Judith Barry (born 1954) is an American multimedia artist, writer and educator.McQuaid, Cate. "A Multimedia Artist Attuned to the Zeitgeist," The Boston Globe, January 26, 2018. Retrieved May 22, 2024.Barry, Judith. Public Fantasy. An anthology of critical essays, fictions and project descriptions by Judith Barry, London: ICA, Iwona Blaszwick (ed.), 1991. Retrieved May 27, 2024.Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Judith Barry, Professor, Faculty. Retrieved May 21, 2024. Art critics regard her as a pioneer in performance art, video, electronic media and installation art who has contributed significantly to feminist theories of subjectivity and the exploration of public constructions of gender and identity.Wallis, Brian. "Judith Barry and the Space of Fantasy," in Projections: mise-en-abyme, Brian Wallis and Judith Barry, Vancouver: Presentation House, 1998.Pagel, David. "Entering a Dream State with Judith Barry's Video Installations," Los Angeles Times, December 22, 2000. Retrieved May 22, 2024.Sangster, Gary. "Articulate Spatial Projections: The Scope of Judith Barry's Video Installation," 8th Cairo Biennale, Baltimore, MD: The Contemporary Museum Baltimore, 2001.Morinis, Leora. "Judith Barry," Hammer Museum, Artists. Retrieved May 21, 2024. Her work draws on a diverse background, which includes studies in critical theory and cinema, dance, and training in architecture, design and computer graphics.Draxler, Helmut. "Ambivalence and Actualization: Judith Barry's Exhibition Design and Artistic Practice," in Judith Barry: Body without Limits, Helmut Draxler, Kate Linker and Javier Panera, Spain: Fundación Salamanca Ciudad de Cultura, 2009. Rather than employ a signature style, Barry combines multiple disciplines and mediums in immersive, research-based works whose common methodology calls into question technologies of representation and the spatial languages of film, urbanism and the art experience.Linker, Kate. "Cinema and Space(s) in the Art of Judith Barry," in Judith Barry: Body without Limits, Helmut Draxler, Kate Linker and Javier Panera, Spain: Fundación Salamanca Ciudad de Cultura, 2009.Drucker, Johanna. "Spectacle & Subjectivity," Artscribe, March-April 1991.Horvat, Katja. "In Conversation with Judith Barry," Inter/View, 2017. Critic Kate Linker wrote, "Barry has examined the effects and ideological functions of images in and on society. Her installations and writings … have charted the transformation of representation by different 'machines' of image production, from the spatial ensembles of theater to computer and electronic technologies."
Barry's work belongs to the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),Museum of Modern Art. Judith Barry, Artists. Retrieved May 21, 2024. Centre Pompidou,Centre Pompidou. Judith Barry, Space Invaders, Artists. Retrieved May 21, 2024. MACBA (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona)Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Judith Barry, Artists. Retrieved May 21, 2024. MUMOK (Austria),Mumok. Judith Barry, Voice Off, Collection. Retrieved May 21, 2024. and KANAL - Centre Pompidou, among others. She has exhibited at MoMA,Grundberg, Andy. "Judith Barry," The New York Times, May 16, 1986. Retrieved May 21, 2024. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,Brougher, Kerry and Russell Ferguson (eds). Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996. Retrieved May 27, 2024. Institute of Contemporary Arts (London),Wolff, Isabel. "Underground art," The Guardian, June 26, 1991. the New Museum,Kimmelman, Michael. "Malcolm McLaren Show," The New York Times, September 16, 1988. Retrieved May 22, 2024. Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston,Smee, Sebastian, "The art of the '80s at the ICA," The Boston Globe, November 15, 2012. Retrieved May 24, 2024.Artnet. "Judith Barry launches ICA Boston's Web Art Project," March 23, 2003. Retrieved May 27, 2024. Documenta,Kunstforum International. "dOCUMENTA (13): The Brain," August/September, 2012. and the biennales of Berlin, Sharjah, Sydney, Venice and the Whitney Museum, among other venues.Vali, Murtaza. "Hale Tenger, Sharjah Biennial, 'September 11,'" Artforum, 2011 Retrieved May 21, 2024.Mammi, Alessandra. "Venezia 43: Unter Den Linden," Artforum, September 1988. Retrieved May 21, 2024.Cameron, Dan. “Whitney Biennial," Flash Art, Summer 1987. Barry has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Prize and Anonymous Was A Woman Award.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Judith Barry, Fellows. Retrieved May 21, 2024.Anonymous Was A Woman Award. Recipients. Retrieved May 21, 2024.Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation. Kiesler Prize 2000: Judith Barry. Retrieved May 21, 2024. She is based in New York and is a professor and in the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology.Cook, Greg. "New Public Art at Gardner Museum Aims To Bring Attention To Refugee Crisis," Wonderland, January 18, 2018.
