Art in the Twenty-First Century (2001) s03e02 Episode Script
Memory
WOMAN: I remember the view from my crib-- the pattern of flowers on the wallpaper.
I remember the layout of my family's apartment, the first place I lived.
I remember I wasn't allowed to play in certain fields around our home.
There were mines in those fields, still active from the war years.
When walking through old cities, I often think of the layer upon layer beneath my feet, like walking on old bones.
But I also marvel at old buildings-- generation upon generation keeping them just as alive as their inhabitants.
Many artists try to bring memories to life.
Let's watch and see where some of them lead us.
This is Isabella Rossellini.
Welcome to Art 21.
ROTHENBERG: If you don't know what you're doing out here in the Southwest in this kind of isolation, if you don't understand that you're supposed to have work and a purpose to every day, you're going to float off into the stratosphere or move very quickly back to an urban center.
( scraping ) The first year was a very hard adjustment just to light-- just to the amount of light here.
So I did make modifications in my studio plan to cut out some light and to reproduce the New York situation of floodlights.
I love red.
I use a lot of red.
I use innumerable tubes of white.
Uh, I try to dirty down most of the colors that I use rather than use them in their pure form.
You squeeze a tube of color and you see this bright green and it's just frightening.
You know, it's this pure color that somebody mixed up and you just have to immediately get after it and, uh, make it, you know, fight with orange or something.
I tend to make all my paintings looking down.
It's just a point of view that I've established since living here.
I think you don't have that in the city, but living on the hills and ups and downs and stuff.
And then being on a ladder so much, I'm starting to have this kind of natural way of not looking at something but down on it.
Say there was a dead cow in the creek once-- which there was-- mysteriously.
Um, I saw the cow from about 40 feet above.
And that painting became Galisteo Creek.
So I've taken what I learned outside and brought it into these interiors.
And now that's pretty much what I want to do with them.
And the studio painting became extremely green, but that was out of the preceding body of work-- the "Domino" paintings-- where I felt free to take green right out of a landscape context into any operation I cared to.
Green became a very exciting event.
It felt fresh.
Red-- red is just like part of my internal palette a a warm, warm tone.
And then my other favorite deal is dirty white, because it would be too bright and colorful.
And it's not my nature.
There's got to be traces of 15-year-old turpentine in those cans.
Every painting carries through the same brushes and the same moves as the last painting.
But again, if I need a clear color and I don't see that any of my cans are going to give me anything but, you know, the dirty down, I'll start a new can and actually once in a while wash a brush so it will be free of old colors.
I was a very social kid up through college, past college.
And, uh, no, and I don't think anybody that knew me in high school or college would ever have thought that I would have been successful at anything much less spending 80% of my life alone in a white room making work.
It's it's odd.
It was a wonderful world in the early '70s.
Artists worked with dancers.
It was very mixed up.
It was very interdisciplinary.
I performed with Joan Jonas, and that was so much fun.
And I had studied painting.
I was interested in painting.
When I got a studio and first started painting and then I started getting a little attention for my work and I had a show and I sold a painting.
So then I started making more paintings, trying to find out my identity.
And when I stumbled on the horse, I went, "Okay, this can be my Jasper Johns Flag.
" This can be nothing to me, because I don't like horses.
I can draw a line through it and make it flat.
I can take all the things that I've learned in the last couple years and negate painting as much as possible in terms of illusionism and shadow and composition and stuff, and that was my run from '73 or '74 to '80.
And that's what I guess I made my reputation on, because they were acceptable as paintings and acceptable as, um not going backwards.
But most artists really wish they had a series where one painting would lead to the next painting, and it would be a variation on it.
And that's what happened in my early career-- the horses.
But the paintings are more of a battle to satisfy myself with now and I do not have a sense of series.
This, as you see here, these are o snake paintings.
Two paintings that are about this idea I had called "meaningless gestures.
" And two paintings that are a reflection of my domestic situation in the house there.
And each of them, the second painting seems to complete the series, which is weird, because I'd like to get a hold of something and be on that idea for a couple of years at least.
But that's not happening at the moment.
I'm able to work through periods when there's no real important idea in my mind.
I can draw; I can learn to make a clay pot.
At least I find some reason to work just about every day.
Because the block is the terriblest.
It's just terrible.
