In 1910, Russian art collector Sergei Shchukin commissioned French painter Henri Matisse to create for his home a pair of large-scale paintings representing music and dance.
The resulting depiction of five exuberant female dancers, a final work for Shchukin and a preliminary version now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, have become icons of early modern art.
But these images of dance are hardly isolated examples in the history of art. As far back as the Greeks and probably before, artists have been intrigued by the beauty, form and energy of bodies moving through space.
And that fascination continues to the present, as an energizing exhibit – if one that sometimes challenges your equilibrium – at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver makes abundantly clear. It runs through Jan. 8.
Titled “Truss Thrust: The Artifice of Space,” it presents six video installations that examine dance – both loosely and tightly defined – in strikingly innovative and thought-provoking ways.
Although previous offerings at the museum have incorporated video art, most of the selections functioned in a more limited and traditional way – usually shown on a television monitor or projected in a kind of screening room.
In contrast, these pieces, which are presented as more unconventional and largely site-specific installations, explore the very nature of the medium and probe the ways viewers perceive and interact with artworks.
Given the fundamental importance of video (the old term continues to be used though DVD technology is now the norm) in today’s art world, the museum’s engagement with these vanguard, experimental works goes far in cementing its bona fides as a relevant contemporary art center.
If animals were the subjects of the ancient cave drawings of Lascaux, the human form was surely not far behind. This only makes sense, considering that we are endlessly probing our natures as human beings and looking at each other.
More than just the form of the body, artists also have been interested in how it moves. Eadweard Muybridge, for example, undertook a series of now-celebrated photographic investigations of movement – first of horses and later human beings – in the late 19th century.
And, of course, any consideration of movement naturally leads to dance, since it is, at its essence, organized movement, and hundreds if not thousands of artists have recorded their impressions of the art form.
Virtually all of them, of course, are static representations, and that is what makes this latest exhibition so compelling: These internationally recognized artists use one kinetic art form to engage another.
Nowhere is that interaction of art and dance more evident than in two studies for the five-screen video installation, “Whenever On On On Nohow On,” which was shown through Oct. 30 at the Renaissance Society in Chicago.
This work and the studies by Berlin-based sculptor Peter Welz are among several collaborative projects he has undertaken with William Forsythe, a renowned American choreographer who directed Ballett Frankfurt for 20 years and now leads his own company in Germany.
In “airdrawing II/front/hand in study/movement of the right hand,” Welz began with a video of a short solo dance performance by Forsythe. Then, projecting it onto a sheet of paper, the artist painstakingly traced the movement of the choreographer’s right hand.
By projecting the video at the museum onto the resulting mass of lines, the viewer can see the unfolding interrelationship of the hands of the artist and dancer in a direct and probably unprecedented way.
To add yet another dimension to this piece, the drawing is accompanied by an adjacent video, which was created with the attachment of a tiny camera to the same right hand, offering a dizzying view of its arcs and swoops.
On display nearby is Welz’s “the fall,” an installation showing dancers falling. Filmed from underneath a glass floor, we see the dancers begin to lean and then suddenly tumble downward.
This piece would be jarring however it was shown, but it is enhanced by Welz’s engulfing presentation. He has created a kind of small room in which the essentially life-size projections are projected onto two walls, thus seeming to fall outward toward the viewer.
Sergio Prego, a Spanish artist living in Brooklyn, N.Y., also has been influenced by dance, but, in his case, not an actual work he experienced but the now-iconic black-and-white photos of Trisha Brown’s 1970 architectural explorations of SoHo.
Taking dance out of the theater and into the streets and radically rethinking what movements could be used in a work, Brown created choreography for the rooftops and walls of SoHo’s historic structures, none more famous than “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building.”
Drawing more than 30 years later on that work as well as such other sources as George Lucas’ sci-fi film, “THX 1138,” Prego has created his own groundbreaking exploration of architecture and movement in a video installation simply titled “ANTI.”
By strapping themselves onto a special track that runs along the top of the walls of some anonymous warehouse, the video’s two participants essentially walk on the walls. With the camera placed on angle with them, the illusion becomes almost real, as walls seem to turn into floors and ceilings.
What results is an eerie, disorienting video that embodies the exhibition’s subtitle, “The Artifice of Space.” The work is helped by its projection here at the end of a long, narrow room that echoes the spaces in the video.
Rounding out “Truss Thrust” are Prego’s “Cowboy Inertia Creep,” a kind of stop-action romp through a city defying normal and physical laws, and the Blue Noses Group’s “Little Men,” a set of projections onto flattened cardboard boxes on the floor.
Together, these six works offer a daring new take on video art that rethinks the relationship between dance and art and challenges the way we see, experience and understand the world around us.
They transform “contemporary” from merely a word in the museum’s name into an exciting, tangible reality.
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-820-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
