ART in the TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Screening Guides to the Seventh Season
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ART IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Screening Guides to the Seventh Season © ART21 2014. All Rights Reserved. pbs.org/art21 | art21.org season seven GETTING STARTED ABOUT THIS SCREENING GUIDE product—behind some of today’s most thought- provoking art. These artists represent the breadth This screening guide is designed to help you plan of artistic practices across the country and the an event using Season Seven of ART21 Art in world and reveal the depth of intergenerational the Twenty-First Century. This guide includes an and multicultural talent. episode synopsis, artist biographies, discussion questions, group activities, and links to additional Educators’ Guide The 32-page color manual resources online. ABOUT ART21, INC. includes information on the ART21 is a nonprofit contemporary art organization artists, before-viewing and after-viewing questions, and ABOUT ART21 SCREENING EVENTS serving students, teachers, and the general public. curriculum connections. ART21’s mission is to increase knowledge of Public screenings of the Art in the Twenty-First FREE | art21.org/teach contemporary art, ignite discussion, and empower Century series illuminate the creative process viewers to articulate their own ideas and interpre- of today’s visual artists by stimulating critical tations about contemporary art. ART21 seeks to reflection as well as conversation in order to achieve this goal by using diverse media to present deepen audience’s appreciation and understanding an independent, behind-the scenes perspective on of contemporary art and ideas. Organizations and contemporary art and artists at work and in their individuals are welcome to host their own ART21 own words. Beyond the Art in the Twenty-First events year-round. ART21 invites museums, high Century series, ART21 produces the online series schools, colleges, universities, community-based New York Close Up, which explores the lives of organizations, libraries, art spaces and individuals young artists living in New York City; Exclusive, to get involved and create unique screening events. presenting singular aspects of an artist’s process, These public events can include viewing parties, significant individual works and exhibitions, panel discussions, brown bag lunches, guest provocative ideas, and biographical anecdotes; and speakers, or hands-on art-making activities. Artist to Artist which features contemporary visual artists in conversation with their peers, discussing Home Video (DVD) This DVD includes Season ABOUT THE ART IN THE TWENTY-FIRST the inspirations and passions that drive their Seven (2014)—twelve CENTURY SERIES ON PBS processes; as well as film specials such as the segments in four one-hour Peabody Award-winning filmWilliam Kentridge: long episodes: Fiction, The first and only nationally broadcast public Anything Is Possible. ART21 videos can also be Investigation, Legacy, television series to focus exclusively on contempo- seen on Vimeo, iTunes, Blip.tv, YouTube, and Hulu & Secrets. rary visual art and artists in the United States and platforms. $29.99 | shoppbs.org around the world, Art in the Twenty-First Century introduces audiences to a diverse range of estab- Major underwriting for Season 7 of ART21 Art in the Twenty-First Century was provided lished and emerging artists working today, and to CREDIT LINE by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Public Broadcasting Service, Agnes Gund, the art they are producing now. A biennial event for Please use the following credit line in publications Bloomberg, The Andy Warhol Foundation for television, ART21 produces four one-hour episodes the Visual Arts, The Horace W. Goldsmith and publicity associated with your event: Foundation, the Robert Sterling Clark each season. The Art in the Twenty-First Century Foundation, the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen This event is produced in collaboration with ART21, Foundation, Toby Devan Lewis and Sikkema series premieres nationwide on PBS in the United Jenkins & Co. Additional funding provided by a nonprofit global leader in art education, producing States and is distributed internationally. members of the ART21 Producers Circle. preeminent films on today’s leading visual artists COVER, CLOCKWISE FROM TO TOP LEFT: Trevor Paglen, Through in-depth profiles and interviews, the and education programs that inspire creativity They Watch the Moon, detail, 2010. C-print, four-part series reveals the inspiration, vision, and worldwide. 