It's terrible to have a couple of months where you can't You're disheartened, because you think everything stinks.
You just do.
It happens.
If you're not in your studio physically most every day, you've denied the possibility of anything happening.
So even if you're reading a detective novel, you should be there.
And then sometimes you just throw your book down on the floor, march off to a painting and say, "Ah, something's wrong here and I'm, you know " Pull the table over, throw my painting shirt on and get going.
And sometimes hours pass that I'm working.
But I almost always do something before I go in the house to watch the news.
I mean, even if I put a wrong stroke on something or change a contour, and that's the only stroke I did, I do it just to have done some work that day.
( bird cawing ) No, I think I'm remarkably lucky to be on this piece of land.
It's not that I think any special thoughts.
It's just I walk usually about 45 minutes.
It's just completely part of my pattern, you know, and sometimes I walk fast with exercise in mind and sometimes I amble.
It's a wonderful place to walk.
There is three or four different terrains to walk in.
It's meditative.
I'm always looking at the ground to look for a bead or an arrowhead or what seems to be two pieces of the same pot.
If you see, I think that piece goes there.
That one definitely goes there.
So it's a small piece of a 11th- or 12th-century pot.
I keep looking at this painting and thinking, why can't I just nail it-- just make it be whatever it's supposed to be and move on? So it's constant reviewing and I can't say what makes me say that's wrong, that stays, that goes, this should be longer.
It's, uh, it's sitting there and looking, and going, "Uh-uh, I have to do something.
" And it had to be done with color.
One's been bugging me for-- it's been around the studio for four or five months on and off, reworked.
And I kept thinking, "Oh, it's okay.
I'm not interested any more in doing this, so it's okay.
" But it simply wasn't.
It's closer I think now to where I can leave it.
It's very few paintings that come fast and sharp, like the small snake painting in there was two days, three days, and I don't want to touch it.
It is what it is and it's it It's, uh, I like it.
I'm not really a "less is more" person, but I figure a hand on a table suggests a human being.
I don't want to get too literal about things.
I want the viewer to be able to do the work, too.
And I find a dragonfly beautiful and a snake beautiful.
Yeah, and many things beautiful.
But it's not a a a goal to try for it or expect to achieve it in my own work.
I'm trying for, let's take truth some kind of truth about some kind of thing.
KELLEY: Right now I'm working on about the 30th tape in a projected series of 365.
And so it's supposed to be one tape for every day of the year.
( rhythmic drumming and clapping ) ( women squeal ) I I knew by the time I was a teenager that I was going to be an artist.
There was no doubt about that.
There was nothing else for me to be.
I think coming out of Catholicism, I have a real interest in ritual.
I mean, ritual is beautiful, but I never was a believer.
Yet I think my interest in art all along has been in trying to develop a kind of materialist ritual.
And I see all art as being a kind of materialist ritual.
When I first started working with stuffed animals, I was responding to the a lot of the dialogue in the '80s about commodity culture.
But I was really surprised that when everybody looked at these works I made, they all thought it was about child abuse.
Now, that wasn't anything I expected and not only did they think it was about child abuse, they thought it was about my abuse.
So I said, well, that's really interesting.
I have to go with that.
I have to make all my work about my abuse, and not only that-- about everybody's abuse, like that this is our shared culture.
This is the presumption that all motivation is based on some kind of repressed trauma.
My work is very reactive.
I'd make something, I get a response that I'm not I I had no idea I was going to get-- I don't reject it; I embrace it.
I run with it, you know.
That tells me what to do.
I decided to go back to my originating trauma, which was my student training, and so I took all these drawings that I did in college as an undergraduate which are perversions of Hoffmanesque compositional principles, and I relearned to paint that way.
And I did this series.
This is the first series of paintings I did in this regressive manner.
They're called The Thirteen Seasons.
They're oval-- I broke from the rectangular form because the oval, again, has no end.
And so it's eternal.
It's eternally recurring abuse.
In this kind of trauma literature, the parts you can't remember is called "missing time" and then you recover it.
Because I work so much with various kinds of tropes-- and they're image tropes or music tropes or performative tropes-- it interests me to try to bring them into my system in certain ways, you know, incorporate them.
It's part of this whole process of working through things.
Things start simple and get more complex.
