Douglas Davis: InterActions 1967-1981

Douglas Davis InterActions 1967-1981 will present the early, innovative works  of a unique artist, writer, performer, and critic. One of the first artists to commit to video in the 1960’s, Davis is a pioneer to the use of the satellite and the computer to create interactive log distance works of performance art that directly involve both performers and the audience. He trail-blazed the idea of art museums, galleries, and artists producing work for broadcast and cablecast. With Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik, Davis created the first global satellite performance for the opening of Documenta 6 in 1977. At every stage in his career, Davis has combined powerful new tools — most recently the Internet, World-Wide Web, and computer-based tele-conferencing — with traditional means such as drawing, photography, printmaking, film, video, and radio broadcasting.

The exhibition will provide an overview of Davis’s early interactive exploration and his ongoing interest in communicating on an “intense, private, and personal level through a public medium. It will offer, for the first time, a multi-dimensional portrait os his early work. Davis — whose work is rooted in Fluxus and Conceptualism — will be represented by video tapes, prints, collages, photographs, objects and two performances. Beginning with Davis’s performance events of the late sixties, the exhibition features some of his best known works including Images from the Present Tense I, 1970 (in which a backwards television produces a flickering light and static hiss), Questions New York Moscow New York Moscow, 1976 (a collaboration with Komar and Melamid while the latter were in the Soviet Union and completed the following year when they immigrated to the United States), and Seven Thoughts, in 1976 (in which the artists broadcasts a seven part message via satellite to the “world’s private minds” from the empty Houston Astrodomer.

Breaking Out (of the Virtual Closet) an interactive performance on the Internet will be presented on December 8 from 5:00 – 7:00 pm with a perlude — Discours Amoureux, an Internet dialogue with an artist at  Geneva at Galerie St. Gervais — at the reception on November 10 from 5:00- 7:30 pm. The performance will include use of multiple media, multiple time frames, and multiple sites — including Lehman College Art Gallery, Franklin Furnance, the Gertude Stein Repertory Theatre/Here Arts Center, CATV Channel 34 Echo Chatline, the School of Visual Arts, and St. Gervais in Geneva. The December 8 performance will also include the work of Davis’s students in the Lehman Scholars Program. The hypertext structure of the performance narrative will invite participation in the development of its plot and theoretical critique of its process. It is the latest in a sustained series of performance stretching back to the 1970’s that “de-mass mass media” through intimate contact between performers and audiences, furthering Davis’ ongoing exploration of time, sequence, and place — as played out in the “virtual” and “real”.

Davis writes, teaches, engages actively in social and political life, and maintains close dialogues with artists in Latin America, South Africa, Eastern Europe, and Russian, where he will lecture next year on a Fulbright grant. An interactive poster will be issued in an unlimited and limited, signed edition. The poster will include essays by David Ross, Michael Govan, and others.

Link to The World’s Longest Collaborative Sentence: https://artport.whitney.org/collection/DouglasDavis/live/