Martin Beck: Program
A sequence of interventions, installations and events by Martin Beck drawing on the exhibition histories and academic aspirations of the Carpenter Center and Harvard University.
Curated by James Voorhies
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
October 23, 2014–October 2016
Made possible with funding and staff of Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts; realized within my responsibilities as Director and Curator of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
In the early years the Carpenter Center’s exhibitions, public programs, and screenings—ambitious in scope and depth—were regarded as integral to the pedagogical concept of a visual arts education. The Center, in its entirety, performed an exhibition of education; a performance that occurred in its pedagogical framework and its public outreach. Martin Beck’s projects, or “episodes” gave particular attention to this founding program, which sought to cultivate a position as an iconic modernist building, school, and exhibition venue.
Beck’s exhibition and residency titled Program unfolded over the course of two years, pulling the rich and complex history at the Carpenter Center into the present, reflecting the institution’s aspirations back onto itself.
Episode 10: Fifty Photographs (Level 3, Jul 7–Sep 24, 2016)
Fifty Photographs constituted the final episode of Martin Beck’s Program. Over the course of his two-year residency Beck focused on various points of public interface that define the Carpenter Center as an institution. These points included physical spaces, curriculum, student relations, media relations, and time-based instances of connecting with the public, such as talks and screenings. This final episode focused on the role of the exhibition form and the art collection as a teaching resource. Beck’s Fifty Photographs consisted of the gathering and reassembly a selection of photographs originally presented in a 1966 exhibition titled Fifty Photographs at Harvard, 1844–1966. Drawn from the then Carpenter Center’s developing photography collection, the photographs were amassed as a teaching tool, cared for by Davis Pratt, who served as Curator of Still Photography at the Carpenter Center from 1966 to 1971. The collection was later dispersed and partially transferred to the Fogg Art Museum and other Harvard collections.
A selection of photographs from the 1966 exhibition were presented in Beck’s Fifty Photographs along with archival documents about the role of photography at Harvard and the organization of the original exhibition. These documents revealed an underlying pedagogic philosophy and reasoning for a photography collection at the university, images ranging from historical accounts of explorations of the American West, to ethnographic documentary records of South Sea Islanders, to depictions of late-nineteenth urban social conditions in the United States and Europe. In every instance, photography was viewed as a means to both shape student knowledge of social, political and ecological issues while encouraging a more acute awareness and reading of the visual environment.
Episode 9: An Organized System of Instructions (Level 0, Lecture Hall, Apr 14, 2016)
Beck employed a series of explorative strategies critically reflecting 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 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, the artist inhabited one of the most common and frequently utilized formats of public address–the artist lecture. An Organized System of Instructions approached 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.
Episode 8: A Social Question (Level 1, Jan 21–31, 2016)
In the fall of 1973 curators Barbara Norfleet and William S. Johnson organized the exhibition The Social Question: A Photographic Record 1895–1910 at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. The selection of photographs was drawn from the Social Ethics Collection originally assembled by pioneering scholar on social reform Francis Greenwood Peabody, founder of the Social Ethics Department at Harvard University in 1906. The photographs dated from late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were part of a collection of six thousand images Peabody had assembled as part of his activist engagement with social issues such as immigration and changing labor conditions. Peabody believed photography was a means to strengthen support for social reform, communicating the need for improved conditions in tenements, factories, public schools and hospitals. The exhibition The Social Question at the Carpenter Center was a teaching site for students and visitors.
Episode 8 engaged Norfleet and Johnson’s exhibition on the level of display: Beck’s A Social Question looked at the original exhibition’s presentational devices through the lens of its photographic documentation. In contrast to other installation photography of the Carpenter Center’s exhibitions of the time, images of The Social Question revealed a particular focus on the exhibition’s audience while also documenting the inclusion of numerous flower bouquets throughout the exhibition.
Episode 7: The Limit of a Function (Level 3)
The Limit of a Function served as a means of assembly and display. It was a table and a vitrine made of powder-coated steel and plywood. It had two rectangular recessed areas covered by glass for exhibition of materials while functioning as a place for repose, study and discussion. The dimensions of the table were derived from Le Corbusier’s grid pattern incised in the concrete floor on Level 3 with a height slightly more than a typical table, slightly less than a vitrine. Two benches and several stools served as seating. The soft wood surfaces of the table and seating were stained comparable in color to the warm accent panels of the Carpenter Center. Casters on the table accommodated different arrangements to coordinate and support programmatic and exhibition activity in the space.