Sense always comes after the fact in my work-- to make it, at first glance, acceptable, like I've seen some of that before or I understand that.
So it has to operate on multiple levels.
It has to be available to the laziest viewer on a certain level and then on a more sophisticated viewer as well.
I think what I make is beautiful.
I think it's beautiful, because terms are confused and divisions between categories start to slip.
And that produces, um what I think is a sublime effect, or it produces humor, and both things interest me.
And I I I guess I'm interested in a kind of sublime play or sublime humor.
Well, behind behind behind the mule is a man and then the fake horse.
Oh, that's better.
That's even better.
You got a man in there to fill up the gap-- that's better.
The man is the pitchfork demon? KELLEY: It's the pitchfork guy.
Stan? It's Stan, if you could get him.
And tell him not to swing his pitchfork around.
Yeah, do something like that.
Stomp, stomp, stomp.
( whinnies ) KELLEY: Day is Done-- the project I'm working on right now-- is kind of built around a mythos that relates to an earlier sculpture I did called The Educational Complex, which is a model of every school I ever went to plus the home I grew up in, with all the parts I can't remember left blank.
I think I want to try it when these cheerleaders get to about here, to give me a big scream, you know like, "Whoa!" Like that's the most wonderful thing you've ever seen.
The audience should do a big scream? Should they raise their arms like at? No, no, just just well, let me I don't know, let me see it.
Let's hear a big "Wha!" ALL: Whoo! Yeah, arms is good.
Lift the arms up.
Whoa! ALL: Whoa! Action.
Action.
( drum cadence playing ) KELLEY: All these videos are based on high school yearbooks.
It's not because I have any interest in high school or high school culture, but it's one of the few places where you can find photographs of these kinds of rituals.
WOMAN: Cut.
Stand this way a little bit.
Yeah, let's go for it.
MAN: Okay.
It's really close.
It won't be the same.
Okay, it's fine.
The the image is the same.
MAN: The image is KELLEY: The relationships are the same.
Almost all of this comes from writing, and and then later I tried to say, well, how can it be visually interesting? It has narrative elements, but it's it's not straight narrative.
KELLEY: Cut.
( laughs ) WOMAN: Good job, Stan.
All the writing is is associative, and it comes from my own experience, but it's very hard to, say, to disentangle memories of films or books or cartoons or plays from "real experience.
" It all gets mixed up.
So in a way I don't make such distinctions.
And I see it all as a kind of fiction.
I can't walk by myself.
I'm not responsible.
KELLEY: When I was younger, all my writing was generated for performance work.
I'm the sailor, but I don't have sea legs, sea legs.
But I don't walk and I don't talk.
( whistles ) So this project is very much a way for me to get back into writing and-- because I don't have the time just to do it.
I have to work it into my work somehow.
It's like music.
I didn't have time to play music anymore, so I had to make a project where I had that had to have music in it, so I forced myself to make music.
( Kelley playing eerie melody on electric organ ) KELLEY: Never had any musical training.
I grew up in a household where there was really very little interest in music, and they didn't teach music in school.
And, uh I grew up on rock and roll music, and all the musicians I knew were self-taught.
I've been playing noise music for many, many years.
But this project is really different because this is like no other music I've ever done, because it's all based on really, uh typical forms, but I know enough about that where I can fake it.
And, I mean, I don't know what I'm doing.
Say, I can't say, oh, that's this chord or that's this note, but I know what it sounds like.
And so we can piece it all together and it's believable.
Am I going to hear the, uh the orchestra sample too? MAN: Uh, yeah, you'll hear, you'll hear what you just did.
Okay.
Here we go.
KELLEY: With the computer, we can do everything ourself.
We don't need to get an orchestra; we can do all the editing here.
We can make films by ourselves.
( cymbals resonating ) ( drum cadence playing ) ALL: Whoo! KELLEY: My dream is to perform it live.
MAN: Let the final procession begin.
KELLEY: So that the whole thing is performed like, say, in a 24-hour period, so the day stands for the year.
( drum cadence continues ) It's very much like a passion play.
Though a somewhat formalized and ridiculous passion play, though its ridiculousness is purposeful.
CAST ( harmonizing ): Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary KELLEY: I think that's the joyfulness of it.
But then it's a black humor; it's a mean humor, so it's a critical y.
