The Event Horizon

Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1997. Text: English. 184 p.; ill.; 16x22 cm. Book design by Luc Derycke. Michael Tarantino, who has died (2003) of cancer at the age of 55, was one of the best, and most creative, curators of contemporary art, with a career that encompassed work in Boston, Brussels, Oxford and across the continent. Born in New Jersey, he held an MA in cinema studies from New York University, and his career in America, before he moved to Belgium in 1988 was impressive. As director of the new works programme for the Massachusetts council for the arts, in Boston in the 1980s, he commissioned and produced more than 200 projects, working not just with visual artists like Judith Barry and Antoni Muntadas, but also with the Wooster Group experimental theatre company, composer John Adams and with Robert Wilson, whose mammoth The Civil Wars he commissioned for the American Repertory Theatre. He was a pioneering supporter of artists' video and film installations, at a time when many institutions did not know how to deal with this emerging form. Tarantino became more widely known in Britain when, in 1998, he was made head of exhibitions at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art. Among other exhibitions, he curated shows about the relationship between architecture, gardens and landscape (Enclosed & Enchanted), and about the influence of Alfred Hitchcock on contemporary art (Notorious). He was always fascinated by the links between art and film, and another exploration of the theme, So Faraway, So Close, pitched Jean-Luc Godard against Ed Ruscha, Jeff Wall against Dennis Hopper. His ability to make unexpected conjunctions - setting up startling juxtapositions which shed new light on their works - meant that artists were as keen to have him curate their monographic exhibitions as to take part in his thematic group shows. Michael Tarantino, curator and writer, born May 27 1948; died November 28 2003. "The Event Horizon is an exhibition about narrative, landscape and cultural identity. The title is taken from an essay by Michelangelo Antonioni, where the filmmaker sets out his ideas concerning the ways in which we may construct a narrative. For Antonioni, to describe an event is to be at the edge of the horizon, always ready to shift into another register, another approach to the story. It is impossible to tell one tale without suggesting another. As an exhibition, The Event Horizon, started from the same premise: how do artists approach the question of narrative? What relationship does landscape have to the stories we tell? And how are our identities influenced by the ways in which those stories are told? " Artists: Michelangelo Antonioni, Marie-José Burki, Ann Veronica Janssens, Sam Taylor-Wood, Jean-Pierre Temmerman. Fine. Exhibition Catalogue. Hard Cover.