Pierre Huyghe | “Anlee”
EXCLUSIVE: Pierre Huyghe’s videos One Million Kingdoms (2001) and Two Minutes Out of Time (2000), part of the collaborative project No Ghost Just a Shell (1999-2003) with Philippe Parreno.
Pierre Huyghe’s films, installations, and public events range from a small-town parade to a puppet theater, from a model amusement park to a wildlife expedition in Antarctica. Revealing the experience of fiction to be as palpable as anything in daily life, Huyghe’s playful work often addresses complex social topics such as the yearning for utopia, the lure of spectacle in mass media, and the capacity of cinema to shape memory.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Pierre Huyghe.
LEARN: Pierre Huyghe is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Romance 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 | Pierre Huyghe, No Ghost Just a Shell (collaboration with Philippe Parreno), 1999-2003. (Left) One Million Kingdoms, video still, 2001; (Right) Anlee, original image, 1999. © Pierre Huyghe, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris/New York.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins, Charles Atlas & Nick Ravich. Camera: Martial Barrault. Sound: Gilles Metivier. Editor: Mark Sutton. Artwork courtesy: Pierre Huyghe. Thanks: Marian Goodman Gallery.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle | Casta Paintings
EXCLUSIVE: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle at home in Chicago, with photographs of the installation The Garden of Delights (1998) at the XXIV Sao Paulo Bienal.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s technologically sophisticated works use natural forms such as clouds, icebergs, and DNA as metaphors for understanding social issues such as immigration, gun violence, and human cloning. The artist’s strategy of representing nature through information leads to an investigation of the underlying forces that shape the planet as well as points of human interaction and interference with the environment.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle.
LEARN: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle 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 | Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, (Left) Doug, Joe and Genevieve from (Right) The Garden of Delights, 1998. Courtesy the artist and Max Protetch, New York.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Mark Falstad. Sound: Heidi Hesse. Editor: Steven Wechsler. Artwork courtesy: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. Thanks: Max Protetch Gallery.
Eleanor Antin | Inventing Histories
EXCLUSIVE: Eleanor Antin reveals the process behind her photographic series Helen’s Odyssey (2007), installed at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York, in particular the work The Tourists (2007) that recasts the destruction of Troy in the southern California desert.
An influential performance artist, filmmaker, photographer, and installation artist, Eleanor Antin delves into history — whether of ancient Rome, the Crimean War, the salons of nineteenth-century Europe, or her own Jewish heritage and Yiddish culture — as a way to explore the present. Antin is a cultural chameleon, masquerading in theatrical or stage roles to expose her many selves.
ART21: You enjoy making photographs, and you’ve made them over your entire career in many different ways. But it’s a mistake to think of you as a “photographer.” What is it that you like about photography? Is it because a photograph is always taking a picture of something that exists? There’s a reality that’s always built into it, no matter how abstract or fake the image?
ANTIN: [SIGH] You’re asking me to go back to the beginning. I can’t really remember… [LAUGHTER] I enjoy that a photograph announces itself. This is going to sound a little naïve to say now, but back then…
The photo comes with a claim to truth. Nowadays we know that’s bullshit. And in those days I knew it was bullshit. Continue reading »
Allora & Calzadilla’s Munich Harmonies
Check out this interview and footage from Vernissage TV’s coverage of Allora & Calzadilla’s (Season 4) concurrent exhibitions at Kunstverein München and Haus der Kunst in Munich. Kunstverein München includes several installations of “geological bunkers” with hidden opera singers and musicians plying militaristic beats and crooning apocalyptic. Continuing to explore the politicization of music, the collaborative’s Haus der Kunst show offers Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano, a new performance work that scrutinizes the famous Ninth symphony and its shared history with the museum’s architecture and both their subsequent usurpation by the Nazis.
Kerry James Marshall | Being an Artist
EXCLUSIVE: Kerry James Marshall discusses three recent paintings, all Untitled (2008), during the installation of his exhibition Black Romantic at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. The exhibition is on view through July 3, 2008.
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: You’ve said before that when you were young you knew you wanted to be an artist with a capital “A.” Do you see your recent portraits of painters as being related to a mythic or romantic conception of what being an artist is and is supposed to mean?
MARSHALL: Well…it’s the idea of the artist. And it’s the idea of the artist and what the artist looks like or what the artist represents. You could say that those paintings are a kind of mythic image of the painter. But part of what that work is also attempting to do is to address some of the challenges that this whole notion of Black Arts faces.
Kerry James Marshall | “Black Romantic”
EXCLUSIVE: Kerry James Marshall discusses two recent paintings, both Untitled (2008), during the installation of his exhibition Black Romantic at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. The exhibition is on view through July 3, 2008.
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: Can you say a little about the title of the exhibition?
