Songs of the 80's
Doug Hall
American, born 1944
1983
A five-part video work in which Doug Hall stages spare, surreal tableaux—a formally dressed man and a lone chair on a barren lakebed—to examine theatricality, alienation, and the constructedness of everyday scenes.
The sight arrests you with its emptiness: an endless cracked playa and low horizon punctuated by a startling white chair and a solitary suited figure whose elongated shadows and statuesque stillness turn the landscape into a mute stage.
By treating video as staged performance and cinematic mise-en-scène, Songs of the 80's expanded video art’s vocabulary toward narrative suggestion and conceptual theater, probing media, identity, and late-20th-century disconnection.
Medium
Five videos (color, sound)
Dimensions
15:53 min.
Classification
Department
Credit
Acquired through the generosity of Margot and John Ernst
Accession
557.1984.1-5
Palette
Exhibitions
