Willoughby Sharp

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Willoughby Sharp (b. 1936, New York City), the co-founder, with writer/filmmaker Liza Bear, of Avalanche magazine (1970-1976), is an internationally known artist, curator, gallerist, teacher, author, and telecom activist.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Sharp began his media work in 1967 by shooting a small number of films in 8mm, Super 8mm, and 16mm including “Earth,” (1968, Collection: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and “Place & Process,” (1969, Collection: MoMA, New York). After these films, he started producing a prodigious body of video works in 1/2, 3/4 and 1-inch tape. These works included video sculpture, video installations, “Videoviews,” (1970-1974), Videoperformances (1973-1977), cable television programs (1985-1986), and broadcast TV programs (2001-).

In February 1969, at the invitation of Hans Haacke, he presented a three-part video installation, “Earthscopes,” at Cooper Union, N.Y., which included the only showing of a video catalogue of the historic “Earth Art” exhibition that he had curated at the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. In March 1969, Sharp created “Einstein’s Eye,” a closed-circuit b/w video sculpture exhibited at the Richard L. Feigen Gallery in Soho, N.Y.

The following year, Sharp’s film “Place and Process” was included in MoMA’s “INFORMATION” exhibition curated by Kynaston McShine. Also in 1970, Sharp curated “Body Works,” the first video traveling show with works by Vito Acconci, Terry Fox, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, Dennis Oppenheim and William Wegman which was presented at the Museum of Conceptual Art, San Francisco, California.

At the San Jose State TV studios in 1970, Sharp began the “Videoviews” series of videotaped dialogues with artists which he continued after he bought one of the first Sony 3400 Porta-Pac video recording systems in 1972. The “Videoviews” series consists of Sharps’ dialogues with Bruce Nauman (1970), Joseph Beuys (1972), Vito Acconci (1973), Chris Burden (1973), Lowell Darling (1974), and Dennis Oppenheim (1974). More recently, working with ARTENGINE, N.Y., a collaborative video production/post-production company in partnership with Duff Schweninger, Mr. Sharp has produced an ongoing series of 30-minute documentary programs on Dennis Oppenheim (2001), Keith Sonnier (2002), Earle Brown (2002), and Morton Subotnick (2003).

In 1976, under an NEA grant to Center for New Art Activities, Inc., he co-produced [with Liza Bear] “Five Video Pioneers: Acconci, Serra, Sharp, Sonnier, Wegman” (Collection: MoMA, N.Y.). That year he also represented the United States in the Venice Biennale.

Shortly afterward, Sharp started to produce a series of international, multi-casting, pre-Internet projects which simultaneously interlaced information from computers, telefax, In September 1977, he participated in Send/Receive Satellite Network: Phase II, co-produced and directed by Keith Sonnier and Liza Bear in collaboration with a group of San Francisco and New York artists; this was the first trans-continental interactivesatellite work made by artists. His participation in Send/Receive in part led to Sharp’s current preoccupation with global collaborative work through a series of interactive telecommunications and streaming transmissions. This ongoing series of projects honors the accomplishments of electrical geniuses Guiliermo Marconi (1981), Heinrich Hertz (1986) and Nikola Tesla (2005-2006).

Since 1969, Sharp has had more than 20 solo exhibitions at museums, and art galleries such as: Brown University; the University Art Museum, Berkeley, California; The Museum of Conceptual Art, San Francisco; CAYA, Buenos Aires, Argentina; the University of Iowa; the Ontario College of Art, Toronto; the University of California, Los Angeles; the Vancouver Art Gallery, and Pumps Gallery, Vancouver. His work has also been seen in many group shows in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia.

[edit] Magazine Contributions

Sharp has been the contributing editor to four publications: Impulse magazine, Toronto, Canada (1979-1981); Video magazine, San Francisco (1980-1982); Art Com, San Francisco (1984-1985), and the East Village Eye, N.Y. (1984-1986). He has published three monographs on contemporary artists, contributed to many exhibition catalogues and has written articles, essays, and interviews featured in ARTFORUM, Art In America, Arts magazine, Avalanche magazine, the Leica Journal, Quadrum, and Studio International.

