Join scholar Bruce Jenkins, professor of film, video, new media, and animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, for a talk punctuated with 16mm film clips.

“This talk reflects on a single year that commences in February 1988 with my first encounter with Marcel Broodthaers’s films, which were stored in the basement of the family home in Brussels, and my episodic viewing of these works in an editing suite at the Royal Belgian Film Archive,” says Jenkins. “It concludes rather felicitously in February 1989, when Maria Gilissen and I traveled from Brussels to Berlin for the opening night of the Forum section of the Berlin International Film Festival—the Berlinale—devoted entirely to the long unseen films of Marcel Broodthaers. The critical success of that festival program set in motion a process that would eventually result in a catalogue raissoné devoted to the artist’s filmmaking and a deepening awareness of the centrality of cinema to Broodthaers’s artistic career.”

About the Speaker

Prior to coming to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Jenkins was the Stanley Cavell Curator at the Harvard Film Archive. He served for 14 years as the curator of film/video at the Walker Art Center, where he organized major film retrospectives and worked on exhibitions devoted to Marcel Broodthaers, Bruce Conner, Chantal Akerman, and the Fluxus Group. Jenkins contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues for such museums as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Centre Georges Pompidou; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Jenkins has also authored a book-length study on the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, edited a volume of writings by Hollis Frampton for MIT Press, and written the main essay for Ediciones Poligrafa’s recent catalogue on Michael Snow. He is currently at work coauthoring the catalogue raisonné of Andy Warhol’s films for the Whitney Museum and Yale University Press.