Paul Sharits (1943-1993)

A Program by Media Study

Declarative Mode is a two-projector work which was produced on a Bicentennial Grant from the American Film Institute. In keeping with the patriotic commitment of the project, the film was originally accompanied by a highly fragmented reading of the Declaration of Independence. Since that time, however, Sharits has decided to present the film in silence and allow its visual richness and musical complexity to be highlighted. Like his “locational” pieces, Declarative Mode is a multiple-projector work which attempts to suggest the compositional dimensionality of music. Composed of two screening spaces, one inside the other, the film is constructed in the form of a double sonata/ the inner screen, which is dimmer and smaller than the outer, presents the same film in a preview mode which is nearly a second ahead of the outer screen. Each image, therefore, occurs first on the outer screen. The tonal complexity generated by this simple arrangement brings Declarative Mode nearly full circle back to the richly emotional character of Shartis’s early work.

Although Paul Sharits is perhaps best known for his works in film, a large number of his paintings, sculptures, “frozen frames” and installation pieces had received recognition throughout the United States and Western Europe/ trained as a painter, Sharits abandoned that medium in 1966 to work exclusively in film where he helped to pioneer the minimalist/materialist shift in American avant-garde filmmaking. Recently, however, Sharits has returned to painting, while continuing his film practice.

Complete retrospective screenings of Sharits’s films have been held by the Alright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, at the Centre national D’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou in Paris, and at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City. He has appeared with his films at numerous other exhibitions including screenings at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum.