Reimagining the Object Record: SFMOMA’s MediaWiki

Behind the floor-to-ceiling glass wall that separates his book-filled office from the administrative spaces, Rudolf Frieling, Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), still entertains a little viewing station with a DVD and VHS player, connected to a 1990s CRT monitor. The colorfully cabled setup is a remnant of a time when artists and galleries sent VHS viewing copies directly to curators to promote their works. For curators, such a setup provided a practical and necessary portal to accessing their collection. Single-channel video works could easily be viewed or previewed in this way. However, more complex video installations are not as accessible. For instance, to stage Christian Marclay’s immersive four-channel installation Video Quartet (2002) for Frieling in 2012, media technicians at SFMOMA had to set up four synchronized DVD players and four monitors—the installation art’s cumbersome equivalent of pulling out the wire mesh art screen that houses a painting in storage. The four-channel video projection consists of a myriad of found footage segments and is, in and of itself, a musical composition, with the four channels of the work coming together like four different instruments playing in unison.