It's, you know it's negative joy.
But that's art, I think, you know, for me at least.
That's what separates it from the folk art that I'm going to-- that I still think the social function of art is that kind of negative aesthetic.
Otherwise there's no social function for it.
( women squealing ) ( upbeat jazzy music playing ) SUGIMOTO: This is my studio in New York, and I am on the 11th floor facing north sky.
This is a very traditional 19th-century painters studio in Paris.
And I I'm not using any artificial light here.
And all I do is this, you know, shading up and down and then I can control the light.
To me, this system, this method, still makes the best quality picture.
Our, uh we think we keep making inventions and makes tools as sophisticated as possible, but to me contemporary people tend to tend to rely onto the computer method and all the machines.
That's not good enough.
You need something more than that.
So this system, it's very hard to control, but it still makes the best picture.
So I'm against a kind of evolution, you know, this is ( laughing ) I am sticking to the traditional method.
( machine beeping ) I am very craft-oriented person.
But at the same time, I want to make something artistic.
The fossils works almost the same as photography.
To me, photography functions as a fossilization of the time.
( liquid dripping ) How my architectural series started, I visited so many early 20th-century architecture.
They are all famous.
They look so beautiful in the book, but if you actually go there, it's 60, 70, 80 years old.
They are, most of them, in very bad conditions.
To make them out-of-focus picture, all the wrinkles disappeared.
Stillness, well, that's something I'm not intentionally, you know, promoting it, but most of the people sees it and it's very quiet and serene.
In seascapes case, my subject matter is water and air.
That's the kind of most kind of abstract theme.
I find a spot that I want to stay, and I stay there maybe sometimes one week, sometimes a couple weeks, two, three weeks.
And then I just stay there, and just feel like I'm a part of this, you know, nature and landscape.
So far, I visited so many different seas, but I never be on the boat.
I have to be on the ground.
I start feeling this is the creation of the universe and I'm witnessing it.
Well, this is my miniature seascapes, Day and Night.
And I wind this up and it shakes.
So this is my, you know, famous Japanese earthquake.
Shall I do it here? Whoa.
Well, this is one of my fossil collection, 450 million years old.
And in this cabinet I call this cabinet as my Shinto shrine, portable Shinto shrine.
I have this mirror here and, well, the Japanese Shinto shrine, they always keep the mirror inside, that's probably the reflection of the old memory, ancestors.
And, you know, this is I'm worshiping our ancestors.
This is the earliest stage of the life formation in the world.
So this is what I have to pay respect.
Two years ago, I was commissioned to build a Shinto shrine in Japan.
You know, it's a religious institution and it's still active, but the building itself, it's so old and deteriorated so I was commissioned to rebuild this Shinto shrine.
So this is exactly 30 years since I first came to see this Large Glass, to see this Duchamp piece.
Actually that was the year I came to New York from California, after spending three years in California as an art student.
And that was the first things I did, make a short trip from New York to Philadelphia to see this Duchamp piece.
It seems strong and important.
The way you read it is your own creation.
He is kind of stimulating a kind of very abstract thinking of the kind of metaphors.
So there's no one answer to describe this, you know.
Well, this is the miniature which I made.
This was actually photographed in Tokyo, and what I photographed was the replica of The Large Glass.
I use eight-by-ten camera.
This is the original negative here sandwiched between the two thick glass like this.
And then this side is the positive actually, the contact print from the other side, negative.
I wasn't so aware of Duchamp's influence, but but after reaching at my age now, I feel very strongly how how much effect that he did affect on my career in art.
What I'm working on now is my show at the Cartier Foundation in Paris.
The Cartier Foundation, it's a glass box, it's a huge glass box.
I'm presenting a three-dimensional Duchamp Large Glass presentation in my way of presentation.
This is the bachelor section.
And this is the bride section.
This is each nine figures as a bachelor that's being represented as more like a machine-like figure.
That's why I'm related to this collection of my machine photographs.
The machine models were 19th century.
They served to demonstrate the very basic machine movement for the student.
We are getting into this upper part of the section called the "bride section.
" So this is there's supposed to be a bride with this very interesting formation of cloud-like shapes.
That's kind of feminine to me, so I decided to compare with my mathematical forms, like this.
