No doubt many of you are aware of the damage Hurricane Sandy wrought on a significant number of Chelsea galleries.  Maybe a little less publicized but no less important (or sad) was the damage done to the Smack Mellon residency program in DUMBO.  It was bad.  Per the Smack Mellon website –  ”all the aritsts’ studios were flooded with six feet of water, destroying all contents including their artwork.  And the studio program’s media lab, kitchen, and wood shop also sustained severe damage.”

Fortunately, Smack Mellon resident – and New York Close Up artist – Shana Moulton came out relatively unscathed; she lost her work space there, but her art (video media especially) was safe at home.

And even more fortunately, the good folks at Art Fag City are dedicating this year’s Wienerfest & Fundraiser to Smack Mellon’s recovery efforts.   It’s this Sunday December 16, 3 to 7PM at Postmasters in Chelsea.  Fifty percent of full price ticket sales will go to Smack Mellon relief.

So if you’ve got the cash, Smack Mellon could really use your help. Thanks.

Sadly, this is Nick’s last post for the foreseeable future.  At least we know he’s not able to contribute for good reasons. Season 6 production has started to seriously heat up, and I know he’s also very actively engaged in pre-production for a brand new, not yet publicly announced Art21 web video series.  He hopes to return to regular posting when work (and life) calms down. — Ed.

Photo by Mark E. Hogancamp.

Yes, unhappily, it’s my last posting.  But happily, I think it’s going to be of interest to a lot of folks — an interview with director Jeff Malmberg, the filmmaker behind Marwencol, the 2010 South by Southwest Film Festival Grand Jury award winner for best documentary.  Marwencol is a pretty remarkable blend of profile, first person confession, and art documentary.  Here’s the basic story, in the words of the Marwencol website:

Marwencol is a documentary about the fantasy world of Mark Hogancamp.  After being beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside a bar, Mark builds a 1/6th scale World War II-era town in his backyard. Mark populates the town he dubs “Marwencol” with dolls representing his friends and family and creates life-like photographs detailing the town’s many relationships and dramas. Playing in the town and photographing the action helps Mark to recover his hand-eye coordination and deal with the psychic wounds of the attack. When Mark and his photographs are discovered, a prestigious New York gallery sets up an art show. Suddenly Mark’s homemade therapy is deemed “art”, forcing him to choose between the safety of his fantasy life in Marwencol and the real world that he’s avoided since the attack.

There’s a lot stuff already out on there on the film and director Jeff (collected on the Marwencol site) so I thought I’d take the opportunity to ask some intentionally non-context setting, but hopefully thought-provoking questions, while still hitting all my little Art21 pet obsessions.  But before we start, I should mention a couple of ways you can experience the film and art in person.  The Esopus Gallery in New York will be showing Mark’s original photos of Marwencol thru October 28.  And even better, the film has just started its gradual national release; it’s currently at the IFC Center in New York, and will open in a lot of other big cities in November and December.

Nick Ravich:  Thanks for the time, Jeff. Marwencol is really your first directing effort — but your background is in editing.

Jeff Malmberg:  That’s why I ended up getting the bug and wanting to try “directing” is because I edited a documentary a couple years ago and had so much fun with it, and I thought, wow, there’s just so many directions you can head.  You know, it was almost like you were writing with footage, and trying to create this portrait out of these hundreds of hours of footage that you had.  And so once I finished that up, it was called Red, White, Black, and Blue, and it played on PBS in 2007.  I thought, maybe I should try my hand at directing, not realizing of course that what I was really signing up for was the ultimate editing exercise.  The directing in this case was really just going out and trying to get to know someone and just mowing down as much footage as I could so that I could come back in the edit room and really live with it for a long time and see what came out.  So the directing was really a wonderful experience, but the film was made in the edit room.  And it was such a deep and rich subject that just kept getting deeper the more I’d talk to Mark.  And I knew that if I just shot…as much as I could, I could edit my way out of it.

