Filming Carrie Mae Weems in Syracuse
Producing the Art:21 series feels a lot like creating a work of art. One of the big revelations in working on the series is the tremendous amount of detail, planning, and collaboration often involved in making art. While some of the artists we’ve profiled work primarily alone in the quiet intimacy of their studio, many others (especially in Season 5!) work on projects that can involve a cast of dozens or more, including not just the artists but also studio assistants, fabricators, and exhibition space personnel – all of whom can play an important role in creating the final work.
At Art21, our core production team consists of only 5 members of our full-time staff but to make the series, we work closely with a broader team that includes our consulting directors, editors, crews, and post-production personnel, with whom we have worked with for many years. Perhaps the most important collaboration, however, is with the artists themselves. Rather than try to impose a pre-determined structure onto the artists’ segments, we work hard to determine a story and approach that works for them.
So the starting point to our production process is always a conversation with the artists we are profiling. In an ideal world, we would love to film each artist over many weeks, and even the months or years that artworks sometimes take to complete. However, given our limited resources as a nonprofit, we have to plan our shoots judiciously, so the next step is to get more details from the artists about their upcoming schedule. While we are often told that our segments feel very in-depth, we typically film only a few days with each artist – sometimes as little as 1-2 days, and rarely more than 5. The key is to use those days to capture their story, which can include the making of a specific work, a special installation, the rhythm of the studio, the role of their collaborators, or a broader overview of their ideas and methods over time.
Paul McCarthy and assistants in his Los Angeles studio
The tricky part is determining which are the best days for us to film. With some artists, there is a huge hum of activity in the studio at all times. For example, with Paul McCarthy, we basically found a time that the studio could accommodate our crew and once there, we let our cameras roll as a seemingly endless stream of activity took place all around. Likewise, our visit to Doris Salcedo’s Bogota studio involved a witnessing of an ongoing process, a way of life among a committed group of people working together to collectively create art. Filming on-site installations or key moments in the production of a specific artwork can be more challenging since our goal is to film at the moment when an artwork or installation is far enough along that viewers can start to get a sense of what it will become. But we don’t want it to be so far along as to be nearly done, since we still want to reveal to our viewers the hidden alchemy of the process – that moment when the work starts to come together and its inner logic begins to shine through.
Wodiczko Perforates Polish Pavilion with “Guests”
Krzysztof Wodiczko, "Goście / Guests," 2008-2009, video projection, project visualization. Photos courtesy of the Artist and Zachęta National Gallery of Art.
Entitled Goście / Guests, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s exhibition greets visitors to the Venice Biennale’s Polish Pavilion with the words of political theorist Hannah Arendt: “Refugees driven from country to country represent the avant-garde of their people.” Obviously, Arendt is not referring to “avant-garde” in the artspeak sense that you and I may be accustomed to. Rather, she suggests that the state of displacement is one that will be experienced by entire populations, rather than small persecuted groups. The proclamation comes from Arendt’s 1943 article, “We Refugees,” which calls for a resistance to assimilation and predicts the gradual dissolving of European borders and segregated nation-states. In the context of the Biennale, whose very structure upholds the model of the nation-state, the invocation of Arendt is bold, if not contentious.
Stepping inside of the Polish Pavilion, we can see Arendt’s views embodied, as the solid stone building is suddenly rendered porous and thin by Wodiczko’s trompe l’oeil installation. Projections create the illusion of frosted glass floor-to-ceiling windows on every wall. At first, it seems that you can observe goings-on outside the pavilion through these translucent windows. Within each arched “pane” you can see silhouettes of bodies engaged in various activities—speaking on cell phones, vacuuming, resting on suitcases. Voices, which reveal casual conversations that are all related to issues of immigration (i.e. unemployment, legalization documents, etc.), stir your analytical mind and the sensory illusion dissolves—but not completely. Your mind remains unsettled by mirage of surrounding humans.
While it would be easy to say that the characters in these tableaus—clearly immigrants—are guests, your own status as such is also underscored. As the viewer, you are most likely a guest of Venice, and certainly a guest of this space. In Wodiczo’s Art:21 segment, he describes engaging with memorials as “a vehicle through which the past and the future converge.” Though the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale functions much differently than a memorial, I believe that in quoting Hannah Arendt, Wodiczko ties the perpetual flux of today’s “stateless” immigrants to the mass displacement of Jews and other Europeans in WWII, and ultimately implicates the viewer in this ongoing lineage.
