Martin Beck: Reality is Invisible

Episode 6: Reality is Invisible
In 1971 the experimental filmmaker Robert Fulton made the 16mm film Reality’s Invisible while teaching in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Through candid interviews with VES students, impromptu recordings of faculty lectures, and lingering shots on concrete surfaces and spaces around Le Corbusier’s architecture, Reality’s Invisible is a frenetic and visually lush, almost visceral, portrayal of academic life at the Carpenter Center. The intimate footage captures the pedagogical activities, intellectual ideas and political concerns occupying students and faculty involved in the nascent days of a new visual arts program and building at Harvard. Pushing the limits of filmmaking, Fulton’s images and sounds, edited and layered, collide into a “tone,” as he later described it, revealing the chaos, fluidity and motion at the Carpenter Center. Robert Fulton's films are in the collection of the Harvard Film Archive. 

Reality is Invisible is Martin Beck’s sixth episode in his ongoing exhibition Program. This multi-part episode includes the screening of a 16mm print of Reality’s Invisible, introduced by Beck on September 10. The screening, which follows the opening reception of the VES Visiting Faculty, 2015–16 exhibition, is a means to welcome returning students and faculty, inaugurating another academic year. This episode also incudes a digitization of Fulton’s film in order to produce a DVD edition that is given to students currently concentrating in Visual and Environmental Studies and graduate students in Film and Visual Studies.  A screen-printed poster and DVD package designed by James Goggin communicates about the film prior to its screening in September and thereafter.

Martin Beck

Martin Beck is an artist whose exhibitions and projects engages questions of historicity and authorship and often draws from the fields of architecture, design, and popular culture. Recent exhibitions include The thirty-sets do not constitute a sequence at 47 Canal, New York (2015), Approx. 13 Hours at castillo/corrales, Paris (2014); Last Night at Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland (2013); the particular way in which a thing exists at Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal (2012). Beck’s works were included in the 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014), the 29th São Paulo and the 4th Bucharest Biennales (2010).  He was co-curator of Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault at Museum der Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Culturgest, Lisbon; and Artists Space, New York (2013). His books include, About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe (2007), The Aspen Complex (2012), Last Night (2013), and Summer Winter East West (2015).