This was made to be to show a student what's the mathematics, you know, three-dimensional mathematic theories can be seen in actual three-dimensional models.
I was very bad in mathematics when I was a high school student.
I loved physics, but my lack of understanding of mathematics made me think that I am not the proper person to get into physics.
You know, I found that I'm quite a visual person; I have to confirm everything by my eye.
So I became more like a visual artist.
Every museum show, I try to design the space.
It's very important.
It's not just a photography show.
It's more like I'm designing the space.
It's just like a space sculpture, like.
I want people to get puzzled first, you know.
As people walk in, the first probably people may think this is a minimalist sculpture show.
And then came all the way into the space and came back and all of a sudden this is a photography show.
So people pay only one admission and get to see two different kind of show.
It's very heavily discounted.
I have so many ideas being cooked in my brain and they seem like all impossible.
But sometimes it's it becomes reality.
So this is through my translation of my visual, like, visual understanding of how how I see things.
And then make make imagination possible to be able to show to everybody that's the task of artist, I think.
McELHENY: A very important part of what has led me to being an artist is the way that I am was going to Europe and studying these areas where they've always done glass manufacture.
I worked with glass for a year and a half before I went there.
And the reason why I went there in the first place was because I was interested in this story that I'd been told of it being this secretive, romantic, oral tradition that was only passed on person to person.
I think also what I was interested in is this idea of being an apprentice.
And in Europe that's still a very normal idea.
And I didn't go there with any kind of goal in mind except to just experience that.
The people I studied with were actually very much involved in the invention of mid-century modernism, so in some sense they were very, very far from the deep past.
In another sense they were very close to it because the way they were working essentially was unaltered for hundreds of years.
But they were in connection with these famous architects and designers and artists.
and been very instrumental in figuring out a way-- to adapt this tradition to make modern objects.
I've made these works that were about this connection between a glass factory and the designs of Christian Dior.
And they were displayed in an installation that was based on the 1952 Venice Biennale.
Those objects that were parts of that piece, they had to feel like a 1950s glass vase.
They had to look like a figurine, and they had to look like the specific dress they were based on.
And then they had to look balanced, or not too ugly, or not too Yeah, they had to have some kind of elegance.
So a lot of times, it's also, too, a kind of, you know, a basic visual elegance or balance that I'm looking for.
A lot of my work comes from memory in the sense that my work is a memory of objects.
All of my work is essentially derived from some previous source at some level.
A lot of times what I'm doing is sort of reimagining something or transforming it slightly, but it's always very much in connection to its source.
I feel lucky that I have the opportunity to know how to make some things myself.
I find it very pleasurable to really want to make a certain kind of thing and have an idea of how I want it to be, and then to get fairly close to that.
Stop.
It involves working with other people, and I like that aspect of it.
You can't stop in the middle-- it's like playing a piece of music-- so you know you have to be in its own time throughout the period of making it.
It can be very, very frustrating.
The problem is, is you can't touch it.
If you could touch it, it would be very relatively easy to do, so you have to manipulate it in other ways.
There's this visceral thing that you actually haven't touched it, so once it cools off, you know, overnight or something, I often have the feeling of, like, even though I recognize that I made it, I don't really believe it until I, you know, I take it out and handle it for a few days maybe, and then I start to, like, "Okay, yeah, maybe I made that.
" For me, what being an artist offered was being part of a community of people interested in ideas.
And that was really the reason from the beginning why I wanted to be an artist.
I did this installation based on this famous bar that Adolph Loos designed the same year that he wrote this essay called "Ornament and Crime.
" This famous essay describes how removing ornament from the world is more morally pure.
Basically it says primitive people are the people who decorate; that the natural course of progress in man is to remove this decorative impulse from our psyche.
And it is about making the world white, in the sense of a world without ornamentation, without individuation, without grayness.
Almost immediately it falls apart and becomes something really, really horrible, and especially when it becomes imposed upon the world.
Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome, and Isamu Noguchi, the famous American sculptor, met in a bar in 1929 and had a conversation in which they kind of invented a new kind of abstraction.
And it was an abstraction of total reflectivity.
And it was based on the notion that if you placed a reflective object inside a totally reflective environment that you would have this completely new kind of seeing and this completely new experience of form.