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I’m back from my summer break and ready to change things up a bit with this column.  So instead of the usual long laundry list of documentary various and sundry, I think I’m going to keep it long but centered around a single subject.  So to inaugurate, I’m posting an interview I did back in the spring with someone who’s probably watched more documentaries in a year than I’ll see in my lifetime, Thom Powers.  He’s the documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival, artistic director of the “Stranger Than Fiction” documentary screening series in New York, and has just started up a new New York-based documentary storytelling festival called DOC – NYC, set to start in early November 2010.

Thom Powers. Courtesy Stranger Than Fiction.

Nick Ravich:  Where are you right now?

Thom Powers:  I’m in Hollywood, Florida, where I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks with . . . I don’t know if I told you but my wife and I have a relatively newborn child, going on nine weeks now.  So we are enjoying the support of her parents who live here.

NR:  Thanks so much for giving me the time.  There’s a lot of stuff about you online so I don’t want to cover old ground, but I wanted to start with some easy meatball questions for you.  I know you were actively producing documentary work.  Are you in production on something at the moment?

TP:  No.  I did that for a roughly 10-year period, from 1994 till about 2004.  And after doing that for 10 years, I was looking for a change.  I was passionately interested in documentary film and was burned out by production.  Which is strenuous work, as you know.  And it was around that time that I conceived the “Stranger Than Fiction” series, and then shortly thereafter got the job at the Toronto International Film Festival.  And sort of reinvented my career in programming.   I have a background as a filmmaker, so I think that’s an asset as a programmer.  I probably have a better visceral sense of what filmmakers have gone through, by the time they get to the festival stage, than someone who comes from a more academic background or who has never produced a film before.

NR:  I have to ask you about your experience at the old WNET-produced (PBS in New York City) arts show, Egg.  I was a big fan.  Though our show Art:21 is very different in a lot of ways, I see Egg as a progenitor.

TP:  Egg was a terrific show.  I’m very sorry that it didn’t last.  And I’m very happy that people like you have picked up the mantle and reinvented something like it.  The main piece I produced for them was a profile of the cartoonist Joe Saco, who pioneered a style of documentary war reportage in comics, and who comes out of my former life working for his publisher Fantagraphics books and my interest and friendship with him.  I did that piece and my partner did a couple of other pieces for Egg.  It was a great opportunity for us as filmmakers because the other films we were doing at the time were one or two year long projects.  And it was really nice to able to break out and do something in a short form more quickly.  It wasn’t terribly well-paid but it sort of covered the short amount of time you were going to spend on it.  For working filmmakers, it’s very valuable to have little outlets like that — where you can make a short investment of time and stretch your muscles in a different way; where you can work with different people, etc.

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Howdy y’all.  First a little news from Art21 production HQ.  After a successful shoot in London (expect an Exclusive on Season 5 artist Yinka Shonibare’s just-unveiled Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle work, installed on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, soon), we’re completely battle stations for a shoot that’s totally new for us and a little scary for me – a talk with Art21 artists Laurie Simmons and Oliver Herring, moderated by Robert MacNeil (of MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour fame) that will be streamed LIVE at 8PM on Wednesday June 23, 2010.  That’s right, LIVE.  A first for any Art21 production.  And that’s the scary part.  Three cameras and roll-in video, a big old switcher and soundboard, lotsa cables, a ten-person crew, and yours truly will be directing.  Please pass along any suggestions for calming my nerves and please check out the cool mini-site that Art21 web guru Jonathan Munar has built for the event, The Present Perfect with Art21.  There’s some new Oliver- and Laurie-related videos and a great opportunity for users to submit their own Oliver Herring-inspired dance video; select submissions may be screened and streamed at the event!

Mendocino, CA. Photo: Nick Ravich

In other news, I just got back from a really, really nice time representing Art21 at the 2010 Mendocino Film Festival in crushingly beautiful Mendocino, CA.  Contrary to usual festival practice, the programmers at Mendocino, lead by Pat Ferrero, paired individual Season 5 segments – as opposed to full hour episodes — with other related-documentary and narrative pieces.  Our Jeff Koons segment screened with The Great Contemporary Art Bubble (2009); Kimsooja with the 2010 Peabody Award-winning doc on contemporary origami Between the Folds; Julie Mehretu with the extremely charming 2009 Oscar documentary short winning Rabbit a la Berlin.  Probably the most entertaining, certainly the most clashing pairing was the Koons.  The Great Contemporary Art Bubble is an unashamed piece of arts muckraking in the Michael Moore vein:  a funny, snarky, easily-offended, at times breathtakingly unfair introduction and tour of the contemporary art market, led by British critic Ben Lewis.  It very effectively picks off certain high-profile contemporary art sales – visually presenting them as deck of cards, a not so subtle gambling metaphor – to construct a narrative of the aughts art market’s rise.  And Jeff Koons is of course name-checked.