MARSHALL: The title of the show is Kerry James Marshall: Black Romantic. There are a lot of implications to that title. One of the reasons I used that title was because it relates to an exhibition that was done at The Studio Museum in Harlem a few years ago called Black Romantic (2002). That show was largely about how there’s certain groups of black artists who do a kind of work that is called Black Art.
I’ve always been interested in this place where popular art or vernacular works cross over and move from the popular realm into the mainstream, critical institutional realm. Certain genres of painting are more privileged and less privileged, and this idea of the Black Romantic, with it’s positive imagery of black figures, has a kind of sentimentality that is seen by many artists as being deficient.
For me, it is more important to resolve whatever those deficiencies are and to bring that work, on its own terms, into a space where it can be dealt with differently. Distancing yourself from it — I think that solves nothing. Continue reading »
Mel Chin | “Paydirt”
EXCLUSIVE: Mel Chin describes the origins and motivations behind the nationwide art project Paydirt in a keynote address to the 2008 National Art Education Association Convention, and visits multiple sites in New Orleans adversely affected by both Hurricane Katrina and lead contamination in the soil.
New Orleans is the second most lead contaminated city in the United States. Discovering that “the disaster was in the soil before the disaster,” Chin felt he had to do something about it as an artist. Speaking before a crowd of thousands of art educators from across the country, Chin recounts, “I remember standing in the ruins of the Ninth Ward and realizing as a creative individual that I felt hopeless and inadequate. And I was flooded by this terrible insecurity that being an artist was not enough to deal with the tragedy that was before me.” Thus Paydirt, and its sister initiative, the Fundred Dollar Bill Project was born.
Fundred focuses on the creation of three million artworks (personal drawings based on the likeness of a one hundred dollar bill) by children across the United States. These artworks, a collective creative action, will be delivered to Washington D.C. to raise awareness and funding for Paydirt. Ultimately Paydirt intends to heal the environmental impact of years of pollution on a city-wide scale. As Chin explains:
Eleanor Antin | “Helen’s Odyssey”
EXCLUSIVE: Eleanor Antin’s exhibition Helen’s Odyssey (2007) installed at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York. Antin discusses the historical figure Helen of Troy, and how she became the inspiration for photographic works such as Constructing Helen (2007).
An influential performance artist, filmmaker, photographer, and installation artist, Eleanor Antin delves into history — whether of ancient Rome, the Crimean War, the salons of nineteenth-century Europe, or her own Jewish heritage and Yiddish culture — as a way to explore the present. Antin is a cultural chameleon, masquerading in theatrical or stage roles to expose her many selves.
ART21: Homer’s story of Helen of Troy is such a rich parable of beauty and desire. And as an artist, beauty is something that’s your trade. What does beauty mean to you these days?
ANTIN: I’m a sucker for it. I know it’s absurd. It’s like ballet. To me ballet is an image of incredible beauty and incredible pathos. And a little dumb. [LAUGHTER] But that’s part of what I think the beautiful is. You can’t deal with the beautiful if you just don’t know how absurd it is and how dark it is underneath — how mortal it is. It’s got pathos because of its mortality. As Rilke said, “The beautiful is just the beginning of the terrible.”
An-My Lê | Becoming an Artist
EXCLUSIVE: An-My Lê discusses how she came to be an artist after studying biology, while printing a photograph from the series Trap Rock (2006) in her New York studio.
An-My Lê’s photographs and films examine the impact, consequences, and representation of war, framing a tension between the natural landscape and its violent transformation into battlefields. Suspended between the formal traditions of documentary and staged photography, Lê’s work explores the disjunction between wars as historical events and the ubiquitous representation of military power in contemporary entertainment, politics, and collective consciousness.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for An-My Lê.
LEARN: An-My Lê 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 | An-My Lê, (Right) Trap Rock (shot I) and (Left) Trap Rock (truck load out), 2006. © An-My Lê courtesy Murray Guy, New York.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix. Editor: Lizzie Donahue. Artwork courtesy: An-Me Lê.
Josiah McElheny | “Conceptual Drawings for a Chandelier, 1965″
EXCLUSIVE: Josiah McElheny discusses his film Conceptual Drawings for a Chandelier, 1965 (2005), shot at The Metropolitan Opera in New York.
Josiah McElheny creates finely crafted, handmade glass objects that he combines with photographs, text, and museological displays to evoke notions of meaning and memory. McElheny’s work takes as its subject the history of Modernism and the impact it has made on society, aesthetics, and contemporary thought.
Josiah McElheny is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Memory of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
ART21: Could you talk about the impetus for your film Conceptual Drawings for a Chandelier, 1965? You’re known primarily as a sculptor, so why did you decide to make a film?
MCELHENY: Well, my first idea wasn’t a film. Instead I wondered wouldn’t it be really interesting to remake one of those, not as a chandelier, but as a sculpture so you could really get close to it? Continue reading »
