Video still from 45 Minutes from Edith Wharton, Steve Fagin, 2022, 80 min.
45 Minutes from Edith Wharton
Screening with Director Steve Fagin
January 26, 2023
7:30 - 9:00 p.m.
Structural & Materials Engineering Building, SME 149, UC San Diego
Sponsored by UC San Diego's Department of Visual Arts and Film Studies Program.
45 Minutes from Edith Wharton
Steve Fagin, 2022, 80 min.
"The specific work in question is Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence (published 1920, set in the 1870s). But Steve Fagin does not set out to adapt this novel in any way, shape or form. To address it, yes. To circle it. Surround it. Question it. Stalk it, even. To treat it as a cultural site (across, literally, its many editions) and also, in a virtual-cubistic sense, an imaginary space that one can inhabit and poke around in. To unsettle its foundations, its comfortable drift into history, including media history."
– Adrian Martin
Steve Fagin is an American artist and former professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. He has produced a series of feature length videos, including The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel, The Machine That Killed Bad People and TropiCola (the latter produced in collaboration with some of the most important theatre actors and producers in Havana).
These films have been featured prominently at museums, international film festivals, art biennials and have been screened on Bravo International in Latin America, Canal + in Europe and PBS in the United States. His work has had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is the subject of a book from Duke University Press, “Talkin’ With Your Mouth Full”: Conversations with the Videos of Steve Fagin. The work has been presented in the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in many contexts, including both of their summary shows of the essential art of the twentieth century.
From 2005-2009, he worked as Creative Consultant for the haudenschild Garage and Commissioning Editor of the hG, Spare Parts project. The Last Book, an hG, Spare Parts project, was conceived and directed by him. He also completed a series of “smart phone pieces”, Cell Phone Stories, both as Commissioning Editor and as one of the artists for LACMA, Los Angeles. After directing Ideal Glass' production of Vestiphobia at Fábrica de Arte Cubano in Havana in early 2017 he wrote and directed the feature, Who the F*** is Clifford Odets? (2018), an 8-episode Web Cabaret series, The Batista Syndrome, shot in Havana, 2019 and the recently completed feature, 45 Minutes from Edith Wharton (2022).He is currently in pre-production on News from Nowhere, a feature on the past, present and future of the "Utopias" of the 20th century to be shot in Havana, March, 2023.