Matthew Ritchie | Architect Benjamin Aranda
EXCLUSIVE: Architect Benjamin Aranda, of Aranda/Lasch, discusses his contribution to artist Matthew Ritchie’s anti-pavillion project The Morning Line (2008), produced in collaboration with engineer-architect Daniel Bosia & Arup AGU, and physicists Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok.
Comissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary for the 3rd Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Seville, The Morning Line opens today and will be on view through January 11, 2009 at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain.
Matthew Ritchie’s artistic mission has been no less ambitious than an attempt to represent the entire universe and the structures of knowledge and belief that we use to understand and visualize it. Ritchie’s encyclopedic project (continually expanding and evolving like the universe itself) stems from his imagination, and is cataloged in a conceptual chart replete with allusions drawn from Judaeo-Christian religion, occult practices, Gnostic traditions, and scientific elements and principles.
Matthew Ritchie is featured in the Season 3 (2003) episode Structures of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
ART21: What conceptual challenges emerged while working on The Morning Line (2008)?
ARANDA: One of the great meetings we had on this project was with the physicist Paul J. Steinhardt, whose theories on the universe influenced the structure of the project. Steinhardt is the physicist who developed the cyclical model of the universe, which is an alternative theory of how the universe was formed with multiple big bangs.
It was a landmark meeting for us because Steinhardt confirmed a suspicion we all had: that at the root scientific breakthroughs — what underlies them — is an enormous amount of intuition. He said that while science is very empirical, some of the initial breakthroughs are formed through these very intuitive moments that are then substantiated through more empirical calculations and research. Continue reading »
Matthew Ritchie Venice Video
On Matthew Ritchie’s The Evening Line project at the Bienniale Architecture in Venice, via MINI Space blog:
It’s not just about architecture here in Venice. Matthew Ritchie is an artist who recreates the universe as art with paper, lights and installation. For the Biennale he has collaborated with Aranda/Lasch and Daniel Bosia/Arup AGU to create a huge installation made up of fractals and site specific designs.
Kerry James Marshall | On Museums
EXCLUSIVE: Kerry James Marshall discusses his relationship to museums during the installation of the exhibition Black Romantic at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, which features five paintings from the artist’s Vignettes (2003-07) series.
Kerry James Marshall’s work is based on a broad range of art-historical references, from Renaissance painting to folk art. A striking aspect of his paintings is the emphatically black skin tone of his figures, a development the artist says emerged from an investigation into the invisibility of blacks in America and the unnecessarily negative connotations associated with darkness.
Kerry James Marshall is featured in the Season 1 (2001) episode Identity of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
ART21: What’s the relationship between your series of Vignettes (2003-07) and what’s commonly referred to as post-black art.
MARSHALL: The work of African-American artists has for a long time been seen more as a kind of social phenomena instead of aesthetic phenomena. The social implications of the work — be it identity politics and things like that — seem to be privileged in terms of the way the work is received, as opposed to any kind of aesthetic project or intervention the work might be organized around. And so if you read any of the critique that was made around the Freestyle (2001) show at The Studio Museum in Harlem, you’ll find an undertone that seems to suggest that the mainstream critical world and art aficionados were tired of this whole identity politics and multiculturalism moment.
If you examine the subjectivity that a lot of African-American artists address, it often has a kind of cultural, social, political, or historical angle to it. So for the mainstream to suggest that it was sort of tired of having to address those kinds of issues, then, what’s really left for these artists to do if that’s something that’s meaningful to them? On some level, I thought maybe the only thing that was left to do was to make paintings about love. And to take a cynical approach to the concept of love, to the concept of the Vignettes (2003-07), so that they don’t seem to directly address the social and political issues that had been relevant to me and maybe to a lot of other artists who want to make work.
I began by looking at a lot of 18th Century French painting — Rococo work — like Boucher, Fragonard, Bouguereau, and other artists who themselves are also critiqued but critiqued for a lack of political depth in their work, for the frivolity of the work and for the work being kind of saccharine and sentimental and overly puffy and flowery. I started to take those two things and see if I could put them together — to preserve a certain element of the social, political, and historical narratives that are still important to me, but also to deal with the sentimentality, frivolity, and excesses that are embedded in Rococo painting.
