Smart Art Press

INK JET PRINTS WITH LAMINATION
EACH PRINT IN AN EDITION OF 3
PUBLISHED BY SMART ART PRESS/TRACK 16 GALLERY

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE is a collage of five previously existing ethnographic films of the Yanomami Indian Tribe in the Amazon, shot by Napoleon Chagnon and Timothy Asch in the early 1970s. An accompanying exhibition of manipulated images from the film can be seen behind the black curtains in the back of the main gallery space. Each image is an edition of 3, signed and numbered by the artist, published by Smart Art Press and available for purchase.

The images are stills from Chris Wilder’s video, “When Worlds Collide” that have been manipulated by him.

The original five films by Chagnon and Asch are both iconic and academic. Having been broadcast on public television over a twenty-year period made these among the most-viewed anthropological films to date, exposing the tribes and the discipline of anthropology to a large cross-section of the public who might otherwise not be exposed.

The films epitomize one of the fiercest arguments in current anthropology: Chagnon viewed the films as “field notes” or scientifically accurate documentation of tribal life, as opposed to Asch (a trained photographer who studied under masters such as Manor White, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams), who viewed them as visual representations of edited/curated images, and as such, inherently subjective. This conflict has been perpetuated and exacerbated by books such as “Darkness in El Dorado” by Patrick Tierney; the completion (and drastic revision) by Chagnon of Asch’s educational, interactive CD-ROM featuring “The Ax Fight;” and the exhibition of stills scandalously appropriated (without attribution) from the films by German conceptualist Lothar Baumgartner and their screening as art films at MoMA as recently as 2002.

$2,500 each
$12,000 for the set of six

44×58.5 inches, 2007

Exhibition Link