For this particular project, I wanted to use this technique of silvering the inside of the glass so that it's totally reflective to take advantage of this natural property of the glass, creating this perfectly smooth surface.
All a mirror is is coating the back side of a piece of glass with a coating of metal so that the light reflects back at you.
You pour silver nitrate on a piece of glass and it turns into a mirror.
It's very simple actually.
A recent show that I did was titled "Total Reflective Abstraction.
" There were three parts to it, three different rooms that each contained a different kind of approach to this notion.
One was this project about Noguchi and Buckminster Fuller.
I took Noguchi's forms and remade them as reflective objects.
And I created a reflective environment mostly based on his furniture designs and proposals he did for abstract landscapes.
The forms are reflective, and their environment, the base on which they live, is reflective.
They're about a kind of utopia.
And they're the utopia of where everything is connected, everything is perfect, seamless unity.
But it was important for me that these are models-- something that's never intended to go beyond the model stage.
One set of works were what I called "Mirror Drawings," which were essentially just a sheet of glass mirror put directly on the wall.
I made the glass itself, the piece of glass that became a mirror.
And at one point in the process I made this drawing with another kind of glass and then sandwiched it in with more glass on top.
Then when you stand in front of them, then suddenly you see yourself, but you see yourself overlaid with this pattern.
It was sort of this idea of this metaphor of what art is.
The experience of art is a kind of fusion of your experience of yourself and of the object.
In one of the other rooms is two competing versions of the history of 20th-century design objects.
The displays themselves are completely reflective on the outside, and completely reflective on the inside.
And then across the front is a piece of two-way mirror.
And the effect of this is that the objects on the inside of this are reflected theoretically infinitely in the mirror in the backside of the case.
You yourself are not reflected, because it's a two-way mirror.
The objects themselves are totally reflected.
So the reflections move a little bit, but basically all these reflections in the objects stay totally still.
So they have this very airless quality.
The definition of being a modern person is to examine yourself, to reflect on yourself and to be a self-knowledgeable person.
So this is sort of a history of what it is to be 20th century.
Here's these objects that represent culture that you know, that is around us, and then the reflecting on themselves in an infinite regression, in a kind of, you know, infinite narcissism.
So they're sort of, uh yes, this is sort of what the 20th century was.
I'm interested in the question of seduction.
And I'm interested in the idea of how do you seduce people to be interested in what you've done? Seduction often involves presenting something in a very kind of sumptuous way, and that attracts people.
I hope that my work functions to seduce you, so that you want to look at it.
Two sugars, no cream.
Thank you.
You know what I mean, Sam.
I'm not talking about being a star, or buying a house.
I'm talking about real dreams.
POLICE DISPATCHER: 232, we just got a 41.
( sighs ) I'm not even sure if I have dreams anymore.
I doubt it.
I really do.
( indistinct police radio transmissions ) You know, I used to keep this notepad and pencil next to my bed, just in case.
Lots of people do it.
( radio transmissions continue ) You know, wake up in the morning and write everything down quickly.
( laughing ) But when I would reach over for the pencil, by the time I'd grab it, if there ever was a dream, it's gone.
I've missed it.
It's like sitting in an empty movie theater.
Next time on Art:21: Art in the 21st Century.
WOMAN: You use metaphor to extinguish the unknown.
MAN: All anyone is trying to do is to try out some new ideas.
MAN: When you start doing what you really believe in, that's when you do your best work.
MAN: Art, unlike life, needs this heightening of reality.
I remember the layout of my family's apartment, the first place I lived.
I remember I wasn't allowed to play in certain fields around our home.
There were mines in those fields, still active from the war years.
When walking through old cities, I often think of the layer upon layer beneath my feet, like walking on old bones.
But I also marvel at old buildings-- generation upon generation keeping them just as alive as their inhabitants.
Many artists try to bring memories to life.
Let's watch and see where some of them lead us.
This is Isabella Rossellini.
Welcome to Art 21.
ROTHENBERG: If you don't know what you're doing out here in the Southwest in this kind of isolation, if you don't understand that you're supposed to have work and a purpose to every day, you're going to float off into the stratosphere or move very quickly back to an urban center.
( scraping ) The first year was a very hard adjustment just to light-- just to the amount of light here.
So I did make modifications in my studio plan to cut out some light and to reproduce the New York situation of floodlights.