ART21: The paintings are a sequence of images, an animation of sorts. Were you thinking viewers would relate to them cinematically?
MARSHALL: They’re cinematic only in that it’s a sequence of images that constitute one motion. And so in that regard, it is cinematic in a sense because you’re supposed to be constantly aware of the rotation of the two figures. It’s five phases of a 360 degree rotation. But that’s the only thing that’s constant in the group of works, because everything else around them is different. It’s like they are different pictures but they are a part of a single sequence of action.
ART21: Why are they painted predominantly in black-and-white?
MARSHALL: One of the reasons I use the grisaille technique in those paintings was to deny a bit of the Rococo. If you take a genre of painting that’s recognized for being pretty or flowery, but you want to start to do some other things, then you have to strip away some of those characteristics. One of the first characteristics is the over-investment in color that those pictures would have. So I stripped away the color, which reduces a certain amount of sweetness in the pictures. Black and white always tends towards a level of seriousness, and you can use it to avoid sentimentality when you’re dealing with highly keyed chromatic kind of relationships. The only color note in there is the cartoony pink in the hearts. The pink is a way of refusing to deliver on all of the points of which grisaille is supposed to deliver. And I chose to paint the hearts pink specifically to emphasize the disconnection between the overtly romantic imagery in the foreground and the historical or political imagery in the background.
ART21: What advice would you give to younger artists?
MARSHALL: The drive to be relevant — not just for yourself and the people who like your work — has moved a lot of artists throughout time to do the kinds of things they do. If you look how artists became artists in the past, there were smaller numbers of people vying for positions in the royal courts and churches and atelier system. They didn’t have five thousand people coming through the system back then. But now we have these graduate programs at universities that are putting out thousands of credentialed artists every year. And so what are these artists trying to do? They are all trying to get a gallery show. They’re trying to get the grants. They’re trying to get written about in the newspaper. They’re trying to get their work collected. They’re trying to do all of those things so they can keep on making their work.
Now the only way you can do that really is to distinguish yourself from what everybody else in the field is doing. And so if you were taught while you were in school that being a part of the club — being one of many amongst other artists — that that’s somehow worthwhile, then how do you sustain your development and your productivity? What do you aim for?
Whatever it is you’re aiming for has to be judged by somebody outside yourself as having a kind of value. But if you just leave that to people who are out there, who somehow supposed to know more about what you’re doing than you do, then I think you are in a world of trouble. If you don’t have any mechanism to determine to some degree what your chances might be of achieving the kind of success as an artist you want to achieve, then you’re in deep trouble. And I think there is a lot that can be done. I think you can decide. And the way you decide is to know what it is artists are trying to do and what is meaningful to the discipline above and beyond what you think is meaningful to you as a person trying to express yourself.
This is why I say it’s not about self-expression. If it were really just about self-expression, then that would require a receiver who is so sensitively attuned to your sensibility that they are capable of recognizing an intrinsic value — not in what it is you’re doing, but who it is you are.
VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller and Nick Ravich. Camera & Sound: Nick Ravich. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: Kerry James Marshall. Thanks: Jack Shainman Gallery.
PHOTO | All works: Kerry James Marshall, (top and center) Vignettes, 2003-07; (bottom) Untitled, 2008. Production stills, 2008, © Art21, Inc.
Roundup: 30 Weeks & 30 Exclusive Videos
Hooray! We’re celebrating thirty consecutive weeks of thirty exclusive online videos!
Looking back over these past few months, we’ve featured several 2008 exhibitions by artists such as Eleanor Antin, Kerry James Marshall, Josiah McElheny, and Gabriel Orozco. We’ve introduced you to the people who work with contemporary artists, from Alvin Ailey dancers to the students at George Jackson Academy. We’ve showcased innovative film and video, including Mark Bradford’s Super 8 home movies, Pierre Huyghe’s computer animations, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s infinite film, and Catherine Sullivan’s multi-channel works. We’ve traveled the world, bringing you artists and their work in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, Seattle, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Chile, Paris, and Mexico City. And we’ve mourned the passing of a truly great artist, Robert Rauschenberg.
All this, and we look forward to bring you a new online video—each and every week—throughout 2008 and into 2009.
We encourage you to comment on our debut videos (links to each below).
What are your favorite videos and why?
