Somebody Hit the Lights

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More About

• Bruce McClure
• Brooklyn (New York City)
• Whitney Museum of American Art

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Bruce McClure isn't a filmmaker so much as a conjurer and a catalyst. Every McClure show — or "projector performance" — is a hands-on creation devised and revised for a unique crowd and not a rote screening of obsessively crafted celluloid. The New Yorker, who trained as an architect before gravitating to the comparatively uncrowded field of "improvisational lightworks" (a highbrow term we just coined, and which McClure would reject), sets up a row of customized projectors through which he funnels and filters light and the occasional loop of spliced, stressed film. His aim is to induce a state of disorientation, through mechanically generated visual effects, that approaches vertigo. The modified metal projectors generate a trippy soundtrack, and the artist himself typically makes his voice heard in the room — hopefully he'll do so tonight at "Walls of Sound: Projector Performances by Bruce McClure." "I usually have things to say that don't necessarily have anything to do with the film," McClure told The Brooklyn Rail last year. "I'm creating a haze, you could say, to replace that cigarette haze that was once a part of theaters." You have to like a guy who's so firmly anchored in the tactile, predigital world. At the same time, McClure is anything but a Luddite or a primitive. As his inclusion in the Whitney Biennial confirmed, he's a one-of-a-kind artist.
Thu., Oct. 25, 7:30 p.m.; Fri., Oct. 26, 7:30 p.m., 2007