36 x 48 inches. Courtesy the artist, Metro Pictures, Altman Siegel, and Galerie Thomas techniques behind the creative works of some of Zander. © Trevor Paglen; Katharina Grosse, One Floor Up More Highly, 2010. Soil, wood, today’s most accomplished contemporary artists. acrylic, styrofoam, clothing, acrylic on glass fiber reinforced plastic, 25K x 55 x 271 feet. ART21 travels across the country and abroad to CONTACT Installation view: MASS MoCA, North Adams, film contemporary artists, from painters and MA. Photo: Art Evans. Courtesy the artist. Please send inquiries to ART21 at: [email protected] © Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst Bonn; photographers to installation and video artists, in Elliott Hundley, Composition Orange, detail, 2013. Oil paint, paper, ink, chalk on linen, 84 x their own spaces and in their own words. The result Network Partners 168 x 2V inches. Courtesy the artist, Andrea is a unique opportunity to experience first-hand the Rosen Gallery, and Regen Projects. © Elliott Hundley; Joan Jonas, Reading Dante, 2007. complex artistic process—from inception to finished Performance for Performa at Performance Garage, New York, 2009. Courtesy the artist. © Joan Jonas. © ART21 2014. All Rights Reserved. pbs.org/art21 | art21.org fiction EPISODE SYNOPSIS Omer Fast born 1972, Jerusalem, Israel Katharina Grosse born 1961, Freiburg/Breisgau, Germany Joan Jonas born 1936, New York, New York What makes a compelling story? How do artists disrupt everyday reality in the service of revealing subtler truths? This episode features artists who explore the virtues of ambiguity, mix genres, and merge aesthetic disciplines to discern not simply what stories mean, but how and why they come to have meaning. In multichannel video installations, Omer Fast blurs the boundaries between documentary, dramatization, and fantasy, frequently generating viewers’ confusion. Fast plays with our assumptions about identity and the structure of dramatic narrative, revealing shades of meaning as stories are told, retold, and mythologized. Katharina Grosse creates wildly colorful sculptural environments and paintings that unite the fluid perception of landscape with the ordered hierarchy of painting. Her work is a material record—a story—and, perhaps, an inscription of her thoughts. Or, perhaps, it’s an illusion. Working in performance, video, installation, sculpture, and drawing, Joan Jonas finds inspiration in mythic stories, investing texts from the past with the politics of the present. By wearing masks and drawing while performing on stage, Jonas disrupts the conventions of theatrical storytelling to emphasize potent symbols and critical self-awareness. © ART21 2014. All Rights Reserved. pbs.org/art21 | art21.org fiction ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES Omer Fast Joan Jonas Omer Fast’s multichannel video installations blur A pioneer of performance and video art, Joan Jonas the boundaries between documentary, dramatiza- works in video, installation, sculpture, and drawing, tion, and fantasy, frequently generating viewers’ often collaborating with musicians and dancers to confusion. Fast often anchors his narratives with realize improvisational works that are equally at a conversation between two people—whether home in the museum gallery and on the theatrical subjects recounting their own stories or actors stage. Drawing on mythic stories from various playing roles of interviewer and interviewee. As cultures, Jonas invests texts from the past with dialogues escalate in tension, portraits of carefully the politics of the present. By wearing masks in calibrated identity emerge. Through repetition and some works, and drawing while performing on reenactment, multiple takes of given scenes build stage in others, she disrupts the conventions of shades of interpretation as a story is told, retold, theatrical storytelling to emphasize potent symbols and mythologized. Stories of origin, trauma, and and critical self-awareness. From masquerading desire mutate into one another, forming blended in disguise before the camera to turning mirrors genres that confound expectations and disrupt on the audience, she turns doubling and reflection narrative conventions. Projected into space or into metaphors for the tenuous divide between unfolding simultaneously on multiple screens, the subjective and objective vision, and the loss of work resonates with characters—whether a drone fixed identities. pilot, worker in the adult film industry, or a wife talking to her husband—who seem to express the elemental complications and disparities of their own identities. Katharina Grosse Katharina Grosse is a painter who often employs electrifying sprayed acrylic colors to create large-scale sculptural environments and smaller wall works. Interested in the shifts of scale between ‘imagining big’ while being small in relationship to one’s surroundings, she explores the dynamic interplay between observing the world and simply being in it. By uniting a fluid perception of landscape with the ordered hierarchy of painting, Grosse treats both architecture and the natural world as an armature for expressive compositions of