-visioning History: Adaptation Comes to Philbrook by Carolyn Deuschle Adaptation, an upcoming exhibit at Philbrook Museum of Art, offers visitors a look into one of contemporary art’s most complex and obsessed-over topics: the art of adaptation. Transforming source material into new modes of expression, video artists Guy Ben-Ner, Arturo Herrera, Catherine Sullivan, and Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation explore the ways that memory—induced by the original material—triggers response. In an era of media saturation, these artists reclaim and recast familiar images and narratives so as to shed new light on the meaning of the original work as well as to represent the source material as subordinate to a contemporary perspective. In the vein of photographer Cindy Sherman, Israeli-artist and stay-athome-dad Guy Ben-Ner casts himself and his family in semi-scripted, short videos that adapt classic stories to film. For example, Ben-Ner’s Moby Dick (2000) condenses Herman Mellville’s magnum opus into a brief retelling of the story of Captain Ahab and his quest for the great white whale. Along the way, Ben-Ner does what so many artists have done in the past: he looks to the art of previous generations to see what qualities to continue to propagate. Interestingly, his role as father has him exploring similar ground and this dynamic is what makes his work shine. Working primarily in drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography, Venezuelan-artist and University of Tulsa-graduate Arturo Herrera creates works that draw on the unconscious, mixing abstract shapes with more recognizable elements, such as cartoon characters. Les Noces (The Wedding) (2007) is his first piece using the moving image and is featured in the exhibit. For Les Noces, Herrera sequenced 80 of his previous works on paper to create an adaptation of Igor Stravinsky’s 1923 ballet of the same name. The projected images respond to the pitch of Stravinsky’s score, both paying homage to as well as reimagining the original piece.
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In her work, Catherine Sullivan examines human behavior as actions in concert with learned or innate emotional states and gestures. Unlike the other works in Adaptation, Sullivan’s Triangle of Need (2007) adapts email, in the form of a money extortion scheme, to film. For Sullivan, we “perform” in accordance with a script that we are given by nature and society. Using the rhetoric of film and dance, she explores the way that humans adapt their “lines” to the present moment, in an effort to allow viewers to perceive human behavior as performance. Eve Sussman and her collaborator, the interdisciplinary group The Rufus Corporation, create feature-length videos based on the narratives of paintings from the canon of the history of Western art. Adaptation features Sussman and The Rufus Corporation’s The Rape of the Sabine Women (2007), which is inspired by Jacques Louis David’s painting The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799). The artists offer a contemporary—and at times, radical—retelling of the myth that David’s painting is based. Ben-Ner, Herrera, Sullivan, and Sussman & The Rufus Corporation investigate and challenge not only the meaning of the original source material but also its cultural authority, leaving viewers with both an insight into major questions facing contemporary artists today and fresh understandings of historical works. Adaptation is on view from October 17th through January 9th, 2011 at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa. Visit www.philbrook.org for more information. n Originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, Carolyn Deuschle is a freelance writer based in Flagstaff, Arizona. Previously, she was an editor at Princeton Architectural Press in New York City. Her writing has appeared on DesignObserver.com and RL Magazine.