Live Jitters, Mendocino Film Festival, and Real Art
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.
100th Exclusive & William Kentridge Exclusives, Carrie Mae Weems Uncut, the problem with talking, and screenings
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.
Karen Schmeer, the Maysles Brothers, & Art Doc Screenings in NYC
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.
Julie Mehretu & the Problem of Shooting Big
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.
Art21 Uncut: Water Gun Painting at Besant Hill School from Art21 on Vimeo.
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.
Art21 Uncut: Julie Mehretu Painting at Goldman Sachs from Art21 on Vimeo.
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?
