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Video Episodes:
97 Views
13:49:15 06/18/10
Yinka Shonibare MBE: "Nelson's Ship in a Bottle"
[LESS INFO] 97 VIEWS | ADDED 13:49:15 06/18/10
Episode #111: Yinka Shonibare MBE discusses the theatricality and sense of wonder inherent in his public sculpture "Nelson's Ship in a Bottle," installed on the 4th Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. Situated across from "Nelson's Column," a monument erected to honor Admiral Lord Nelson's death at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 during the Napoleonic Wars, the brightly-colored sails of Shonibare's boat reference the complex heritage of British colonialism and its multicultural present. Known for using batik in costumed dioramas that explore race and colonialism, Yinka Shonibare MBE also employs painting, sculpture, photography, and film in work that disrupts and challenges our notions of cultural identity. Taking on the honorific MBE as part of his name in everyday use, Shonibare plays with the ambiguities and contradictions of his attitude toward the Establishment and its legacies of colonialism and class. In multimedia projects that reveal his passion for art history, literature, and philosophy, Shonibare provides a critical tour of Western civilization and its achievements and failures. Learn more about Yinka Shonibare MBE: http://www.art21.org/artists/yinka-shonibare-mbe VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Ian Serfontein. Sound: Paul Stadden & Luke Williams. Editor: Joaquin Perez. Artwork Courtesy: Yinka Shonibare MBE. Thanks: Tamsin Selby & Greater London Authority.
16 Views
11:00:33 06/11/10
Allan McCollum: "Shapes Ornaments"
[LESS INFO] 16 VIEWS | ADDED 11:00:33 06/11/10
Episode #110: Horace & Noella Varnum in Sedgwick, Maine, describe their experiences working with artist Allan McCollum on the Shapes from Maine (2009) exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York. Applying strategies of mass production to hand-made objects, Allan McCollum's labor-intensive practice questions the intrinsic value of the unique work of art. McCollum's installations—fields of vast numbers of small-scale works, systematically arranged—are the product of many tiny gestures, built up over time. Viewing his work often produces a sublime effect as one slowly realizes that the dizzying array of thousands of identical-looking shapes is, in fact, comprised of subtly different, distinct things. Engaging assistants, scientists, and local craftspeople in his process, McCollum embraces a collaborative and democratic form of creativity.Learn more about Allan McCollum: http://www.art21.org/artists/allan-mccollumVIDEO | Producer:
Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich.
Interview:
Susan Dowling.
Camera:
Richard Kane & Joel Shapiro. Sound: Kenny Weinberg. Editor: Lizzie Donahue & Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy:
Allan McCollum. Special Thanks: Horace & Noella Varnum.
13 Views
10:59:21 06/04/10
Jeff Koons: Potential
[LESS INFO] 13 VIEWS | ADDED 10:59:21 06/04/10
Episode #109: Jeff Koons tells a story from his childhood about finding a sense of self through making art, asserting that art has the potential to inspire similar transformations within each viewer.Jeff Koons plucks images and objects from popular culture, framing questions about taste and pleasure. His contextual sleight-of-hand, which transforms banal items into sumptuous icons, takes on a psychological dimension through dramatic shifts in scale, spectacularly engineered surfaces, and subliminal allegories of animals, humans, and anthropomorphized objects. The subject of art history is a constant undercurrent, whether Koons elevates kitsch to the level of Classical art, produces photos in the manner of Baroque paintings, or develops public works that borrow techniques and elements of seventeenth-century French garden design. Organizing his own studio production in a manner that rivals a Renaissance workshop, Koons makes computer-assisted, handcrafted works that communicate through their meticulous attention to detail.Learn more about Jeff Koons: http://www.art21.org/artists/jeff-koonsVIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Kurt Branstetter & Joel Shapiro. Sound: Mark Mandler. Editor: Paulo Padilha & Mark Sutton. Artwork Courtesy: Jeff Koons. Special Thanks: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
8 Views
11:07:44 05/28/10
Florian Maier-Aichen: Infrared Landscapes
[LESS INFO] 8 VIEWS | ADDED 11:07:44 05/28/10
Episode #108: Florian Maier-Aichen likens his use of infrared film to an in-between state, discussing photography’s role in picturing the American West and its ability to confound past and present.Alternately romantic, cerebral, and unearthly, Florian Maier-Aichen’s digitally altered photographs are closer to the realm of drawing and fiction than documentation. He embraces difficult techniques, chooses equipment that produces accidents such as light leaks and double exposures, and uses computer enhancements to introduce imperfections and illogical elements into images that paradoxically "feel" visually right, though they are factually wrong. Often employing an elevated viewpoint (the objective but haunting "God’s-eye view" of aerial photography and satellite imaging), Maier-Aichen creates idealized, painterly landscapes that function like old postcards. Interested in places where landscape and cityscape meet, he chooses locations and subjects from the American West and Europe—from his own neighborhoods to vistas of the natural world. Looking backwards for his influences, Maier-Aichen often reenacts or pays homage to the work of the pioneer photographers of the nineteenth century, sometimes even remaking their subject matter from their original standpoints. Always experimenting, he marries digital technologies with traditional processes and films (black-and-white, color, infrared, and tricolor), restoring and reinvigorating the artistry and alchemy of early photography.Learn more about Florian Maier-Aichen at: http://www.art21.org/artists/florian-maier-aichenVIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Robert Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Joaquin Perez. Artwork Courtesy: 303 Gallery, New York; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; and Florian Maier-Aichen.
6 Views
11:46:24 05/21/10
Beryl Korot: "Dachau, 1974"
[LESS INFO] 6 VIEWS | ADDED 11:46:24 05/21/10
Episode #107: Beryl Korot narrates the process of creating one of the first multi-channel works of video art — Dachau, 1974 — a haunting document of tourists visiting the notorious Nazi concentration camp. An early video-art pioneer and an internationally exhibited artist, Beryl Korot’s multiple-channel (and multiple-monitor) video installation works explored the relationship between programming tools as diverse as the technology of the loom and multiple-channel video. For most of the 1980s, Korot concentrated on a series of paintings that were based on a language she created that was an analogue to the Latin alphabet. Drawing on her earlier interest in weaving and video as related technologies, she made most of these paintings on hand-woven and traditional linen canvas. More recently, she has collaborated with her husband, the composer Steve Reich, on “Three Tales,” a documentary digital video opera in three acts that explores the way technology creates and frames our experience.Learn more about Beryl Korot: http://www.art21.org/artists/beryl-korotVIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Wesley Miller. Camera & Sound: Nick Ravich. Editor: Joaquin Perez. Artwork Courtesy: Beryl Korot.
42 Views
10:59:34 05/14/10
Julie Mehretu: "Mural"
[LESS INFO] 42 VIEWS | ADDED 10:59:34 05/14/10
Episode #106: Julie Mehretu puts the finishing touches on her large-scale painting Mural at Goldman Sachs, adjusting shapes and colors in dialogue with the architecture and views from the street. Julie Mehretu's paintings and drawings refer to elements of mapping and architecture, achieving a calligraphic complexity that resembles turbulent atmospheres and dense social networks. Architectural renderings and aerial views of urban grids enter the work as fragments, losing their real-world specificity and challenging narrow geographic and cultural readings. The paintings' wax-like surfaces—built up over weeks and months in thin translucent layers—have a luminous warmth and spatial depth, with formal qualities of light and space made all the more complex by Mehretu's delicate depictions of fire, explosions, and perspectives in both two and three dimensions. Her works engage the history of nonobjective art—from Constructivism to Futurism—posing contemporary questions about the relationship between utopian impulses and abstraction.Learn more about Julie Mehretu at: http://www.art21.org/artists/julie-mehretuVIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Wesley Miller. Camera & Sound: Nick Ravich. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Thanks: Erika Fortner; Jessica Kingdon; Goldman, Sachs, & Co.; Harmony Murphy; and Damien Young.
30 Views
11:50:49 05/07/10
Susan Rothenberg: Bruce & the Studio
[LESS INFO] 30 VIEWS | ADDED 11:50:49 05/07/10
Episode #105: Susan Rothenberg describes the blend of studio time and ranch work that she shares with her husband, the artist Bruce Nauman, at their New Mexico home. Susan Rothenberg's early work—large acrylic, figurative paintings—came to prominence in the 1970s New York art world, a time and place almost completely dominated and defined by Minimalist aesthetics and theories. The first body of work for which she became known centered on life-sized images of horses. Glyph-like and iconic, these images are not so much abstracted as pared down to their most essential elements. The horses, along with fragmented body parts (heads, eyes, and hands) are almost totemic, like primitive symbols, and serve as formal elements through which Rothenberg investigated the meaning, mechanics, and essence of painting. Rothenbergs paintings since the 1990s reflect her move from New York to New Mexico, her adoption of oil painting, and her new-found interest in using the memory of observed and experienced events (a riding accident, a near-fatal bee sting, walking the dog, a game of poker or dominoes) as an armature for creating a painting. These scenes excerpted from daily life, whether highlighting an untoward event or a moment of remembrance, come to life through Rothenbergs thickly layered and nervous brushwork. A distinctive characteristic of these paintings is a tilted perspective in which the vantage point is located high above the ground. A common experience in the New Mexico landscape, this unexpected perspective invests the work with an eerily objective psychological edge.Learn more about Susan Rothenberg at: http://www.art21.org/artists/susan-rothenbergVIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Robert Elfstrom & Dyanna Taylor. Sound: Jim Gallup & Ray Day. Editor: Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: Bruce Nauman & Susan Rothenberg. Special Thanks: Bruce Nauman.
6 Views
11:13:11 04/30/10
Mike Kelley: "Day Is Done"
[LESS INFO] 6 VIEWS | ADDED 11:13:11 04/30/10
Episode #104: Mike Kelley reveals how photographs from yearbooks and newspapers in Detroit served as the inspiration behind the performative project "Day Is Done," shown installed at Gagosian Gallery. Mike Kelley’s work ranges from highly symbolic and ritualistic performance pieces, to arrangements of stuffed-animal sculptures, to wall-sized drawings, to multi-room installations that restage institutional environments (schools, offices, zoos), to extended collaborations with artists such as Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, and the band Sonic Youth. His work questions the legitimacy of ‘normative’ values and systems of authority, and attacks the sanctity of cultural attitudes toward family, religion, sexuality, art history, and education. He also comments on and undermines the legitimacy of the concept of victim or trauma culture, which posits that almost all behavior results from some form of repressed abuse. Kelley’s aesthetic mines the rich and often overlooked history of vernacular art in America, and his practice borrows heavily from the confrontational, politically conscious “by all means necessary” attitude of punk music.Learn more about Mike Kelley: http://www.art21.org/artists/mike-kelleyVIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Nancy Schreiber & Joel Shapiro. Sound: Tom Bergin & Stacy Hruby. Editor: Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: Mike Kelley. Special Thanks: Gagosian Gallery, New York.
16 Views
12:30:12 04/23/10
Beryl Korot: "Radical Software" 1970-74
[LESS INFO] 16 VIEWS | ADDED 12:30:12 04/23/10
Episode #103: Beryl Korot describes the impetus behind the innovative 1970s publication Radical Software, elucidating the history of video in art and the impact of mass media on society. Emerging from an independent video community that included media visionaries such as Marshall McLuhan and groups such as Televisionaries, Videofreex, People's Video Theater, and Global Village, the first issue of Radical Software debuted in Spring of 1970 as a publication by the Raindance Corporation. Beryl Korot and Phyllis Segura (Gershuny) acted as Editors, while Michael Shamburg served as Publisher with Ira Schneider as co-Originator. Early contributors included Nam June Paik, Buckminster Fuller, Ant Farm, Frank Gillette, and Paul Ryan, among others. After eleven issues, Radical Software ceased publication in the Spring of 1974 and is now an invaluable time capsule of an era.An early video-art pioneer and an internationally exhibited artist, Beryl Korots multiple-channel (and multiple-monitor) video installation works explored the relationship between programming tools as diverse as the technology of the loom and multiple-channel video. For most of the 1980s, Korot concentrated on a series of paintings that were based on a language she created that was an analogue to the Latin alphabet. Drawing on her earlier interest in weaving and video as related technologies, she made most of these paintings on hand-woven and traditional linen canvas. More recently, she has collaborated with her husband, the composer Steve Reich, on "Three Tales," a documentary digital video opera in three acts that explores the way technology creates and frames our experience.Learn more about Beryl Korot: http://www.art21.org/artists/beryl-korotVIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Wesley Miller. Camera & Sound: Nick Ravich. Editor: Joaquin Perez. Archival Material Courtesy: Beryl Korot & the Daniel Langlois Foundation of Montreal. Special Thanks: Davidson Gigliotti & Ira Schneider.
