Carolyn Lazard’s current exhibition Long Take, at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center until 13 December 2026, begins with dance but quickly moves beyond the idea that a video simply records a performance.
The central work Leans, Reverses was developed with dancer Jerron Herman and poet and artist Joselia Rebekah Hughes. The project exists through a dance performance, its recording, a choreographic score, captions and audio description. Three monitors can display black fields while text describes sounds or movements that are not necessarily visible in the conventional way.
What interests me is that accessibility is not added after the artwork is finished.
It becomes one of the materials from which the artwork is built.
Captions normally occupy the edge of moving-image culture.
We switch them on when necessary.
Lazard moves them toward the centre.
A phrase describing a movement becomes another version of that movement.
Audio description creates another performance through language.
The recorded image is no longer automatically treated as the most complete version.
That is a surprisingly radical idea for video art.
A camera does not necessarily preserve the work better than words.
Each translation loses something.
Each translation can also create something that was not visible before.
https://museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/carolyn-lazard-long-take
