"The world may never understand what was done here today but the image created will never be forgotten." Doug Hall, the "Artist President," in Media Burn. Show and Tell includes works of self-portraiture, surrealism, photojournalism, and social documentation drawn from the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and Richard Lorenz. The photographer's progression from scientist and amateur to artist and professional is marked in this exhibition that ranges from luminous stereoptic autochromes by Louis Lumiére (1910) and Etienne-Jules Marey (1886); personal keepsake daguerreotypes in their original cases; and captivating early portrait work by Lewis Carrol (1878) and Julia Margaret Cameron (1874); to contemporary photography by Andy Warhol, Jay DeFeo, Garry Winogrand, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, and many others. Just as technological advances like the invention of a shutter facilitated Eadweard Muybridge's Animal Locomotion series (1887), and the development of the flashbulb made possible Weegee's social caricatures such as The Critic (1945), artists' video began with the introduction of the Sony Portapak in 1965. Among the seminal works of video art on view are Ant Farm's Media Burn, 1975, and Lynn Hershman's Confessions of a Chameleon, 1986. Walter Benjamin wrote in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" that reproducible media photography and film (or video) lose their aura due to their lack of uniqueness. But the ability of these mediums to capture and thus preserve experience replenishes in impact what is lost in authenticity. Show and Tell is on view through August 15.
