The first work to be shown in the new Media Gallery is a dramatic revisioning of the "world's best painting." Media artist Eve Sussman stages the moments surrounding the imagined conception of Diego Velázquez's monumental painting Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor) (1656) as a high-definition video tableau entitled 89 Seconds at Alcazar (2003). Las Meninas, housed in the Museo del Prado of Madrid, is an eminent addition to Velazquez's oeuvre, and is a painting in a category all its own. Grand in both composition and scale, Las Meninas dramatically attests to Velazquez's experimentation with the complex mechanics of perspective and composition through the genre of the imperial group portrait. In twelve minutes of running time, Sussman fluidly frames the space for an approximate 89-second climax in which Velázquez's Spanish royal family and courtiers would have converged on their exact spots in the "snapshot" configuration of the painting. By connecting the singular scene of Las Meninas with a created continuity of events, Sussman successfully scripts the body-language of the everyday within the development of the historical portrait.
