Recently honored with a complete retrospective at MoMA and an article in Artforum by P. Adams Sitney, Peter Hutton will visit Cornell on September 23rd. In advance of his visit, we present three of his silent and meditative cinematic portraits of place: New York Portrait: Chapter Two (1980-81), a melancholy city symphony; Study of a River 1996-97), a luminous black and white portrait of the Hudson River; and Skagafjördur (2002-04), a magnificently photographed portrait of the fjord valley and coastline of northwest Iceland that blur distinctions between sea, earth, and sky.
Peter Hutton (American, b. 1944) studied painting, sculpture, and film at the San Francisco Art Institute under the tutelage of Robert Nelson, Bruce Nauman, and Bruce Conner. He is now the director of the Film and Electronic Arts program at Bard College, where he has been a professor of film since 1984; his students at Bard—and other institutions, including Hampshire College and Harvard University—have included Sadie Benning, Matthew Buckingham, Ken Burns, Hal Hartley, and Mira Nair.Also a former merchant seaman, Hutton has spent nearly 40 years voyaging around the world, often by cargo ship, to create meditative, luminously photographed, and intimately diaristic studies of place, from the Yangtze River to the Polish industrial city of Lodz, and from the fjord valley and coastline of northern Iceland to a ship graveyard on the Bangladeshi shore (At Sea). Hutton will speak with a screening of At Sea on September 23rd. His visit is cosponsored with the CCA and the Society for the Humanities.
more at moma.org and artforum.com/inprint/issue=200805&id=19968. 16mm
1 hour 17 minutes, USA