An interview with Carrie Mae Weems by Dawoud Bey
We’re back! Keep your eye on this column in the months to come as BOMB Magazine highlights Season 5 artists and themes, with excerpts of new and vintage interviews from our Archive. This week, read an excerpt from an interview with Carrie Mae Weems conducted by fellow photographer Dawoud Bey. Then check out thier full conversation in the Summer 2009 issue of BOMB, on newsstands now and online here:
- Carrie Mae Weems, 1976. Photo by Dawoud Bey.
Dawoud Bey: Your work has had a very grand sweep since we first met in 1976. I would say you began in a kind of documentary mode, turning your camera on aspects of your surrounding world that allowed you to visually talk about the things that you were seeing and the things that had value or meaning for you. Your Family Pictures and Stories brought those observations closer to home in an autobiographical way and also began to bring a shift through the introduction of a textual voice into your work. Since that work you have deployed a range of strategies in realizing your ideas. I’m wondering if you could go back for a minute and just talk briefly about where you were in 1976 when you had decided that the camera was going to be your voice. What influenced you and who were your models at that point?
Carrie Mae Weems: We were young. (laughter) It’s wonderful to have the benefit of hindsight. I think often about planning retrospectives—I’ve got one coming up this fall in Seville at the Contemporary and one at the Frist Center for Contemporary Art in Nashville in 2011. They give me the chance to look back over the work, over my history. The thing that surprises me most about the early work is that it’s not particularly different from the work I’m making now. Of course I was trying to find a unique voice, but beyond that, from the very beginning, I’ve been interested in the idea of power and the consequences of power; relationships are made and articulated through power. Another thing that’s interesting about the early work is that even though I’ve been engaged in the idea of autobiography, other ideas have been more important: the role of narrative, the social levels of humor, the deconstruction of documentary, the construction of history, the use of text, storytelling, performance, and the role of memory have all been more central to my thinking than autobiography. It’s assumed that autobiography is key, because I so often use myself, my own of experience—limited as it is at times—as the starting point. But I use myself simply as a vehicle for approaching the question of power, and following where that leads me to and through. It’s never about me; it’s always about something larger.
In Family Pictures and Stories, I was thinking not only of my family, but was trying to explore the movement of black families out of the South and into the North. My family becomes the representational vehicle that allows me to enter the larger discussion of race, class, and historical migration. So, the Family series operates in this way, as does the Kitchen Table series. I use my own constructed image as a vehicle for questioning ideas about the role of tradition, the nature of family, monogamy, polygamy, relationships between men and women, between women and their children, and between women and other women—underscoring the critical problems and the possible resolves. In one way or another, my work endlessly explodes the limits of tradition. I’m determined to find new models to live by. Aren’t you?
Meet the Season 5 Artist: Carrie Mae Weems
The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Compassion, premiering on Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Compassion features three artists — William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, and Carrie Mae Weems — whose works explore conscience and the possibility of understanding and reconciling past and present, while exposing injustice and expressing tolerance for others.
Who is Carrie Mae Weems and what does she have to say about compassion?
Carrie Mae Weems was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1953; she lives and works in Syracuse, New York. With the pitch and timbre of an accomplished storyteller, Carrie Mae Weems uses colloquial forms—jokes, songs, rebukes—in photographic series that scrutinize subjectivity and expose pernicious stereotypes. Weems’s vibrant explorations of photography, video, and verse breathe new life into traditional narrative forms—social documentary, tableaux, self-portrait, and oral history. Eliciting epic contexts from individually framed moments, Weems debunks racist and sexist labels, examines the relationship between power and aesthetics, and uses personal biography to articulate broader truths. Whether adapting or appropriating archival images, restaging famous news photographs, or creating altogether new scenes, she traces an indirect history of the depiction of African Americans for more than a century.
On the subject of compassion in art, Weems says about her own life and process (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):
There are ideas about compassion—what you sacrifice for compassion, what you give up, what you choose not to live with so that you can express that. But we all sacrifice something for our compassion in some way. We’re giving up something so that something else larger can happen, so that something bigger than you can take place. Sometimes we sacrifice our families. Sometimes we sacrifice other levels of interpersonal communication so that we have that larger relationship with questions that move and shape the world.
And so (and I don’t think that I’m being naïve or sentimental or dramatic about it) I think that I’ve sacrificed an enormous amount of interpersonal comfort to pursue aspects of compassion, to pursue them, to look at them and to say, “Yes, I will step up to this. I want this too. And if I want this in this time, in this moment, then certain things have to be sacrificed (because I don’t know how to do it all).” Sometimes you sacrifice too much. You find yourself out on a limb and not knowing really quite how to get back down the tree. But it’s the space that you’re in because you have taken the risk. I’m not unaware of the sacrifices and, at times, whom your compassion hurts. It’s not all moving in one direction. It’s complicated, as the work is complicated.
What happens in Weems’s segment in Compassion this October?
“Narrative and storytelling is in the blood,” declares Carrie Mae Weems, “I really needed to understand something about the nature of my own being, and my own voice, and really where I come from.” Through a mixture of archival personal photos and the artist’s first major photo-documentary series, Family Pictures and Stories (1978-84), Weems takes the viewer on a personal journey through her childhood in 1950s Portland, Oregon, the outward discrimination towards her mixed-race family (Jewish, Native American, and African American), and her own radicalization in the 1960s when she moved to San Francisco at the age of sixteen to dance with choreographer Anna Halprin.
Another artist worth reading
Jack Tworkov in his Provincetown studio. Photo by © Arnold Newman, for an article written by Robert Hatch, "At The Tip Of Cape Cod," July 1961 issue of Horizon.Via the Provincetown Artist Registry.
Owing to its timeless insights about artmaking and life, art teachers traditionally assign Ashcan School painter Robert Henri’s 1923 collection of writing, The Art Spirit
“Every art can only say what the medium allows it to say. Every change in medium is a change in content. A painter knows that what was originally suggested by charcoal can never be said in paint. If you paint you say one thing. If you stain you say another. If you paste, you say still another. By the time you use a computer you will say an utterly different thing—that’s why painting will go on…” Feb. 12, 1967
“Among artists much more sure of their seeing, there is a much more instantaneous agreement on the worth of a painting than there is among laymen. It is interesting to note and compare the artist’s positive tone in speaking of a painting and the layman’s hesitativeness and vagueness. The layman is vague because he is guessing, because he does not see as fast, or at all [what], the artist sees….” October 16, 1961
“My main problem at Yale [Tworkov chaired the Art Department 1963-1969] was to establish the degree of my responsibility and authority. To smother the fights of the faculty, which mostly was between Chaet and Peterdi on the one hand and Albers followers on the other…” November 19, 1963
“A Mr. Slesinger from the Guggenheim Foundation called to say that I’ve been awarded a fellowship. Because of the mail strike they could not mail the award. So Wally [his wife] went to the office to pick it up. What is strange is that Motherwell and Geldzahler are on the jury, two people I have no high regard for….” March 20, 1970
“There was a time when painters could ignore what critics said about painting, since it was agreed that they did not know what they were talking about. Now it is no longer true. Critics have caught up with painting. They are talking sense about it. And that is perhaps what is wrong with painting. Painting needs once more to go beyond ABC.” Feb. 12, 1967
An exhibition of Tworkov’s paintings, organized by Jason Andrew and the Estate of Jack Tworkov, will be at the UBS Art Gallery, New York, NY, August 13-November 13, 2009.
Arts Stimulus Funding & the Art Economy Part 2: Talking to the House Arts Caucus Co-Chairs
Rep. Louise Slaughter speaks about the economic and employment impact of the arts and music industry on March 26, 2009 (via the Education and Labor Committee's YouTube channel).
A few months ago, I went to the Bronx for a studio visit with an accomplished artist, John Fekner, whose personal brand of street graphics helped define a tumultuous era in New York’s cultural life in the late 1970s and early 80s. He explained to me something that people of my generation may not remember, namely that in the early 1980s federal funds for the arts quickly dried up and countless arts programs went into crisis and eventually closed their doors. It was a difficult time, he said, and the decline in federal funding seemed to continue until the mid-1990s, when federal arts funding became a lightning rod issue as the ICA’s exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photography became the poster child for an art establishment that reputedly didn’t represent the values of middle-class Americans. The resulting controversy made the federal agency that allocates federal arts money, the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), a target for national disdain.