[edit] Education

Before completing his education at Brown University, the University of Paris, the University of Lausanne, and Columbia University (where he was a doctoral candidate in art history under Professor Meyer Shapiro), he worked at IBM World Trade, New York. In 1975 he received an honorary Ph. D. from Milton College, Milton, Wisconsin.

[edit] Teaching Career

Mr. Sharp has taught on the faculties of the School of Visual Arts, Humanities and Science Department (1984-1988); the University of Rhode Island, Kingston, where he was also the director of the Fine Arts Center (1988-1990); and the New School University, Parsons The New School for Design, Graduate Faculty, Digital Design Department, N.Y. (2000-2003). For the last 38 years he has been a visiting artist at numerous art institutions and he has shown his video in museums in the U.S. and abroad.

[edit] Collaboration with Joseph Beuys

Sharp met Joseph Beuys in Dusseldorf in 1958. From then until Beuy’s death in 1986, they had a close, collaborative relationship. Sharp was instrumental in bringing Beuys’ work to the attention of the American art world. Starting with an ARTFORUM interview (December, 1969), he also featured Beuys in the first issue of Avalanche magazine (1970). Then in 1972, Sharp produced the Beuys “Videoview” which constituted Beuys’ first solo show in New York at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Inc., N.Y. He also produced “Public Dialogue” in which Beuys performed as part of Mr. Sharp’s “Videoperformance” exhibition in 1974. In 1974, at Beuys’ request, Sharp videotaped “I Like America, America Likes Me” his performance at the Rene Block Gallery, New York, which has recently been released as “America” (1974-2003). In 1979, Beuys invited Sharp to curate the film/video sections of his retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

[edit] Accolades

Sharp has received numerous grants, awards and fellowships both as an individual or as the Executive Director of the three non-profit arts organizations that he has founded

  1. The Center for New Art Activities, Inc. N.Y.
  2. The Franklin Street Arts Center, Inc. New York
  3. WORLDPOOL, Toronto, Canada


[edit] Museum Collections

His video and film works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, N.Y.; ZKM (Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe, Germany; The Collection of the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Rhode Island School of Design, Rhode Island; the National Art Gallery, Ottawa, Canada; The Western Front, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, as well as many private collections worldwide.

[edit] Body of Work

  • Joseph Beuys' America (1974-2003) 12 min
  • Earle Brown By Artengine, New York (2002) 28 min
  • Dennis Oppenheim By Artengine, New York (2001) 28 min
  • Keith Sonnier By Artengine, New York (2002) 28 min
  • Who Killed Heinrich Hertz? (1986-1987) 20 min
  • Willoughby Sharp's Downtown New York (1986) 58 min
  • Art And Telecommunications (1983) 60 min
  • The Space Shuttle Is A Robot (1983) 20 min
  • Willoughby Sharp's Beta 1: DBS (1982) 20 min
  • Five Video Pioneers: Acconci, Serra, Sharp, Sonnier & Wegman (1977) 30 min
  • Two-Way Demo(1977) 20 min
  • Willoughby Sharp Videoviews Chris Burden (1975) 27:45 min
  • Art Stars in Hollywood: The Decadence (with Chip Lord and Megan Williams) (1974) 60 min
  • Art Stars Interviews (with Chip Lord and Megan Williams) (1974) 60 min
  • Joseph Beuys' Public Dialogue (1974) 120 min
  • Willoughby Sharp's Videoperformances (1973-1974) 58 min
  • Chris Burden Videoview (1973) 30 min
  • Joseph Beuys Videoview (1973) 30 min
  • Vito Acconci Videoview(1973) 30 min

Credited as Actor

  • I Was a Quality of Life Violation (2004) .... Cop
  • Whoregasm (1988)
  • Police State (1987) .... Sergeant Wojynski

Source: http://www.imdb.com

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