O'Neill's films enjoy a devoted following in the avant-garde film community, and the exhibit draws upon this renewed interest in independent films amongst younger people in the area, particularly art students and college students. The exhibit also clearly has an appeal for older individuals who remember the 1960's and might have a greater interest in O'Neill's paintings from a historical, reminiscent point-of-view.
However, because of the basic nature of the wall texts, the exhibition is clearly also intended as introduction to O'Neill, as well as purely as a retrospective of the artist's talents. Also, because the writings connected to the work of this artist stress his relationship to the dominant aesthetic movements of the Post-War era, in California, such as the Beats and the independent film movement, a layperson or a beginning student of art history could also enjoy the exhibit/
The content of the exhibition, particularly the films and interactive works, however, are designed to upset notions of art in such laypeople, as well as provide a seamless and...
The exhibition is clearly an experience, or intends to be, as well as is a museum piece. The website's highlighting of O'Neil's most recent film, the Decay of Fiction (2002), where "O'Neill utilizes a computer to accurately record the position and movement of a film camera through the course of a take, resulting in evocative overlapping of ghostly images in a tandem dance with scenes from the present and whose techniques anticipated technological innovations before their time," underlines the predominance of process in this artist's work. The website, like the design of the exhibit, and the interactive nature of the exhibit, and the freedom the gazer has to experience the artist's works as he or she chooses to, when he chooses to, stresses the personal nature of the artistic process and its lack of linear discourse in its most fundamental forms.
Works Cited
SMMoma Website. (2004) "Pat O'Neill: Views from Lookout Mountain" Retrieved October 25, 2004 at http://smmoa.org/site/exhibits/onViewNow.html
