ARTIST
Burt Barr
Burt Barr, born in 1938 in New York, NY, was a groundbreaking artist renowned for his unique approach to video art. His works, characterized by minimalism and humor, challenged conventional filmmaking techniques. Barr's videos, such as "Slo Mo" (1996) and "The Long Dissolve" (1998), playfully critiqued contemporary life's hectic pace, urging viewers to pause and reflect. Transitioning from filmmaking to installations in the 1990s, Barr exhibited widely, including solo shows at prestigious institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA PS1. He often collaborated with notable figures in the art world, documenting New York City's vibrant artistic community.
Biography
Born: 1938, New York, New York
Died: 2016, New York, New York
Burt Barr was a boundary crossing artist, born in 1938 in New York, NY. Known for his use of traditional cinematic techniques to create simple but humorous videos. Characterized by minimal processes and presentations, use of the single take, 4:3 aspect ratio, and slow fade-ins and fade-outs, Barr’s work was the antithesis of most other contemporary video art. His works often punned, both verbally and visually, on conventions of filmmaking with videos like Slo Mo (1996), featuring a turtle moving in slow motion, and The Long Dissolve (1998), showing an ice cube slowly dissolving in a glass dish. They play on the absurdity of contemporary life's rapid pace, and beg us to slow down, to take a breather in the midst of our frenetic days.
Burt Barr began making videos in the mid-1980s. These early works were shown at film festivals in Montreal, Berlin, Toronto, San Sebastian, Melbourne, and Rotterdam, as well as on PBS. In 1993 he made the transition to the installation works that have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide including solo presentations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul. He claimed that "black and white are the only two colors I'll ever need."
From early in his career, Barr worked with personalities of the art world, many of them actors in various roles. Included in this group are Clarissa Dalrymple, Klaus Kertess, Dorothy Lichtenstein, Trisha Brown (his wife), Robert Rauschenberg, Elizabeth Murray, Cecily Brown, Billy Sullivan, Jessica Craig-Martin, Nessia Pope, Stephen Mueller, Carroll Dunham, Teresita Fernandez, Tim Davis, Ester Partegas, and “downtown” performers such as Willem DaFoe, Diane Madden, Lance Gries, Stephen Petronio, Jodi Melnick, Stanford Makishi, Jimena Paz, Roz LeBlanc, Mindy Myers, and Judith Sanchez-Ruiz. Working with these artists formed yet another dimension to the work—that of documentation of the art community during a particular time in New York City.
Artwork
Summer
$1,700
The Gun and The Dog
$1,800