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Art21’s Season 6, at least as far as video production is concerned, is getting a little more real everyday.  We’re deep in the throes of pre-producing our first honest-to-god shoot for Season 6.  I can’t reveal many details but I can say that it’ll be in London, cover multiple artists (some London/UK-based, some not), is going to require some serious on location live translation, and – I’m deeply embarrassed to admit – will be our first truly all digital/tapeless shoot.  I’m furiously researching now how to make both the tapeless location and post-production processes work within our existing tape-based model.  Any tapeless geniuses out there can feel free to contact me here; I’ve got all sorts of questions.  It’s a brave, not-so-new world out there (but more on that later.)

Yinka Shonibare, "Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle," 2010. Photo Credit: James Jenkins.

One concrete thing I can reveal about our London shoot is that we’ll be covering the unveiling of Season 5 artist Yinka Shonibare MBE’s Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth project, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle.  Unfortunately we were a little too early in the game to shoot the work’s fabrication back when we originally shot with Yinka in the Fall of 2008.  But we’ll definitely make up for that now; expect the footage to appear in an upcoming Exclusive video, or at the very least an Uncut video.

Speaking of Uncut video, our industrious production unit shot two more Art21-sponsored artists conversations since my last blog post.  I’ll save you the last installment’s angst (the eternal problem of shooting a necessarily static, talk-based event) and just give you a nice video nugget instead.  And in early May, we shot a unique meeting of two super smart minds:  Art21 Season 3 artist Josiah McElheny and art critic and historian Boris Groys.  Modernism-obsessed Josiah and 20th-century Russian avant-garde expert Boris vibed almost too well (both were actually taking notes throughout their talk), discussing the more than ideological differences between translucency and transparency and, in the clip above, the very real dangers of the modernist glass box.

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As usual, there’s a lot of production-related ground to cover I’d like to cover.  First, I really need to publicly acknowledge what’s hopefully no longer a private landmark, the release of our 100th Exclusive video last Friday, William Kentridge: Pain & Sympathy.  Rather than bore you with some self-congratulatory shout outs to the folks who’ve been responsible for this two years (and counting) effort – Art21 associate curator Wes Miller and web manager Jonathan Munar; freelance editors Mark Sutton, Lizzie Donahue, Mary Ann Toman, Joaquin Perez, Paulo Padilha, and Jenny Chiurco; Art21 Executive Director Susan Sollins and Series Producer Eve Moros Ortega; Art21 production coordinators Larissa Nikola-Lisa and Ian Forster – I thought I’d take this as a chance to pull back the curtain on our online video production process.

The trio of Exclusive William Kentridge videos we’ve released so far – Breathe, Return, and Pain & Sympathy – are a great way to start. Each had the same starting point – a multiple day shoot at William Kentridge’s studio in Johannesburg, South Africa in the Fall of 2008 (initially intended for the Kentridge Season 5 broadcast segment) – but each had a different editorial genesis and trajectory. A  little breakdown of which will, hopefully, shed some new and interesting light on our online video production process.

The Breathe Exclusive may be in a way the most typical. It started quite literally as an outtake from the broadcast segment, a sequence that didn’t quite make the final cut; Wes Miller and myself, Art21’s online video producers, inherited it from the broadcast segment’s editor, Mark Sutton.  After seeing it for the first time, there was little question in my mind of whether it would make the Exclusive cut.  I loved the immersive quality of it, how quickly you’re dropped in on William’s creative process.  But I loved the quick pay-off even more.  It’s rare that an artist’s process can yield such a complete narrative cycle – a beginning (organizing of cut papers),  middle (paper fanning), and end (footage in camera monitor) – in such a short time frame.

