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October 20, 2003

Media Contact: Patricia Quill, (858) 822-066

PARIS’ POMPIDOU CENTER PURCHASES
THE VIDEOS OF UCSD FILMMAKER STEVE FAGIN
New Work Premiers October 24 in San Diego

Coinciding with the release of Oliver Kahn, UCSD professor Steve Fagin’s 55-minute video that focuses memory in an age of ever-increasing streaming video, The Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou recently announced that it will acquire this new work along with Fagin’s videos TropiCola and The Machine That Killed Bad People. Fagin’s earlier video The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel is already in the collection the Pompidou Centre, Europe’s leading collection of modern and contemporary art.

“While I am honored that the Pompidou Centre has acquired my work, quite frankly I’m much more comfortable at the edges of the art world rather than at it’s center,” says Fagin.

With video sales now representing 58% of the commercial film business, Fagin considers not only content and form in his new work, Oliver Kahn (2003), he also engages the question of distribution. One Star Press, Paris, will distribute the work as a deluxe limited edition artist book and DVD. “I initially thought it best to publish Oliver Kahn as a limited edition,” says Fagin, “rather than having it be perceived as marginal as many time-based works are. It is a challenging chamber piece that will only yield its subtleties through multiple viewing.”

Oliver Kahn will also premier at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, in La Jolla on Friday, October 24, 2003 at 7:30 p.m.

Named after the Bayern Munich goalkeeper who led the German national team in the World Cup last year in Japan and Korea, Oliver Kahn is loosely based on the 1958 one-act play by Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape, in which an old man plays back audiotapes he recorded while young and reconsiders his early passions and ambitions. Fagin’s Oliver Kahn uses soccer matches, Hollywood movies, and personal reverie to reflect how one recounts a life.

“In the last eighteen years Steve Fagin has made some of the most intelligent and intellectually daunting videos,” says filmmaker Mark Rappaport. “They are also vastly entertaining. In another world Fagin’s work would have much broader exposure…if there was any justice.”

Steve Fagin Oliver Kahn Screening of Oliver Kahn Visual Arts at UCSD

The limited edition artist book and DVD Oliver Kahn is available through One Star Press, Paris. One Star Press, an artist-managed press, has produced over 70 books, multiples and artists’ films with an international roster of artists since 2000.

Steve Fagin is Chair of the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. The recipient of several NEA grants, his work has been featured at 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. 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, which have been prominently featured at museums and international festivals and screened on Bravo International in Latin America, Canal + in Europe and PBS in the United States. Recently, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art featured his work at shows on the art of the 20th Century.