5 Views
11:19:15 04/16/10
Mary Heilmann: Home & Studio
[LESS INFO] 5 VIEWS | ADDED 11:19:15 04/16/10
Episode #102: Mary Heilmann leads a tour of her home and studio on Long Island, pointing out how she’s modified the surrounding landscape and the ways in which the scenery has seeped into her paintings. For every piece of Mary Heilmann's work—abstract paintings, ceramics, and furniture—there is a backstory. Imbued with recollections, stories spun from her imagination, and references to music, aesthetic influences, and dreams, her paintings are like meditations or icons. Her compositions are often hybrid spatial environments that juxtapose two- and three-dimensional renderings in a single frame, join several canvases into new works, or create diptychs of paintings and photographs in the form of prints, slideshows, and videos. Heilmann sometimes installs her paintings alongside chairs and benches that she builds by hand, an open invitation for viewers to socialize and contemplate her work communally.Learn more about Mary Heilmann: http://www.art21.org/artists/mary-heilmannVIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: David Howe. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix. Editor: Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: Mary Heilmann
21 Views
14:02:06 04/09/10
Julie Mehretu: Painting Conservator Luca Bonetti
[LESS INFO] 21 VIEWS | ADDED 14:02:06 04/09/10
Episode #101: Luca Bonetti leads the installation of artist Julie Mehretu’s massive painting Mural (2009) at Goldman Sachs, coordinating a team of installers and studio assistants.Julie Mehretu's paintings and drawings refer to elements of mapping and architecture, achieving a calligraphic complexity that resembles turbulent atmospheres and dense social networks. Architectural renderings and aerial views of urban grids enter the work as fragments, losing their real-world specificity and challenging narrow geographic and cultural readings. The paintings' wax-like surfaces—built up over weeks and months in thin translucent layers—have a luminous warmth and spatial depth, with formal qualities of light and space made all the more complex by Mehretu's delicate depictions of fire, explosions, and perspectives in both two and three dimensions. Her works engage the history of nonobjective art—from Constructivism to Futurism—posing contemporary questions about the relationship between utopian impulses and abstraction.Learn more about Julie Mehretu at: http://www.art21.org/artists/julie-mehretuVIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Nick Ravich. Camera & Sound: Nick Ravich. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Thanks: Luca Bonetti; Travis Fitzgerald; Goldman, Sachs, & Co.; and Harmony Murphy.
46 Views
12:28:02 04/02/10
William Kentridge: Pain & Sympathy
[LESS INFO] 46 VIEWS | ADDED 12:28:02 04/02/10
Episode #100: With his video "History of the Main Complaint" (1996) serving as a backdrop, William Kentridge discusses how artists draw upon tragedy as subject matter for their work and how drawing itself can be a compassionate act. Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—William Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects most often framed in narrowly defined terms. Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge often uses optical illusions to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions. Learn more about William Kentridge at: http://www.art21.org/artists/william-kentridge VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: William Kentridge.