I love red.
I use a lot of red.
I use innumerable tubes of white.
Uh, I try to dirty down most of the colors that I use rather than use them in their pure form.
You squeeze a tube of color and you see this bright green and it's just frightening.
You know, it's this pure color that somebody mixed up and you just have to immediately get after it and, uh, make it, you know, fight with orange or something.
I tend to make all my paintings looking down.
It's just a point of view that I've established since living here.
I think you don't have that in the city, but living on the hills and ups and downs and stuff.
And then being on a ladder so much, I'm starting to have this kind of natural way of not looking at something but down on it.
Say there was a dead cow in the creek once-- which there was-- mysteriously.
Um, I saw the cow from about 40 feet above.
And that painting became Galisteo Creek.
So I've taken what I learned outside and brought it into these interiors.
And now that's pretty much what I want to do with them.
And the studio painting became extremely green, but that was out of the preceding body of work-- the "Domino" paintings-- where I felt free to take green right out of a landscape context into any operation I cared to.
Green became a very exciting event.
It felt fresh.
Red-- red is just like part of my internal palette a a warm, warm tone.
And then my other favorite deal is dirty white, because it would be too bright and colorful.
And it's not my nature.
There's got to be traces of 15-year-old turpentine in those cans.
Every painting carries through the same brushes and the same moves as the last painting.
But again, if I need a clear color and I don't see that any of my cans are going to give me anything but, you know, the dirty down, I'll start a new can and actually once in a while wash a brush so it will be free of old colors.
I was a very social kid up through college, past college.
And, uh, no, and I don't think anybody that knew me in high school or college would ever have thought that I would have been successful at anything much less spending 80% of my life alone in a white room making work.
It's it's odd.
It was a wonderful world in the early '70s.
Artists worked with dancers.
It was very mixed up.
It was very interdisciplinary.
I performed with Joan Jonas, and that was so much fun.
And I had studied painting.
I was interested in painting.
When I got a studio and first started painting and then I started getting a little attention for my work and I had a show and I sold a painting.
So then I started making more paintings, trying to find out my identity.
And when I stumbled on the horse, I went, "Okay, this can be my Jasper Johns Flag.
" This can be nothing to me, because I don't like horses.
I can draw a line through it and make it flat.
I can take all the things that I've learned in the last couple years and negate painting as much as possible in terms of illusionism and shadow and composition and stuff, and that was my run from '73 or '74 to '80.
And that's what I guess I made my reputation on, because they were acceptable as paintings and acceptable as, um not going backwards.
But most artists really wish they had a series where one painting would lead to the next painting, and it would be a variation on it.
And that's what happened in my early career-- the horses.
But the paintings are more of a battle to satisfy myself with now and I do not have a sense of series.
This, as you see here, these are o snake paintings.
Two paintings that are about this idea I had called "meaningless gestures.
" And two paintings that are a reflection of my domestic situation in the house there.
And each of them, the second painting seems to complete the series, which is weird, because I'd like to get a hold of something and be on that idea for a couple of years at least.
But that's not happening at the moment.
I'm able to work through periods when there's no real important idea in my mind.
I can draw; I can learn to make a clay pot.
At least I find some reason to work just about every day.
Because the block is the terriblest.
It's just terrible.
It's terrible to have a couple of months where you can't You're disheartened, because you think everything stinks.
You just do.
It happens.
If you're not in your studio physically most every day, you've denied the possibility of anything happening.
So even if you're reading a detective novel, you should be there.
And then sometimes you just throw your book down on the floor, march off to a painting and say, "Ah, something's wrong here and I'm, you know " Pull the table over, throw my painting shirt on and get going.
And sometimes hours pass that I'm working.
But I almost always do something before I go in the house to watch the news.
I mean, even if I put a wrong stroke on something or change a contour, and that's the only stroke I did, I do it just to have done some work that day.
( bird cawing ) No, I think I'm remarkably lucky to be on this piece of land.
It's not that I think any special thoughts.
It's just I walk usually about 45 minutes.
It's just completely part of my pattern, you know, and sometimes I walk fast with exercise in mind and sometimes I amble.
It's a wonderful place to walk.
There is three or four different terrains to walk in.
It's meditative.