The Return Exclusive started, embryonically, as a broadcast segment outtake – basically an uncut 45-second clip of the composer sequence from Kentridge’s original Return video.  Wes and I were intrigued when we first saw it.  Editorially, it gave us the opportunity to give an idea central to the broadcast segment – William’s fascination with the messily human process of visual perception – a new wrinkle.  But we knew we wanted to deliver something more fleshed out, something a bit more directed than just an extended clip.  Digging further into the broadcast footage, we discovered we had footage of William actively describing the work at a laptop in his studio (footage not exploited in the broadcast segment).  That footage became the skeleton for the segment, the support upon which we could extend and further clip from William’s original video. As we cut the piece, we realized that we were battling against the same perceptual conundrum that William’s describes in his video – our desperate need to resolve chaos into order.  As producers, our particular balancing act was to find a way to reveal enough of each individual sequence to suggest some kind of resolution, but not so much that we’ve given away the punchline.

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“La Danse—The Paris Opera Ballet,” 2009. Directed by Frederick Wiseman.

Though it’s been a particularly busy past few weeks here at Art21 production HQ – creating new exclusive videos, shooting the preparation and rehearsals for William Kentridge’s Nose production at the Metropolitan Opera, and in general getting ready for our next season – this has also been quite a fertile time for documentary screenings. So I thought I’d extend my last post and talk about some more hard-to-resist documentary offerings in New York City and beyond.

But first, in my last post, I mentioned the passing of the acclaimed documentary editor Karen Schmeer. One of the very hopeful things to come out of this very, very sad event is the establishment of the Karen Schmeer Editing Fellowship. Here’s the description in the words of the website:

“The Karen Schmeer Editing Fellowship has been established to honor the memory and spirit of Karen. The yearlong experience encourages and champions the talent of an emerging editor. The fellowship provides opportunities to help cultivate an editor’s artistry and craft and to expand his or her professional and creative community.”

Now, on to the screenings. This programming can’t really be defined as art-related, though; the films are a little too important and interesting to pass up for editorial niceties. First, I really need to mention the yearlong screening series of the films of legendary and still active documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman at the Modern Museum of Art in New York.  MoMA is showing all his films to date – a remarkable 39 works, including his latest project, Boxing Gym (2009) – through the end of the year. If you’re anywhere in the area, it behooves you to at least catch one. And if you’re interested in an almost encyclopedic depiction of the world on film, then take this probably once in a lifetime chance and see all of them (and if you do, I’d love to hear from you). Though I’m sad to report that classics like Titicut Follies (1967) – once banned by the Massachusetts Supreme Court – and High School (1968) have already shown, there’s still a lot of great screenings left. Next up is Juvenile Court (1973) on March 18. Go here for the schedule. And if you’re looking for a little help in navigating an admittedly intimidating body of work, check out filmmaker and avowed Wiseman fan Errol Morris’s amusingly alternative guide here.

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Before I do anything, I want to mention the very sad passing of an important member of the independent documentary community, Karen Schmeer. Karen was killed in a hit and run accident in New York’s Upper West side almost two weeks ago.  Karen was an exceptionally talented editor with credits including Sergio (2009), Sketches of Frank Gehry (2005), and filmmaker Errol Morris’s Fog of War (2003), and Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control (1997.)  But more importantly, she was a friend to me and many others both in and out the production world. She will be greatly, greatly missed.

Karen Schmeer. Photo: Garret Savage.

Lots to cover but let me start with another Art21 Uncut first. The in-house Art21 production team, led by our newest member, Production Coordinator Ian Forster, recently got the chance to shoot at the big beautiful exhibit of Gabriel Orozco’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. So Ian and I spent a couple of quiet morning hours shooting Mobile Matrix – spectacularly suspended in the MoMA atrium – La DS, and a whole lot of other well-known and not quite so well-known Orozco works. For me, the installation of Working Tables, in the back area of the top floor gallery, was a highlight: the sheer density and variety of objects, many extremely disparate, yet all somehow connected. Below is a little uncut taste of some of the footage we shot.