What kinds of stories and videos would you like to see featured in the future?
Gabriel Orozco | “Mobile Matrix”
EXCLUSIVE: Gabriel Orozco discusses the process behind his sculpture Mobile Matrix (2006), a permanent installation for the José Vasconcelos Library in Mexico City.
Gabriel Orozco’s sculptures and photographs disrupt conventional notions of reality. Drawing our attention to slips in logic, philosophical games, and hidden geometries, Orozco uncovers the extraordinary aspects of the seemingly everyday. His use of humble materials and means (graphite on bone, a ball of clay, a 35mm camera) engages the imagination through its disarming simplicity and intimacy.
Gabriel Orozco is featured in the Season 2 (2003) episode Loss & Desire of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
ART21: How did the Mobile Matrix (2006) project for the José Vasconcelos Library in Mexico City come about?
OROZCO: The new building for the library was a major project for the National Institute of Fine Arts and the Ministry of Culture in Mexico. They thought it would be great to have something in the building like an artwork. They called me and I told them I would like to see the building, but I would wait until the construction was a bit more advanced and then see if I get an idea that I think could work.
When they held a competition to make this building, it was all over the newspapers and it was a strong competition. I met with the architect that won the competition, Alberto Kalach, who I didn’t know before. He’s a well-known architect in Mexico, just a little bit older than my generation. We’ve since become good friends.
When the building was finally ready, I went. And when I was there, walking in, I liked it very much. It’s an interesting, open space with all these hanging bookshelves. It’s quite an impressive, monumental library. I had a couple of ideas, and one of these ideas was to have the skeleton of a whale in the center. Somehow it was more like an image than an idea. It came to me like a very clear image of this floating whale in the center of the bookshelves and the library. So that’s what I proposed.
Everybody loved it from the beginning. But whales are protected, right? There isn’t a way you can buy a whale skeleton. You have to either get a copy — a cast, a reproduction — or nothing. There isn’t a market for whale skeletons, at least in Mexico. It’s forbidden. But the fact that this is a national library belonging to the government, it makes it easier because I could just borrow the skeleton from our coastline. It became like an act of preservation, to put it in the hands of the library that belongs to all Mexicans, to the people.
ART21: What was the process of excavating the skeleton like?
OROZCO: When the project was approved, I didn’t have that much time to complete it before the building was finished. So I put together a team. I called a friend who was the director of the Museum of Natural History in Mexico and I said, “I need a whale skeleton. Do you think we can get one? How do we do it?” And he said, “Okay…let me make some phone calls.”
Because we were working for the Ministry of Culture, it was easy to get access to some government offices. We called the director of the National Park in Baja California, which is one of the three major national parks in Mexico. It’s a sanctuary for whales, which is why it’s one of the most famous. We traveled there, my friend from the museum and I, in a team of six. We arrived at a village, and from there we had to take a boat to the beach. There was absolutely nothing there but thirty-five kilometers of sand dunes. It was almost like a science fiction trip because we were on these motorcycles, riding in the dunes, looking for skeletons in this amazing landscape.
Nancy Spero | Leon Golub’s “Gigantomachy II”
EXCLUSIVE: Leon Golub’s Gigantomachy II (1966) and Nancy Spero’s Maypole: Take No Prisoners (2007) in her New York studio.
A pioneer of feminist art, Nancy Spero’s work since the 1960s is an unapologetic statement against the pervasive abuse of power, Western privilege, and male dominance. Executed with a raw intensity on paper and in ephemeral installations, her work often draws its imagery and subject matter from current and historical events such as the torture of women in Nicaragua, the Holocaust, and the atrocities of the Vietnam War.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Nancy Spero.
LEARN: Nancy Spero is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Protest of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
DISCUSS: What do you think about this video? Leave a comment!
PHOTO | Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, production stills, 2007. © Art21, Inc.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix & Merce Williams. Editor: Lizzie Donahue. Artwork courtesy: Nancy Spero. Thanks: Samm Kunce.
Matthew Ritchie | “The Morning Line”
EXCLUSIVE: Matthew Ritchie discusses his upcoming exhibition The Morning Line (2008) in his New York studio, with animated architectural schematics of the installation. The Morning Line will be on view October 2, 2008 - January 11, 2009 at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain, as part of the 3rd Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Seville.
