Judith Barry
→ Professors
January 16, 2025
6:30pm
In person at The Kitchen at Westbeth and Livestreamed at The Kitchen ON AIR
As part of thir current exhibition, Lines of Distribution, on view at The Kitchen at Westbeth, The Kitchen partners with Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) to present a screening of Two Moon July (1986)—a made-for-television “arts and entertainment special” directed by Tom Bowes and produced for The Kitchen by Carlota Schoolman. Lines of Distribution examines a subset of The Kitchen’s programmatic initiatives from the 1970s and 1980s—including television productions—that extended beyond the institution’s New York space to distribute the art forms it supported throughout the United States and abroad. The exhibition features a section of archival materials related to Two Moon July, alongside a new video work by artist Wong Kit Yi, which draws inspiration from the television special.
This public program marks a collaboration between two organizations with longstanding investments in artists’ television. It combines a screening of Two Moon July with a panel discussion on the broader field of artistic experiments with broadcast platforms in the 1980s, featuring artists Judith Barry and Kit Fitzgerald, along with writer and musician Johanna Fateman. The event celebrates the life and practice of Tom Bowes (1948–2024), who was on staff at The Kitchen for over five years before directing Two Moon July.
Two Moon July documents a dramatized day-in-the-life of The Kitchen, portraying the institution’s signature range of activities spanning video, music, dance, performance, and film in a style that merges aspects of a variety show and a documentary. The special is one of several artworks The Kitchen produced for broadcast in the 1980s, during a time when various art centers were experimenting with television as a mode of distribution that could present avant-garde art to wider audiences nationally and internationally.
Following a screening of the work, Barry and Fitzgerald will reflect on their respective engagements with television during this era. Examples discussed will include Barry’s 1989 essay “This is Not a Paradox,” which explores how video artists worked with broadcast media throughout the decade, and Fitzgerald’s works of video art that circulated over the airwaves, such as Olympic Fragments (made with John Sanborn, 1980), an excerpt of which appears in Two Moon July. In conversation with Fateman, the artists take up questions about the possibilities—and pitfalls—of television as a platform for artistic expression in the 1980s, while also considering the evolving relationship between art and mass media into the present day.