Art21 Uncut: Gabriel Orozco at MoMA from Art21 on Vimeo.

Next up is something I’ve been hoping to do since I inaugurated this column and, given the current embarrassment of riches, have no choice but to mention. And that’s talking about the wealth of art documentary viewing opportunities in New York.

First up is the documentary presenting organization, Stranger Than Fiction. Screening at the IFC Center in New York for the past five years, Stranger than Fiction, in the words of its website, “presents an eclectic mix of documentaries – sneak previews and lost classics – followed by discussions with the filmmakers and post-show receptions.” Though not exclusively devoted to screening arts documentaries, it has shown a number of gems from the genre over the years. In mid-January, I caught a showing of the Maysles Brothers’ – and I’m sorry but the epithet truly works here – cinema vérité classic, Running Fence (1978), covering the epic struggle to install Christo’s and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence public artwork in Sonoma and Marin Counties, California in 1976.

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In our new column, On Location, Art21 Director of Production Nick Ravich breaks his silence and gives you the scoop on Art21’s production comings and goings including, among other things, straight-from-the-set reports on recent shoots and some (hopefully) enlightening discussions on those areas where television production and contemporary art collide. And if we’re lucky, Nick will expand his column to include some non-Art21 related musings, reviews, interviews, and other ephemera on the world of production and art in general. — Ed.

In a previous blog post, I had talked about a recent Art21 online video shoot with art teacher Lucia Vinograd’s rather amazing students at Besant Hill School in Ojai, California (Lucia is part of our Art21 Educators professional development initiative.)  At the time, I was only able to post a couple of screen grabs from the field footage, but now I’d love to give you an actual video sample. So below is a short but inspiring scene with Besant Hill School student Julie Yu painting with a very unconventional brush, assisted by fellow student Griffin Davis.

I’m also posting this short, unedited clip as a very informal way of inaugurating a new strand of Art21-produced video releases of (appropriately enough) more informal, off the cuff, backstage-revealing moments—stuff that’s a little less polished and structured than our “Exclusive” videos.  After two plus years of diligently producing online-intended video content, the staff here was looking to create a regular home for these moments that, for whatever reason, sometimes don’t make the final cut.  Additionally, the hope is that these clips point, in some way, to the behind-the-scenes production process, while also previewing future video “Exclusive” releases.

Julie Mehretu. Art21 production still, 2009.

And in keeping with today’s theme of amuse bouche video, I’m posting an uncut clip from an ambitious web-only video shoot that I know I definitely haven’t mentioned. We had the very good fortune to shoot the installation and final painting of Julie Mehretu’s monumental ten panel work at the new Goldman Sachs building in lower Manhattan (the initial creation of this painting in Berlin was an extensive part of our original broadcast segment on Julie.)  Last fall, over the course of a month, Julie and a team of studio assistants and a professional installation crew uncrated, unrolled, stretched, hung, and further painted the work, on site, in the Goldman Sachs lobby. And we were able to shoot some key moments along the way. So below is a video of the painting fully hung, but not yet finished, from the unique bird’s eye view of a scissor lift.

Now, part of the reason I’m posting this is because, well, it’s just plain cool and I wanted to make sure our viewers saw it, as well give them a quick look at the kind of stuff they’ll be seeing in our soon-to-be-released “Exclusive” segments drawing on this footage. But the other reason is a little less self-promotional. This particular shot – a vertiginous, downward angled tracking shot on a 20-foot plus tall painting that elongates the top “foreground” painting elements but compresses the bottom “background” painting elements – points to a much bigger issue: the difficulty of fairly, accurately, faithfully shooting art on video. Part of Art21’s mission is not to just represent contemporary artists “in their own words” (i.e. in as unmediated way as possible) but to represent their artwork in as a similarly undistorted way as possible. For modestly scaled, easel-size works, this is a relatively easy thing to accomplish. But for works the size of Julie’s – in this case an 80 x 23 foot painting installed in a narrow corridor — it’s basically impossible. There’s literally no position we could put the camera in that would give us a wide shot of the full painting, and certainly not one that wouldn’t create the kind of classic edge distortion – key stoning effects where right angles seem to bend at the tape — that typically happens when shooting wide angle. Additionally, the graphic complexity and density of Julie’s imagery – the tremendous variety of line, shape, and color – wreak havoc with interlaced video’s sometimes crude ability to give a stable, color-uniform image.

