Ericka Beckman is an American contemporary visual artist and filmmaker.Taubin, Amy. "Fairytales of New York: Amy Taubin on Ericka Beckman," Artforum, April 1, 2011. Retrieved January 15, 2025.McQuaid, Cate. "Fairy tales, video games, and hard labor in this artist's hallucinatory films," The Boston Globe, July 17, 2019. She came to prominence in the 1970s as part of the Pictures Generation, a group of American conceptual artists who appropriated popular culture imagery for the purpose of cultural critique.Harbison, Isobel. "Image Games: Ericka Beckman," Tate, 2013. Retrieved January 15, 2025.Beeson, John. "Ericka Beckman at Kunsthalle Bern," Artforum, November 2013, p. 304-305. Retrieved January 15, 2025.Eklund, Douglas. The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009. Retrieved January 14, 2025. Beckman's practice has focused on the potential for cultural transformation and individual agency through the exposition and subversion of dominant ideologies in media.Bier, Arielle. "Ericka Beckman," Artforum, October 6, 2015. Retrieved January 15, 2025.Watlington, Emily. "At Performa, Ericka Beckman Offers an Anti-Capitalist Musical Adaptation of Jack and the Beanstalk," ARTnews, October 29, 2021.Reynolds, Pamela. "In 'Double Reverse' At The MIT List, Ericka Beckman Focuses Her Lens On The Game," WBUR, May 21, 2019. Retrieved January 14, 2025. Her film and video works adopt game and fairytale tropes as structuring device, employing hand-made sets that suggest playing fields together with protagonists (or "players"), whose rule-based actions are choreographed to the rhythms of musical scores and incantations.Stefan, Olga. "Ericka Beckman," Art in America, September 3, 2013. Retrieved January 14, 2025.Sung, Victoria. "Game On: Ericka Beckman's You The Better." Walker Art Center Magazine, October 18, 2016. Retrieved January 14, 2025. Now considered prescient, her work has marked the rising influence and effects of video gaming and digital image-production on psychological development and social life.Carrigan, Margaret. "What Can Fairy Tales Tell Us About Today? Two Video Artists Offer Modern Takes," New York Observer, June 5, 2018.Taft, Catherine. "Ericka Beckman," Artforum, May 2016. Retrieved January 15, 2025.Schwendenwien, Jude. "Ericka Beckman," Artforum, October 1988. Retrieved January 14, 2025. In a review of Beckman's first US retrospective, Margaret Carrigan wrote, "Beckman has centered her video work on the visual language of games, fairytales, and folklore. While these might be sources of childhood fun, Beckman is not playing around: her dark, techno-futuristic films and installations use these tropes to question role-play, gender and identity, as well as issues surrounding late-capitalist systems of power and control."Carrigan, Margaret. "Beckman Gives Patriarchal Canon a Bashing," The Art Newspaper, May 30, 2019.
Beckman's work belongs to the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),Museum of Modern Art. Ericka Beckman, Artists. Retrieved January 14, 2025. Metropolitan Museum of Art,Metropolitan Museum of Art. You The Better, Ericka Beckman, Collection. Retrieved January 14, 2025. Centre Georges Pompidou,Centre Pompidou. Ericka Beckman, Artworks. Retrieved January 15, 2025. Whitney Museum,Whitney Museum of American Art. Ericka Beckman, Artists. Retrieved January 14, 2025. The Broad,The Broad. Collection: Ericka Beckman + Matt Mullican, Events, 2017. Retrieved January 15, 2025. and Walker Art Center,Walker Art Center. Ericka Beckman, Artists. Retrieved January 14, 2025. among others. She has exhibited or screened work at those institutions,Cotter, Holland. "At the Met, Baby Boomers Leap Onstage," The New York Times, April 23, 2009. Retrieved January 14, 2025.Centre Pompidou. Ericka Beckman, Events. Retrieved January 15, 2025. as well as at Mumok (Vienna),Mumok. "Reach Capacity: Ericka Beckman," Cinema. Retrieved January 14, 2025. Tate Modern, Los Angeles County Museum of Art,Eckardt, Steph. "A Visual Appreciation of Fine Artists Appropriating Commercial Photography," W Magazine, September 5, 2022. Retrieved January 15, 2025. the Mori Art Museum (Tokyo),Mori Art Museum "20th Anniversary Exhibition World Classroom: Contemporary Art through School Subjects," Exhibitions. Retrieved January 14, 2025. and Drawing Center.The Drawing Center. "Ericka Beckman: Power of the Spin," Exhibitions, 2025. Retrieved January 15, 2025. Beckman lives and works in New York City and is a professor emeritus of film and video at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.Martin, Heather. "Ericka Beckman: Double Reverse," Art New England, July/August 2019.Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Ericka Beckman, Professor, MassArt Film/Video. Retrieved January 15, 2025.