The Limit of a Function inserted the sense of potential into the site. It provided possibility for interaction among visitors and prolonged use of institutional space. The table and seating created a situation of assembly, where the basic form of a bench inherently invited visitors to share a single material, wood surface while each stool encouraged rearrangement based on individual preference. The Limit of a Function offered opportunity for group discussion or individual contemplation reinforcing the originating function of the exhibition and museum as a public sphere where looking, thinking and conversation overlap.
Episode 6: Reality Is Invisible (Aug 24–Sep 10, 2015)
In 1971 the experimental filmmaker Robert Fulton made the 16mm film Reality’s Invisible while teaching in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Through candid interviews with VES students, impromptu recordings of faculty lectures, and lingering shots on concrete surfaces and spaces around Le Corbusier’s architecture, Reality’s Invisible is a frenetic and visually lush, almost visceral, portrayal of academic life at the Carpenter Center. The intimate footage captures the pedagogical activities, intellectual ideas and political concerns occupying students and faculty involved in the nascent days of a new visual arts program and building at Harvard. Pushing the limits of filmmaking, Fulton’s images and sounds, edited and layered, collide into a “tone,” as he later described it, revealing the chaos, fluidity and motion at the Carpenter Center. Robert Fulton’s films are in the collection of the Harvard Film Archive.
Reality is Invisible was Martin Beck’s sixth episode in the ongoing exhibition Program. This multi-part episode included the screening of a 16mm print of Reality’s Invisible, introduced by Beck on September 10, 2015. The screening, which followed the opening reception of the VES Visiting Faculty, 2015–16 exhibition, was a means to welcome returning students and faculty, inaugurating another academic year. The episode also included a digitization of Fulton’s film in order to produce a limited edition DVD that was given to students concentrating in Visual and Environmental Studies and graduate students in Film and Visual Studies.
Episode 5: Photography and the City (July 22–Aug 24, 2015)
This episode involved records culled from the Carpenter Center’s archive that document the number of visitors to exhibitions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The selected attendance sheets showed only hash marks made in various styles and inks on lined notebook paper, shifting their legibility from data gathering documents to abstract drawings. Presented as an exhibit during the summer months while the university was not in session these archival documents are evidence of a data collection process that signals broadening interest in administering and managing constituencies as a basis for institutional planning and development.
Photography and the City comprised three 8.5 x 11 inch attendance sheets installed on the left half of a white-laminate surface of 120 x 60 inches. The height of the surface was 32 inches, a display that is neither a table for seated visitors nor a typical viewing surface for standing viewers. The attendance sheets reflected another aspect of framing the institution. And as classes reconvened after the summer, a poster-style announcement for the next episode was placed on the right half of the table’s surface.
Episode 4: A Report of the Committee
This episode comprised of a digitally distributed installation view of The Art of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, a 1971 exhibition at the Carpenter Center; a floor-to-ceiling curtain segment made of cream-pink silk chiffon; and the original 1960 Report document placed inside a vitrine sited in relation to the curtain. The constellation of these three elements corresponded with core values of the Carpenter Center’s educational framework where courses, exhibitions, and architecture seamlessly united into a cohesive pedagogical practice.
“A Report of the Committee on the Practice of the Visual Arts at Harvard University,” dated June 30, 1960, is a five-page document written by a university committee appointed to shape and consult on the emergent visual arts program at Harvard. The report focuses on the basic framework for how the Visual Arts Center, eventually realized in 1963 as the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, would function within the pedagogical program at the university.
Episode 3: Integration of the Program
A digital slide show with images ranging from original photographs, archival documents to architecture were publicized and distributed via the Carpenter Center website.
Episode 2: 1963
The original press release issued for the inauguration of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in 1963 was reproduced as a facsimile and distributed to the Carpenter Center’s mailing list of press contacts. In addition, the facsimile document was available as a take-away from a dispenser placed on the newly altered exterior of the Level 3 gallery at the Carpenter Center.
Episode 1: Removed and Applied
This first episode consisted of the removal of existing sheet-metal cladding from the exterior walls of an art gallery designed in 2000 by Peter Rose + Partners and inserted into the existing Le Corbusier gallery on Level 3. Beck orchestrated removal of the cladding and instructed that gypsum board is adhered to the exposed surface, primed, sanded and painted with White Dove 275 paint.
Book
Martin Beck: An Organized System of Instructions, 2017, 208 pages, 10.25 x 7.875 inches, Sternberg Press.
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