Words You Can Use: The BAVC BLOG

by Angelo Sacerdote, TIMA Manager and Senior Preservation Specialist

This past March 13th, I was fortunate enough to go to the opening of California Video at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles with BAVC’s Development Director, Carol Varney.

We arrived early and were given a tour of the Getty Research Institute’s video vaults and preservation set-up by Jonathan Furmanski, who does all of the video preservation work for the Institute. About half of the exhibit came from the Getty Research Institute’s acquisition of the Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive in 2006. Jonathan came up to BAVC around then and was given an intensive training by our former preservation specialist, Jon Selsley. Jonathan said he modeled their preservation lab after ours and used their preservation lab to work on many of the pieces in the show.

We met all kinds of people including our host, Glenn Phillip—the exhibition’s curator and senior projects specialist and consulting curator in the Department of Contemporary Programs and Research at the Institute. We also met Bill Viola and Kira Perov (whose work BAVC preserves), Skip Manning, Chip Lord and Doug Hall of Ant Farm. There was a re-creation of Ant Farm’s original video installation “Eternal Frame” which included Heather Weaver’s restoration of the video (which was featured in our preservation DVD, PLAYBACK: Preserving Analog Video).

Pam Kramlich, the wife of BAVC Board member Richard Kramlich, was also at the exhibition. The Kramlichs are perhaps the foremost collectors of video art in the world, and loaned a piece for the Getty exhibition. The Kramlichs have been integral in helping BAVC become what it is today, and it was good to see their work among so many other video pieces that helped to define the history of California’s video art movement.

We’re really grateful to Jonathan and Glenn for showing us the Getty from the inside out and for inviting us to the opening of the exhibition. We are also grateful to the video artists whose work germinated at BAVC and continues to be preserved here.

This show is one of the more fun art exhibits around and I highly recommend you go see it, but if you can’t make it to LA before June 8th, some of it is viewable online. You can also check out the catalog (which mentions BAVC), from the Getty bookstore.

Carol took some pictures for you so you can see a little bit of what we saw: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bavc/sets/72157604170342119/