Matthew Ritchie’s artistic mission has been no less ambitious than an attempt to represent the entire universe and the structures of knowledge and belief that we use to understand and visualize it. Ritchie’s encyclopedic project (continually expanding and evolving like the universe itself) stems from his imagination, and is cataloged in a conceptual chart replete with allusions drawn from Judeo-Christian religion, occult practices, Gnostic traditions, and scientific elements and principles.
Matthew Ritchie is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Structures of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
ART21: What are you aiming for the viewer to experience with your work?
RTICHIE: What I’m aiming for is to describe the whole spectrum of experience, simultaneously. There are an enormous number of things in the world that we know about, and there are an exponentially larger number of things that we don’t know about. And those things that we don’t know about affect the things that we think we know about all the time. So we have our daily experience, and we go through our day and things happen the way that we think they’re supposed to happen (sort of). But when something changes, we automatically accommodate to that change and read it as part of our life. This is the narrative of a person’s life, and one of the ways that we describe what’s going on is we tell stories. We always tell the stories after things have happened, not before. There is no real story of what’s going to happen next. But once something’s happened there’s always a story about how and why and what the reasons were.
In one sense what I’m trying to do is create a manual of all the codes — all the stories that have ever been told — or a way to read all those stories through a lens. What are those stories trying to describe? They’re all trying to describe the same thing, which is how everything works. Why is it, on any given day, one person crosses a street and has a great day, and another person crosses the street and is hit by a car and that’s the end of their life? We’re always trying to make sense of this dramatic shift in, this incredible potential for all of these vast, unknown forces to suddenly reach through — reach out — and touch you and that’s it. It’s always in the air, for all of us. This could be the day you win a million dollars, or the day your life is over.
So in a way these things that I’m making could be thought of as meaning machines that take apart all the stories, lay out all the parts in front of you, and then allow you to choose one little piece of the story. Instead of it being chosen for you by the forces of fate, I lay out the parts and say, “Here, you can actually pick this up and have a look at it.” See what it’s made of? Tap it on the table, bite it a little bit. See what’s going on with this piece of fortune.
A good metaphor is a pack of Tarot cards — in itself it’s not a story, but lay out the cards and it always tells a story. What I’m trying to do is give people a sense of control over the narrative. A story is not any more real or less real than anything else. A story is just something you do with your brain. It’s a function — like walking — you tell stories wherever you go. And stories are all made up of pieces. And you can change the way you understand the story by changing the way you understand the pieces. And if you can do that, in a sense you’ve changed the dynamic of how you relate to reality.
The piece The Morning Line (2008) is like a frozen piece of reality. It’s like in the movies, where everyone’s suddenly turned into a statue and only you can walk around the world. You can look behind the scenes where the puppet master is controlling everything. I’m trying to show you what’s going on, like a magician showing you his trick in slow motion: this is what it looks like when you stop everything and look at the parts you can’t see.
ART21: Where does the title for the piece come from? And what’s its relationship to music?
RTICHIE: The Morning Line takes its title from a British racing paper. It has the lineup of the day — all the horses — and what they’re going to accomplish. But to me it’s also a reference to the beginning of a new day, when everything is a new possibility.
The Morning Line building is really a gigantic musical instrument. It’s programmed with a series of scores that are based on the Medieval idea of polyphony, which is multiple sliding tracks that have a specific relationship to each other, but to the listener, the tracks always seem to be moving past each other. When polyphony was first invented, it was believed to be the Devil’s music because of its possibility for multiple interpretations. Instead of a very rigid set of canonical moves forward, you can actually have lots of different things happening at the same time. It’s about this idea of multiple voices.
Every time you come back to The Morning Line, not only does the piece track you through various technologies and produce sounds that move around you, but it’s constantly reorganizing its own musical mind. It will sing you a different song or tell you a different story every time you go through, which goes back to this idea that there’s always another story, but it’s always the same story.
ART21: The Morning Line is a physical building, and yet it comes out of an interest in drawing, in scale, in fractals. Is there a tension between the flat one-dimensionality of drawing and architecture in three dimensions?