Early life and career Barry was born in 1954 in Columbus, Ohio. She pursued early interests in architecture and dance after moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1974. She studied architecture and cinema at the University of California at Berkeley while also exploring dance, performance art and video—then-marginal art forms that offered greater opportunities to women. In the latter 1970s, she was active in modern dance companies and feminist art collectives in San Francisco and at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles.Grundberg, Andy. "Beyond Still Imagery," The New York Times, April 7, 1985. Retrieved May 21, 2024.Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Judith Barry, Publications. Retrieved May 21, 2024.
Barry's performance works engaged themes involving voyeurism and women's role as subject and object of the erotic gaze. They often situated her own body as the site of conceptual and visual experiment.Marzo, Jorge Luís. Judith Barry, Fundació La Caixa, Artists. Retrieved May 21, 2024. After pushing her art toward installation, she moved to New York in the 1980s, continuing her work in exhibition design, multimedia and new digital technologies. In 1987, she earned an MA in communication arts and computer graphics from the New York Institute of Technology.Perron, Jacques. "Judith Barry," Fondation Daniel Langlois, 2006. Retrieved May 24, 2024.
Work and critical reception Barry's work has links to conceptual art, feminist performance art, critical theory and cinema studies. In addition to multimedia installations, video, exhibition design and performance, she has produced sculpture, photography, graphic and drawing projects. She frequently engages viewers through visually immersive environments employing new technologies. Her formal strategies draw upon critical analysis, architectural form and cinematic spectacle to consider subjects such as the body, perception, language, and the role of urban planning and visual technologies in shaping identity, gender and social paradigms.Avgikos, Jan. "Judith Barry," Artforum, February 1992. Retrieved March 24, 2024.Tarantino, Michael. "Judith Barry," Artforum, September 1992. Retrieved May 21, 2024.
Critics define Barry's practice as much in relation to cultural theory and methodology as through aesthetic issues. Brian Wallis wrote that unlike the work of contemporaries delving into gender (e.g., Cindy Sherman or Barbara Kruger), Barry's work is "constantly shifting styles and formats, while consistently probing a series of tough theoretical issues." Among concerns identified are: relationships between display, looking, projection, desire and social control;Kruger, Barbara. "Casual Shopper by Judith Barry," Artforum, March 1983. Retrieved May 22, 2024.Linker, Kate. "Eluding Definition," Artforum, December 1984. Retrieved May 22, 2024. the influence of architectural space and urban planning on identity, social behavior and power relations; insertion of the corporeal and kinesthetic into visually dominated discourses;Heister, Andrea. "Judith Barry 'body without limits'," kunsttexte.de, No. 1, 2010. insistence on a participatory, meaning-productive spectator; emerging technologies and new configurations of space and social life; and the presentation of underrepresented individual stories and histories.ElGenaidi, Deena. "A Window Into the Lives of Women Living in Cairo," Hyperallergic, October 25, 2018. Retrieved May 22, 2024.
Individual works and installations
Visual theorist Johanna Drucker identified "voyeurism, spectacle, the power of display and the seductive apparatus of projection" as central to Barry's work—themes evident in her early video, Casual Shopper (1981–82). An historical analogue to Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, it mapped the transformation of the arcade into the synthetic space of the contemporary shopping mall. Barry's protagonist was a counterpart to Benjamin's male flaneur (roughly, "stroller")—a female flaneuse whose aimless attention to goods and an elusive man control the narrative and action, counter to the traditional dominance of the male gaze theorized by Laura Mulvey. Critics linked the work's use of montage, persistent browsing and endless commercial space to ideas concerning cinema's recycling of unsated desire and the narcissistic pursuit of satisfaction through consumption.
Projection as a metaphor—both its physical sense and the psychological projection of images and fantasies—figured prominently in video installations by Barry that extended the imaginative space of cinema to architectural space, challenging notions of public versus private, and psychic versus social. In the Shadow of the City Vamp r y (Artists Space and Whitney Biennial, 1985) and Echo (MoMA, 1986) considered the redevelopment of urban space and its disconnection from lived experience, shared community and historical grounding, suggesting a failure by modernist architecture to deliver on promises of social liberation.Morse, Margaret. "Judith Barry: The Body in Space," Art in America, April 1993, p. 118. Both large-scale, double-sided projections, they melded imagery of shopping malls and high-rise exteriors and interiors with window-like insertions of fragmented film narratives. Critics suggested that In the Shadow …'s combination of anonymous looking and beckoning views invoked voyeuristic desire in "ceaselessly consuming," vampire-like spectators hungry for images. Echo (referencing the Echo and Narcissus myth) depicted archetypal businessmen trapped and staring out of gridded glass structures that reviewer Andy Grundberg wrote, evoked "the anonymity and anomie of corporate work places, and the narcissism of those who inhabit them."Fisher, Jean. "Judith Barry," Artforum, September 1986. Retrieved May 21, 2024.