Stuart Bender
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The Earlier Known
Seven Prophecies
Induction
#4 - The Day Of Judgement
Seven Prophecies combines digital video effects, original video imagery, and computer generated electronic music with seven operatically sung prophecies (taken from throughout the past three millennia), fragmented spoken narratives, and newsreel footage from decades past.
Inspired by the ancient Delphic oracle, the audience passes through a maze of corridors, arriving in a darkened chamber. Here they may choose from seven video segments to screen by selecting buttons set into an altar-like railing, which separates the viewer from the projected video.
As one critic wrote, "...Seven Prophecies defiantly collapses past and future, memory and augury, into intersecting planes of co-existence. The undulations of sound and image intimate new levels of perception and audience activity."
The installation was originally commissioned and exhibited by the Long Beach Museum of Art in California in 1990. The video has since been on German television (Sudwestfunk 3) and included in the Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, the Bonn Videonale in Germany, and the Dallas Film and Video Festival in Texas. In 1997-1998, the installation was exhibited at the Barnsdall Municipal Art Gallery in Los Angeles as part of the exhibition "Allegorical Revisions."
| - - Catalog - - | | - - Artweek Review (1990) - - |
Press
ALLEGORICAL RE/VISIONSDecember 8 - 14, 1997
LA Weekly
Art Pick
by Peter Frank
Until recently, allegory, the extension of metaphor into narrative (notably narrative whose meaning is recognized as a ritual of social and psychological convention), has been relegated to popular arts like movies and novels. But these are postmodern times, so fine art, too, can be allegorically driven.
The work in "Allegorical Re/Visions" actually adds one more layer to the mix, that of the historical - the history-book historical and the nostalgic historical. Charles Garabedian is represented here, of course, as is Ruth Weisberg (who helped thematize the exhibition) and John Frame.
The other artists included are less well-known as out-and-out allegorists, but damned if not every one reveals him- or herself as a riveting, beguiling teller of tales. Terry Braunstein's pictorial collages, here combined with 3-D objects, have never seemed more profound, nor have Weekly staffer Tom Knechtel's intricately drawn multilayered fantasies. The aura of oddness hovering about Wes Christensen's tiny drawings of domestic scenes can now be understood as an aura of ulterior significance, and Ken Gonzales-Day's Recovered Pages From the Bone-grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River evolves well beyond artful montage into fanciful but eerily credible historicity.
Carole Caroompas, Charlene Roth, Ron Rizk, Kerry James Marshall (the one ex-Angeleno), and the team of John and Toti M. O'Brien and Steve Roden also contribute importantly, but the show's pièce de résistance is the interactive multipartite video projection, Seven Prophecies, of Stuart Bender and Angelo Funicelli - a riveting stretch of multimedia whose scope as well as content is nothing short of operatic.