RITCHIE: Initially the project was to take this idea of drawing, which I was experimenting with in smaller architectural pieces, and ask “Can you make a drawing that’s in a space as big as the world? Can you draw in space?” If you’re going to draw in space, your drawing has to be supported by all the rules of reality. For what I wanted to do, it meant designing a structure out of parts and each of the parts replicates itself at smaller and smaller scale. You can take this down and down and down, all the way into the nano spectrum from the size of a cathedral. We don’t need to think about a given building as having a single frame of reference, which is the size of a human being who’s going to go through the door, use the washroom, and sit down at a table and a chair. I want to think about a building that is designed for the universe to occupy it — the same way it occupies everything else — which is to say at every single scale simultaneously.
It’s a kind of trick that people have been trying to do for 3,000 years, though they never succeeded in solving the geometry of making a structure of this kind scale in three dimensions. There are drawings going back to Plato of this kind of geometry working as a model of the universe, but no one could ever make it because they didn’t have computers
The Morning Line is built out of what’s called a truncated tetrahedron, which is a pyramid with the corners chopped off. If you look past the tetrahedron shape and consider just the surface of it — the drawing on the surface — every point in this sculpture attaches to another point. The line becomes an infinitely recursive form moving through space. You can start to draw a trajectory with it. You’re drawing a journey, and a journey is always the thing that I’m most interested in.
We’ve sort of grappled with what to call The Morning Line structure. You could call it a quantum building, because any one of these tetrahedra can support across its surface twenty-two other smaller tetrahedra of the next scale down and so on. It can grow like a crystal, infinitely smaller in any direction. You could also call it a holographic building, because the premise of holographic theory is that the universe is the same at every scale. Just like a hologram — if you break it — it has a million little tiny holograms inside, all the way down.
The idea is that at every level it maintains the same integrity, but it also maintains the property of the drawing, which is that every little point will always connect to every other little point. There’s always a connection. It’s not just about bricks; it’s about lines moving through space and connecting to the next level down. The journey moves through scale. There’s a connection between the speck of dust that gets into the brake line and jams the brakes of the car that doesn’t stop in time to knock someone over in the road. In the end it all comes back down to a speck of dust. Shakespeare’s famous “my kingdom for a horse.”
VIDEO | Producer: Eve Moros Ortega and Nick Ravich. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Judy Karp. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: Matthew Ritchie and Aranda/Lasch. Thanks: Benjamin Aranda.
PHOTO | All works: Matthew Ritchie and Aranda/Lasch, studies for the The Morning Line, 2008.
Alfredo Jaar | Gramsci & Pasolini
EXCLUSIVE: Alfredo Jaar in his installation Infinite Cell (2004) in Santiago, Chile, and various works.
Through installations, photographs, and community-based projects, Alfredo Jaar explores the public’s desensitization to images and the limitations of art to represent events such as genocides, epidemics, and famines. Jaar’s work bears witness to military conflicts, political corruption, and imbalances of power between industrialized and developing nations, often taking the form of an extended meditation or elegy.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Alfredo Jaar.
LEARN: Alfredo Jaar is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Protest of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
DISCUSS: What do you think about this video? Leave a comment!
PHOTO | Alfredo Jaar, The Ashes of Gramsci, 2005. © Alfredo Jaar, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Lizzie Donahue. Artwork courtesy: Alfredo Jaar. Thanks: Fundación Telefónica, Santiago, Chile.
Matthew Ritchie | Apocalypse
EXCLUSIVE: Matthew Ritchie discusses the apocalyptic themes in his videos The Iron City (2007) and Raphael (2007), featured in his upcoming exhibition The Morning Line (2008) for the 3rd Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Seville. The Morning Line will be on view October 2, 2008 - January 11, 2009 at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain.
Matthew Ritchie’s artistic mission has been no less ambitious than an attempt to represent the entire universe and the structures of knowledge and belief that we use to understand and visualize it. Ritchie’s encyclopedic project (continually expanding and evolving like the universe itself) stems from his imagination, and is cataloged in a conceptual chart replete with allusions drawn from Judeo-Christian religion, occult practices, Gnostic traditions, and scientific elements and principles.
Matthew Ritchie is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Structures of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
ART21: Could you say a little about the inspiration behind the videos The Iron City (2007) and Raphael (2007) that will be featured in your upcoming project The Morning Line (2008)? Isn’t part of the organizing principle behind the works John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674)? What drew you to a text that’s over 300 years old?