So what to do?

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In our new column, On Location, Art21 Director of Production Nick Ravich breaks his silence and gives you the scoop on Art21’s production comings and goings including, among other things, straight-from-the-set reports on recent shoots and some (hopefully) enlightening discussions on those areas where television production and contemporary art collide. And if we’re lucky, Nick will expand his column to include some non-Art21 related musings, reviews, interviews, and other ephemera on the world of production and art in general. — Ed.

If you’re willing to indulge a little Art21 navel-gazing for this very first post, I’d like to inaugurate this column by highlighting something I’ve been hoping to spread the word on for some time – our web exclusive video production. As a lot of you readers are probably aware, in addition to the content we specifically shoot for the broadcast series, Art21 has been actively shooting footage specifically for release on the web. Past exclusive pieces have included our three recent videos on Kerry James Marshall (On Museums, Being an Artist, Black Romantic).  But what a lot of folks might not be aware of is that, as opposed to the broadcast model where we hire outside crew, we’re using in-house personnel and gear to produce these shorts, soup to nuts. And it’s not just production staffers like coordinators Larissa Nikola-Lisa and Ian Forster, but other non-production folks like our Associate Curator, Wesley Miller, and our Education and Public Programming personnel, Jessica Hamlin and Marc Mayer, have all been involved. More importantly, we’re starting to expand the scope of these videos beyond Art21’s roster of broadcast artists.

And now’s a particularly opportune time to mention the widening range of this project because we’ve just come off one of our most ambitious and non-artist centered shoots to date: two full days shooting with the rather amazing art students and teachers at the Besant Hill School in Ojai, CA, and Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica, CA. Our subjects weren’t Art21 broadcast artists, but teachers and students who actively use Art21 in the classroom. (The teachers are part of our Art21 Educators art education initiative. They had participated in an intensive Art21-organized professional development session in New York last summer; this shoot was part of a follow up classroom visit with the teachers.)

At the Besant Hill School in ludicrously beautiful Ojai, CA, we shot with teacher Lucia Vinograd and her uninhibited Advanced Class. The following pictures can only really do the experience justice. And yes, you’re looking at students who were body painting-dancing, blind water gun painting, and acetylene torching (a la Season 4 artist Judy Pfaff.) Oh, to be young again.

Left: A Besant Hill School (Ojai, CA) student gets ready for a body paint performance. Right: Early Judy Pfaff? No, a Besant Hill School student draws with an acetylene torch. All stills are from Art21's HDV original video footage, shot by Nick Ravich, 2009.

These and other student projects were all precociously creative responses to Lucia’s semester long curricula, “The Uses of Chaos, Chance, and the Unpredictable in Art” — a lesson plan influenced by some of the chance strategies of previous Art21 artists, like Cai Guo-Qiang. Students were asked to set up an art-making situation where some primary creative/mark-making element was out of their control. (I wish I had an art teacher like that in high school. I’d be a much cooler person today.)

At the very urbane Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences in Santa Monica, CA, teacher Pam Posey – an accomplished artist in her own right — took her 9th grade art class down the street to the Santa Monica Museum of Art, to check out the Tell Me Something Good: A Collaboration between Kim Schoenstadt and Rita McBride show. The exhibition of photographs and documents is, in the words of the museum’s website, “inspired by the conceptual art exhibition, Art By Telephone (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1969), in which participants phoned in their specifications for their works of art.” A pretty heady premise for 9th graders but one that, as they got comfortable on the exhibit’s floor and were guided by Pam’s expert promptings, they were able to really bite into and discuss.  Are the instructions hindering or helping the artist’s creativity? In the end, are the instructions more interesting than the art? Moreover, this show and discussion dovetailed nicely with Pam’s on-going lesson plan, “What Roles do Rules Play in Art?” – itself nicely reminiscent of some of the rules-based thinking behind the work of Season Five’s Systems artists.

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