Artist(s): Joan Logue
Date: June 8, 1982
Joan Logue extends the act of looking into real time with her 30 second Portraits featured at The Kitchen in 1998. This project started in 1971 and it summed over 400 videos, establishing the first electronic gallery at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Her 30 Second Portraits hold the camera steady on a subject in silence, allowing subtle gestures, hesitation, and presence to unfold. In a press release for The Kitchen, she said "I consider myself a traditional portrait artist working in the medium of video. Video portraits take the next step in portraiture: taking the idea of 'frozen time' and giving way to 'real time', both the viewer and the subject are confronted with their own lived time. The beauty of these portraits is that they reveal what words cannot describe about their subject and it is exactly the intensity of seeing and being seen in this manner that interests me.”
Logue’s video piece featured a selection of over twenty New York performance artists, composers, dancers and writers, including John Cage, Laurie Anderson, Bill T. Jones, Joan Jonas, Philip Glass, Nam June Paik, Lucinda Childs, Meredith Monk, Robert Ashley, Spalding Gray, George Lewis, Max Neuhaus, Charlemagne Palestine, Liz Phillips, Yoshi Wada, Arnie Zane, Carlos Santos, Mary Anne Amacher, Tony Ramos, Richard Teitelbaum and Alvin Lucier.