If the late 1990s were the nadir of federal arts funding in America (funding hit an all-time low of $97.6 million in 2000) since the turn of this century, the numbers have started to creep up. This year, the NEA received $155 million in funding, with an additional $50 million as part of President Obama’s stimulus plan.
But these small victories are not easy ones for the arts community. Fortunately, the arts sector has two champions in Congress who co-chair the House Arts Caucus, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and Rep. Todd Russell Platts (R-PA), both of whom I spoke to separately via phone about the state of federal arts funding today.
A longtime art advocate and a powerful voice in Congress, Rep. Slaughter of Western New York mentioned that while President Ronald Reagan “zeroed out arts funding,” it was also the period when the House Arts Caucus was established. “The Mapplethorpe controversy was a major problem in the 1990s and in 1994, we had people who were being elected to Congress to kill the NEA,” she explains. “They thought it was decadent and didn’t fit their pattern of decency.”
After the turmoil and culture wars of the 1990s, things changed after the 1999 elections. According to Rep. Slaughter: “[Arts funding] did better under President Bush and now with President Obama, we have a more sympathetic ear.”
Straight from the Source
Melanie Pullen-American Revolution Soldier
New media tools are a rich addition to an art teacher’s toolbox and the Web is overflowing with opportunities to discover new artists and art forms. Here in San Francisco, we are fortunate to be surrounded by a myriad of creative folks. Our public media station, KQED produces two artist documentary series, Spark and Gallery Crawl which, like Art:21 Web Exclusive content, are available for free download as video podcasts from iTunes, where you can edit video podcast clips and compile them into playlists. As you start planning innovative, new curriculum for fall 2009, spend some time exploring the endless possibilities of podcasting.
Invite students to practice self-directed art study and become curators, creating thematic playlists highlighting artwork that speaks to their sensibilities. As they discover new artists on iTunes or ArtBabble.org, students should practice critical viewing skills and consider how they might create their own podcast highlighting an emerging artist from their school or community. What further questions do students have for the artists they “meet” in the videos? How would they conduct an interview? Would they include music or graphics? There are endless new media production tools available to our students today, and it’s entirely possible that they’ll be interested in starting their own artist documentary series.
For a specific example of a thematic playlist, take a look at Melanie Pullen’s interview and soldier-focused photographs in her exhibition Violent Times on Gallery Crawl and compare it with Art:21 Season 2 photographer, Collier Schorr’s series of German youth in uniform. How are Pullen and Schorr’s photographs fundamentally similar, and how do the artists’ intentions differ? How does each artist’s treatment of her subjects differ? Do the photographs seem feminine, masculine, or both? Are there other portraitists or photographers who come to mind when viewing these artists’ work? Who are they? Students might choose to create a playlist of video podcasts based on a theme or genre, and close the playlist with their own piece of media such as a video response or short film that ties in with the selected topic.
As Joe Fusaro and Olivia Gude mentioned in their panel discussion at this year’s NAEA conference, teachers should try making less art with their students and focus on thematic study of contemporary artists, considering their relation to artists throughout history. By exploring renowned and emerging artists online and learning about artists’ intentions straight from the source, students will begin to intuitively make connections with their own art-making practices, and be inspired to experiment with fresh ideas and new media tools.
Kristin Farr is an artist and Project Supervisor for Arts Education at KQED in San Francisco.
President Obama, with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., signing the $787 billion stimulus bill at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in February. (via NYTimes.com, photo by Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)
Talking about federal arts funding in America can be very confusing because of the many facts and figures. So, in an effort to understand the current and historic levels of federal funds that artists of all types have enjoyed, and to better understand the economic impact of the arts in America, I have compiled the following data from online sources for Part 1 of this two-part series. Part 2 is an interview with both Congressional Arts Caucus Co-Chairs, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and Rep. Todd Russell Platts (R-PA) about federal funding for the arts, and will post on Thursday.
STIMULUS ARTS FUNDING TODAY
Current funding for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA): $155 million
2009 Stimulus Bill
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (aka 2009 Stimulus Bill): $787 billion
Arts portion of the Stimulus Bill: $50 million (0.006%)
- 40% for state & regional arts organizations
- 60% to arts projects competing for NEA grants
Other arts-related funding in the Stimulus Bill:
- $150 million for infrastructure repairs at the Smithsonian
What the Arts Does For America Economically (via Americans for the Arts)
- There are approximately 100,000 nonprofit arts organizations in America, which spend $63.1 billion annually.