Early life and career Beckman was born in Hampstead, New York.Kunsthalle Bern. "Ericka Beckman: Works 1978–2012," Exhibitions. Retrieved January 14, 2025. She studied at the School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis (BFA, 1974) and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York in 1975, before relocating to attend CalArts (California Institute of the Arts). At CalArts—then building a reputation for a rigorous, theory-based curriculum under the conceptualist leadership of John Baldessari—she shifted her focus to filmmaking and performance, earning an MFA in 1976.Banes, Sally. "Imagination and Play: The Films of Ericka Beckman," Millennium Film Journal, No. 13, 1984. After graduating, Beckman moved to New York along with fellow alumni such as Jack Goldstein, David Salle, Matt Mullican and James Welling, where they individually pursued artmaking that addressed an image-saturated culture and became identified, collectively, as part of the Pictures Generation.
Work and reception Beckman is known for her films that explore game-play as a means of elucidating social issues.Epps, Philomena. "The Mechanism of Mythology," Roman Road Journal, April 2018.Spooner, Cally. "Top Ten," Artforum, May 2015. Retrieved January 15, 2025. The games involved vary by type—some resemble video games while others evoke casino games, board games and sports—and are largely concerned with questions of power, specifically its entrenchment and redistribution in social systems.Shaw, Shelby. "Ericka Beckman with Shelby Shaw," The Brooklyn Rail, December 2018. Retrieved January 15, 2025. Other subjects include agency, technology, gender, capitalism, ethics and knowledge.Dika, Vera. "A Feminist Fairy Tale," Art in America, April 1987. According to Boston Globe critic Cate McQuaid, "Beckman models her incantatory, hallucinogenic films on the ritualistic repetitions of games and hard labor. She draws on fairy tales and uses percussive, throbbing music. Woven together, these structures offer a desperate, frenzied model of life in a society driven by work, production, and the almighty dollar." Characters from childhood stories and media, such as "Cinderella," "Jack and the Beanstalk" and Pokémon, have been featured in Beckman's films.
The films are noted for their complex use of layering as a compositional principle.Harbison, Isobel. "Image Games," Frieze, October 2012. Retrieved January 14, 2025.Rickey, Carrie. "Popcorn and Canvas," Artforum, December 1983, p. 64–69. Retrieved January 14, 2025. Beckman superimposes images, uses plays on words to create double meanings, and juxtaposes a bright, pop-art aesthetic with psychologically dark underlying themes in a manner that ARTnews described as "cheery but biting." Rhythmic temporal patterns are prominent in the work's sound and pacing, repetitive actions and chanting in concert with a kinetic, nonlinear style of editing. Much of the work is filmed in black box-style theaters, which lends itself to superimposition and allows for scenes that lack a horizon line, suggesting representational ambiguity.Hoberman, J. "The Mild Bunch," The Village Voice, September 16, 1986, p. 80.
Beckman's works develop an internal system of symbols which critics have likened to filmic language. Her use of symbolism, disjointed editing and black field backgrounds create what observers describe as "dreamlike" narratives, referencing reality but in a heavily abstracted form. Interactivity is regarded as a key quality in her oeuvre with considerations of audience engagement being central to her strategic use of games as a structuring device and sound, her editing style and the layout of her exhibitions.Larios, Pablo. "Ericka Beckman: The Game Changer," Frieze, March 26, 2018. Retrieved January 15, 2025. Beckman's process is considered labor-intensive for its extensive use of preliminary drawings, hand-made props, hand-drawn animation and manual manipulation of imagery, all done by the artist. She is known to conduct in-depth research for films prior to their creation, for example at NASA's Ames Research Center for her 1999 film Hiatus, and has also acted in her own works.
Critics consider Beckman's work to be rooted in surrealism and structuralism. The artist has cited child psychologist Jean Piaget, conceptualist John Cage, and artists Vito Acconci and Yvonne Rainer as creative influences.Hoberman, J. ""Cinema Gamer: Ericka Beckman," Mousse Magazine, January 6, 2013. Retrieved January 14, 2025.Smithsonian Archives of American Art. "Oral history interview with Ericka Beckman," Collections, 2022. Retrieved January 15, 2025. Her work is often compared and contrasted with contemporary artists such as Cindy Sherman, Dara Birnbaum, Robert Longo and Joan Jonas.Watlington, Emily. "Women and Media, Then and Now: Ericka Beckman, Dara Birnbaum, Lynn Hershman Leeson," Mousse Magazine, Issue 64, 2018.
Early films After reading Piaget's Genetic Epistemology, Beckman began creating her experimental "Super-8 Trilogy," which includes We Imitate; We Break Up (1978), The Broken Rule (1979) and Out of Hand (1980).Hoberman, J. "Explorations: Low tech, high art," American Film, (5), 1980, p. 13–14, 66.Bovier, Lionel, Clément Dirié and Douglas Eklund. Ericka Beckman. The Super-8 Trilogy, 1978-1981, JRP Ringie, 2013. It featured a rotating cast of performers—Beckman and artists including James Casebere, Mike Kelley and Matt Mullican—and combined childhood dream recollections, cognitive development ideas and narrative structures related to games and folklore.Los Angeles Film Forum. Ericka Beckman, 2014. Retrieved January 15, 2025. Characterized by elaborately choreographed performances, labor-intensive hand-altered animation, crude sets and chantlike music, the films evoked a fragmented, ambiguous experience.Carroll, Noel. Interpreting the Moving Image, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Retrieved January 14, 2025.