575 Views
17:17:22 03/26/10
YOU DECIDE: Viewers Choose the 100th "Exclusive"
[LESS INFO] 575 VIEWS | ADDED 17:17:22 03/26/10
We're inviting viewers to choose which video will be our 100th episode in the "Exclusive" series.Will it be Mary Heilmann? William Kentridge? Beryl Korot? Julie Mehretu? Mike Kelley? YOU DECIDE!VOTE NOW & SEE THE RESULTS:http://www.art21.org/exclusive(polls close April 1st, 2010)
108 Views
12:05:23 03/26/10
Susan Rothenberg: Emotions
[LESS INFO] 108 VIEWS | ADDED 12:05:23 03/26/10
Episode #099: Filmed at her home and studio in New Mexico, artist Susan Rothenberg explains how she transforms personal experiences and feelings into works that can become an "emotional moment" for the viewer. While discussing the loss of her dog, Rothenberg describes the process of recovering a memory of her pet through the act of painting. Susan Rothenberg's early work—large acrylic, figurative paintings—came to prominence in the 1970s New York art world, a time and place almost completely dominated and defined by Minimalist aesthetics and theories. The first body of work for which she became known centered on life-sized images of horses. Glyph-like and iconic, these images are not so much abstracted as pared down to their most essential elements. The horses, along with fragmented body parts (heads, eyes, and hands) are almost totemic, like primitive symbols, and serve as formal elements through which Rothenberg investigated the meaning, mechanics, and essence of painting. Rothenberg’s paintings since the 1990s reflect her move from New York to New Mexico, her adoption of oil painting, and her new-found interest in using the memory of observed and experienced events (a riding accident, a near-fatal bee sting, walking the dog, a game of poker or dominoes) as an armature for creating a painting. These scenes excerpted from daily life, whether highlighting an untoward event or a moment of remembrance, come to life through Rothenberg’s thickly layered and nervous brushwork. A distinctive characteristic of these paintings is a tilted perspective in which the vantage point is located high above the ground. A common experience in the New Mexico landscape, this unexpected perspective invests the work with an eerily objective psychological edge. Learn more about Susan Rothenberg at: http://www.art21.org/artists/susan-rothenberg VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Dyanna Taylor. Sound: Jim Gallup. Editor: Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: Susan Rothenberg.
38 Views
12:11:00 03/19/10
Jeff Koons: Money & Value
[LESS INFO] 38 VIEWS | ADDED 12:11:00 03/19/10
Episode #098: Artist Jeff Koons discusses themes of money, desire, perfection, and moral responsibility. Filmed in his busy New York studio and surrounded by numerous assistants at work on paintings and sculptures, Koons describes how the practicalities of running a business are often in service to creative ends.Jeff Koons plucks images and objects from popular culture, framing questions about taste and pleasure. His contextual sleight-of-hand, which transforms banal items into sumptuous icons, takes on a psychological dimension through dramatic shifts in scale, spectacularly engineered surfaces, and subliminal allegories of animals, humans, and anthropomorphized objects. The subject of art history is a constant undercurrent, whether Koons elevates kitsch to the level of Classical art, produces photos in the manner of Baroque paintings, or develops public works that borrow techniques and elements of seventeenth-century French garden design. Organizing his own studio production in a manner that rivals a Renaissance workshop, Koons makes computer-assisted, handcrafted works that communicate through their meticulous attention to detail.Learn more about Jeff Koons: http://www.art21.org/artists/jeff-koonsVIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Brian Hwang, Clair Popkin & Joel Shapiro. Sound: Mark Mandler. Editor: Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: Jeff Koons.
57 Views
13:37:10 03/12/10
Julie Mehretu: Studio Assistants
[LESS INFO] 57 VIEWS | ADDED 13:37:10 03/12/10
Episode #097: Filmed in her Berlin studio, a group of Julie Mehretu's assistants — Sarah Rentz, Damien Young, Erika Fortner and Harmony Murphy — discuss how they each bring different areas of expertise to the process of making paintings, from fine art backgrounds in printmaking and illustration to furniture polishing techniques and administrative skills.Julie Mehretu's paintings and drawings refer to elements of mapping and architecture, achieving a calligraphic complexity that resembles turbulent atmospheres and dense social networks. Architectural renderings and aerial views of urban grids enter the work as fragments, losing their real-world specificity and challenging narrow geographic and cultural readings. The paintings' wax-like surfaces—built up over weeks and months in thin translucent layers—have a luminous warmth and spatial depth, with formal qualities of light and space made all the more complex by Mehretu's delicate depictions of fire, explosions, and perspectives in both two and three dimensions. Her works engage the history of nonobjective art—from Constructivism to Futurism—posing contemporary questions about the relationship between utopian impulses and abstraction.Learn more about Julie Mehretu at: http://www.art21.org/artists/julie-mehretuVIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Ian Serfontein. Sound: Paul Stadden. Editor: Lizzie Donahue, Paulo Padilha & Joaquin Perez. Artwork Courtesy: Julie Mehretu. Special Thanks: Erika Fortner, Harmony Murphy, Sarah Rentz & Damien Young.
06/18/10