- There are more full-time jobs (incl. accountants, designers, plumbers, union workers & engineers) supported by the nonprofit arts organizations than are in accounting, public safety officers, even lawyers and just slightly fewer than elementary school teachers.
- America’s nonprofit arts & culture industry generates $166.2 billion economic activity annually, including 5.7 million jobs, generating $29.6 billion in government revenue, of which $12.6 billion is federal revenue.
Letter from London: YBA Baracas
Work from the Chapman Family Collection, Courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube (London). Photo: Stephen White
There is a new display of contemporary British art at Tate Britain entitled Classified, whose title picks up on a number of predilections and inferences of the works it shows, all of which might loosely be termed Young British Art, and most of which has acquired the nostalgic hue of music you listened to as a teenager (of which more later). You know you shouldn’t like it, but you do. On one level, the title refers to the notion of classification and taxonomy, which so often forms the m.o. of contemporary artists that it might be time to send out a polite cease-and-desist letter to all artists everywhere.
Classified also refers to the idea of something kept secret, an esoteric nugget of knowledge. A cynic (I’m not one) would say that the YBA’s were and are (let’s stick with BA’s now, shall we? Or MABA’s) anything but clandestine. Their work for the most part grew out of an engagement with, even a dependence on, popular tabloid culture in the UK, making their sneery petulance as charmingly unorthodox and infinitely sellable to Americans as the Sex Pistols or Guy Ritchie films. And a separation from Americanness was as much a primary motor for the YBA’s as it was for the more or less contemporaneous Britpop bands. It’s just a coincidence that the glorious reformation of Blur at the Glastonbury Festival is taking place at the same time as this show, but there’s some satisfaction in drawing parallels between British bands’ rejection of the dominance of U.S. grunge in the early nineties and Hirst, Emin, and the Chapmans’ mussing up of the conceptual niceties and post-minimal good manners of U.S. art of the time. For all the fleetingly charming jingoistic bluster, though, “breaking America” remains the benchmark of success, in art and music, and several of these artists might euphemistically be referred to as “big in Japan”—in other words, not famous at all.
Meet the Season 5 Artist: William Kentridge
The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Compassion, premiering on Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Compassion features three artists — William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, and Carrie Mae Weems — whose works explore conscience and the possibility of understanding and reconciling past and present, while exposing injustice and expressing tolerance for others.
Who is William Kentridge and what does he have to say about compassion?
William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1955, where he lives and works. Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—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. In a now-signature technique, he photographs his charcoal drawings and paper collages over time, recording scenes as they evolve. Working without a script or storyboard, he plots out each animated film, preserving every addition and erasure. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge uses stereoscopic viewers and creates optical illusions with anamorphic projection to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions.
On the subject of compassion in art, Kentridge says about his own drawing practice (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):
In the activity of making work, there’s a sense that if you spend a day or two days drawing an object or an image there’s a sympathy towards that object embodied in the human labor of making the drawing. For me, there is something in the dedication to the image, whether it’s Géricault painting guillotined heads or another shocking image. There’s something about the hours of physically studying those heads and painting them that becomes a compassionate act even though you can tell that the artist is very cold-bloodedly and ghoulishly looking at disaster or using other people’s pain as raw material for the work.
That’s what every artist does—use other people’s pain as well as his own—as raw material. So there is—if not a vampirishness—certainly an appropriation of other people’s distress in the activity of being a writer or an artist. But there is also something in the activity of both—contemplating, depicting, and spending the time with it—which I hope as an artist redeems the activity from one of simple exploitation and abuse.
What happens in Kentridge’s segment in Compassion this October?
While filmed in 2008-09, the Compassion episode surveys works and themes that Kentridge has developed over the past twenty years, exemplified by the artist’s poetic narratives that draw upon the texture of current events and the sweep of history. “South Africa is very much part of the work,” says the Johannesburg-based artist, but asks “how does one find a way of not necessarily illustrating the society that one lives in, but allowing what happens there to be part of the work, part of the vocabulary, part of the raw material that is dealt with?” Shooting without a predetermined script when developing the charcoal drawings for his animated films—such as Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old (1991)—Kentridge’s experimental method demonstrates “thinking with one’s hands” and proposes an “understanding of the world as process rather than as fact.”