RITCHIE: Paradise Lost is one of the great books that nobody’s ever read. It’s the greatest epic poem in the English language — everyone agrees — but nobody can get through it because it’s like ninety percent junk. But what it really is, when you spend a little time with it, is an index to all these myths. Milton doesn’t just tell the great story of the Judeo-Christian tradition; he also goes to great lengths to include all of the Greek myths and all of the Persian myths and all of the Egyptian myths. Everybody gets a name check, and he gives all the gods little jobs to do inside the new hierarchy.
All of the religions of the world before Christianity foresaw enormous cycles of activity. The world would be destroyed, it would be rebuilt, it would be destroyed, it would be rebuilt. There was always this anticipation that not only were the gods born out of some vast violent cataclysm, but they would then die in an equally vast violent cataclysm. Milton’s making an argument that Judeo-Christian time, or what we would call teleological time, is the first religion to propose an end to that: the world was created, there’s the fall, and then the world will end — the end. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the world as we know it is not going to come back again; there’s no reincarnation, there’s just Heaven and Hell after that. So Milton is trying to grapple with this enormous new tradition and bring it into some kind of order that includes all the previous traditions. And he’s also trying to include all of the scientific stories of his day as well, which is why there are these subsets on mining and on architecture. It’s like an encyclopedia of all of the interests of society at the time.
Milton’s text was also the first great result of the Enlightenment, which in England took shape as the Republican overthrow of the Anglo-Catholic monarchy, which was the last generation to believe in the Divine Right of Kings. The Divine Right of Kings was entirely literal. It meant members of the ruling class were the direct descendants of God on earth and they could therefore do whatever they wanted. And with Republicanism what you have is a new generation of people saying, “No, that doesn’t make any sense, we’ve got to change this.” So Paradise Lost is simultaneously a political text, an ideological text, a deeply religious and spiritual text, and an attempt to encyclopedically wrap up all of the loose ends of the Bible and re-present them in the light of anthropology and history and ethnography and say, “Okay, here it is — here, finally — here’s all you need to know. Here’s how it all works.”
The kind of thing that was very new in Milton’s time — this idea that human beings had the right to challenge divine authority — has now reached a kind of limit case where, for the last hundred years, it’s been approaching the logical conclusion that “human beings” means every single human being. Because in Milton’s day “human beings” didn’t really include women, it didn’t include slaves, it didn’t include serfs, it didn’t include people who didn’t have property, it didn’t include lots of people. It really meant a small, educated class of people could substitute themselves for the monarchy. But this new class was still in a kind of covenant with God. And this has radically changed, today, because the premise of universal enfranchisement has broadened to include all the people who don’t claim to have a covenant with God, which is everybody else in the world. So with Paradise Lost you have this incredible opportunity to experience something that’s sort of like the time we’re in now: this changeover between a kind of outmoded, late 19th century Republicanism — which has become a kind of residue — and something even more radical. Paradise Lost provides a very strong analogy to the intense historical period we are living in today.
ART21: How are the films and structure of The Morning Line itself influenced by Paradise Lost?
RITCHIE: What I’m trying to do for the piece, as a whole, is to invert this idea of information we all seem to share: that the more information you have, the more you know. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Information is really just the stuff the universe is made of and the more you have of it doesn’t necessarily mean the more you know about it. It just means the more you have. Continue reading »
Ursula von Rydingsvard | Giotto
EXCLUSIVE: Ursula von Rydingsvard in her Brooklyn, New York studio.
Ursula von Rydingsvard builds towering cedar structures, creating an intricate network of individual beams and sensuous, puzzle-like surfaces. While abstract at its core, Von Rydingsvard’s work takes visual cues from the landscape, the human body, and utilitarian objects—such as the artist’s collection of household vessels—and demonstrates an interest in the point where the man-made meets nature.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Ursula Von Rydingsvard.
LEARN: Ursula von Rydingsvard is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Ecology of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
DISCUSS: What do you think about this video? Leave a comment!
PHOTO | Art:21‚—Art in the Twenty-First Century, production stills, 2007. © Art21, Inc.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Mark Mandler & Roger Phenix. Editor: Steven Wechsler.
