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Other Art News ...
SECOND NATURE, Contemporary Scupture at LA's Hammer Musuem ... Read More
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Art:21 Season 5 Returns to PBS on October 7, 2009. Art21 was founded in 1997 with the belief that contemporary visual art is of real interest and value to a broad audience. By making contemporary art more accessible through public television and the Internet, Art21 affords an intimate encounter with contemporary art and the people who make it, encouraging creative thinking and self-expression. Art21 has won numerous awards and has been widely honored and recognized by esteemed organizations in both the art and entertainment communities. In addition to receiving multiple industry awards, Art21 has been invited to numerous film festivals and art education conferences Art21 traveled around the world in Season Five, filming the creation of new art on every continent (except Antarctica) and in museums, studios, galleries and homes in nine countries. Fourteen internationally recognized artists, from painters and sculptors to photographers and artists exploring the possibilities of new media, were filmed in their own environments and in their own words. The result is an exceptional opportunity for audiences to experience first-hand the complex artistic processes behind some of today’s most intriguing and thought-provoking art. Employing stop-motion animation, drawing, and performance, William Kentridge creates poignant films and stage productions that transform sobering political events—such as apartheid, revolution, and colonialism—into poetic allegories. Kentridge, a South African artist perhaps most famous for his animated films, and who works in diverse media including sculpture, charcoal drawings, and prints, was included in the 2009 Time magazine 100 most influential people and is currently staging Shostakovich’s The Nose for the Metropolitan Opera. Carrie Mae Weems takes inspiration from colloquial forms—a joke, song, plea, or rebuke—to create complex photographic series that scrutinize subjectivity and insist that pernicious stereotypes be held up to the mirror of everyday emotional and intellectual life. In a recent video and photo series, filmed around the time of the 2008 United States presidential election, Weems reflects upon the legacy of the 1960s that led to this recent historic moment. Doris Salcedo draws from the oppressive history of her country, Colombia, when creating her work. Her understated sculptures and installations embody the silenced lives of the marginalized, from individual victims of violence in her own country to the larger disempowered populations of the Third World. Jeff Koons utilizes symbolically charged images and objects from popular culture to frame his questions about taste and pleasure in modern society. His painstakingly crafted artworks, perfected by a small army of studio assistants in a modern version of a Renaissance atelier, were recently exhibited at a groundbreaking and controversial installation at the Chateau de Versailles. Mary Heilmann filters her inner world through her work, imbuing abstract paintings, ceramics, and furniture with references to memories and aesthetic influences ranging from popular music to her own Catholic background to cartoons. Florian Maier-Aichen is a German-born landscape photographer who lives in both Los Angeles and Cologne. His works—alternately romantic, cerebral and unearthly—question German Romanticism and myths of the American West. Maier-Aichen’s digitally altered finished works contain elements of the original photograph, but veer toward the realm of drawing and fiction rather than more traditional documentation. A young Beijing-based Chinese artist, Cao Fei’s videos, photos, and new media works explore perception, reality and inner lives in places as diverse as a Chinese factory and the virtual world of Second Life. Yinka Shonibare MBE was born in London and spent his early years in Nigeria. Working in multiple mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography and film, Shonibare draws upon his bicultural upbringing, European literary classics, 18th and 19th century history, and current events to create tableaus of dazzling color and patterns that provoke re-consideration of stereotypical colonial narratives. Art21 filmed Shonibare creating a new drawing “dedicated to the architects of the current economic crisis.” Cindy Sherman is well known for her photographic series in which she creates a myriad of characters, metamorphosing herself from Hollywood starlet to clown to society matron in her photographs and early films. Working alone in her studio, she draws inspiration as much from contemporary tabloids, TV and movies, as from fairy tales and canonical works of art history. Paul McCarthy has created works of video, installation, sculpture and performance throughout his career. His video-taped performances and multimedia installations satirize polite society, ridicule authority, and bombard the viewer with a sensory overload of spectacular imagery. His works, which riff on cultural icons ranging from Hummel figurines to Disney characters, from George Bush to Queen Elizabeth, are often controversial and aim to subvert tradition. Julie Mehretu is an accomplished Ethiopian-American painter. Her often large-scale abstract paintings and drawings reference techniques of mapping and architecture to achieve a complexity that suggests turbulent atmospheres and dense social networks. Art21 filmed Mehretu in Berlin, where she has temporarily relocated her studio to accommodate an enormous painting—commissioned by a major financial institution in lower Manhattan—which, in its conception, addresses the history of market-based capitalism. Influential mentor and teacher to several generations of artists, John Baldessari integrates elements of photomontage, painting, and language in his work. He employs visual juxtapositions to associate images with words and illuminate, confound, and challenge their meaning. Kimsooja is a Korean-born artist who now lives and works in the U.S. She combines the techniques of video, performance and installation in pieces which feature repetitive actions, practices and forms. Often inserting her own body in dense urban environments, as well as in isolated rural settings, Kimsooja’s video works at times blur the boundaries between aesthetics and transcendent experience. Applying strategies of mass production to hand-made objects, Allan McCollum explores the meaning of the unique work of art versus that of mass-produced objects for a society gripped by consumption. In order to create a recent new work, filmed by Art21, McCollum collaborated—strictly via email and phone—with craftspeople in Maine. He is best known for creating large quantities of nearly identical—yet still unique—component objects which then constitute a single work of art.
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