"Closed Circuit" at the Met

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With its small scale and subtle presentation, the video is like a “still photograph come to life,” observed assistant curator Doug Eklund—which made it a perfect model for the department’s future acquisitions.

Over the past six years, the Met has continued—ever so cautiously—to amass a small but impressive collection of video and new media that blurs the line between still and moving images.

“The boundaries between media seemed increasingly fluid when we started looking to comprehensively build the collection, circa 2001,” said Eklund, who has organized the museum’s first multi-artist video exhibition—“Closed Circuit: Video and New Media”—on view at the Met through April 29.

“The museum did not have any representation of video at all at that time,” Eklund added, “but since then, we’ve acquired about two [video or new media works] each year.”

The decision to keep the collection small was deliberate, he explained. “We are primarily concerned with still photography, and because the field of moving image art is so vast and varied, we made a conscious decision not to try and be completist or represent every subgenre,” Eklund said.

“We don’t have the resources to go back and collect the great, seminal early videos by John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman or Martha Rosler. And there are large public and private collections dedicated to comprehensively collecting that material, so we focus on works made in the present or recent past.”

The photo department also gravitates toward smaller and more intimate works, like Hamilton’s abc.

In its current exhibition, the Met is showing its video and new media collection together for the first time. Granted, it’s made up of only eight works, but among them are two important pieces from the 1990s: David Hammons’ haunting-yet-humorous Phat Free (1995/99) and Maria Marshall’s riff on motherhood, When I Grow Up I Want to Become A Cooker (1998).

There are also works by Wolfgang Staehle, Darren Almond, Omar Fast and Jim Campbell.

And then there’s the show’s title piece, Closed Circuit (1997-2000), by American Lutz Bacher, which provides a portrait of late art dealer Pat Hearn, using individual frames culled from 1,200 hours of footage taken at her office. It is intimacy formed out of vastness—and seems like a fitting representative for this select video collection.