I'm always looking at the ground to look for a bead or an arrowhead or what seems to be two pieces of the same pot.
If you see, I think that piece goes there.
That one definitely goes there.
So it's a small piece of a 11th- or 12th-century pot.
I keep looking at this painting and thinking, why can't I just nail it-- just make it be whatever it's supposed to be and move on? So it's constant reviewing and I can't say what makes me say that's wrong, that stays, that goes, this should be longer.
It's, uh, it's sitting there and looking, and going, "Uh-uh, I have to do something.
" And it had to be done with color.
One's been bugging me for-- it's been around the studio for four or five months on and off, reworked.
And I kept thinking, "Oh, it's okay.
I'm not interested any more in doing this, so it's okay.
" But it simply wasn't.
It's closer I think now to where I can leave it.
It's very few paintings that come fast and sharp, like the small snake painting in there was two days, three days, and I don't want to touch it.
It is what it is and it's it It's, uh, I like it.
I'm not really a "less is more" person, but I figure a hand on a table suggests a human being.
I don't want to get too literal about things.
I want the viewer to be able to do the work, too.
And I find a dragonfly beautiful and a snake beautiful.
Yeah, and many things beautiful.
But it's not a a a goal to try for it or expect to achieve it in my own work.
I'm trying for, let's take truth some kind of truth about some kind of thing.
KELLEY: Right now I'm working on about the 30th tape in a projected series of 365.
And so it's supposed to be one tape for every day of the year.
( rhythmic drumming and clapping ) ( women squeal ) I I knew by the time I was a teenager that I was going to be an artist.
There was no doubt about that.
There was nothing else for me to be.
I think coming out of Catholicism, I have a real interest in ritual.
I mean, ritual is beautiful, but I never was a believer.
Yet I think my interest in art all along has been in trying to develop a kind of materialist ritual.
And I see all art as being a kind of materialist ritual.
When I first started working with stuffed animals, I was responding to the a lot of the dialogue in the '80s about commodity culture.
But I was really surprised that when everybody looked at these works I made, they all thought it was about child abuse.
Now, that wasn't anything I expected and not only did they think it was about child abuse, they thought it was about my abuse.
So I said, well, that's really interesting.
I have to go with that.
I have to make all my work about my abuse, and not only that-- about everybody's abuse, like that this is our shared culture.
This is the presumption that all motivation is based on some kind of repressed trauma.
My work is very reactive.
I'd make something, I get a response that I'm not I I had no idea I was going to get-- I don't reject it; I embrace it.
I run with it, you know.
That tells me what to do.
I decided to go back to my originating trauma, which was my student training, and so I took all these drawings that I did in college as an undergraduate which are perversions of Hoffmanesque compositional principles, and I relearned to paint that way.
And I did this series.
This is the first series of paintings I did in this regressive manner.
They're called The Thirteen Seasons.
They're oval-- I broke from the rectangular form because the oval, again, has no end.
And so it's eternal.
It's eternally recurring abuse.
In this kind of trauma literature, the parts you can't remember is called "missing time" and then you recover it.
Because I work so much with various kinds of tropes-- and they're image tropes or music tropes or performative tropes-- it interests me to try to bring them into my system in certain ways, you know, incorporate them.
It's part of this whole process of working through things.
Things start simple and get more complex.
Sense always comes after the fact in my work-- to make it, at first glance, acceptable, like I've seen some of that before or I understand that.
So it has to operate on multiple levels.
It has to be available to the laziest viewer on a certain level and then on a more sophisticated viewer as well.
I think what I make is beautiful.
I think it's beautiful, because terms are confused and divisions between categories start to slip.
And that produces, um what I think is a sublime effect, or it produces humor, and both things interest me.
And I I I guess I'm interested in a kind of sublime play or sublime humor.
Well, behind behind behind the mule is a man and then the fake horse.
Oh, that's better.
That's even better.
You got a man in there to fill up the gap-- that's better.
The man is the pitchfork demon? KELLEY: It's the pitchfork guy.
Stan? It's Stan, if you could get him.
And tell him not to swing his pitchfork around.
Yeah, do something like that.
Stomp, stomp, stomp.
( whinnies ) KELLEY: Day is Done-- the project I'm working on right now-- is kind of built around a mythos that relates to an earlier sculpture I did called The Educational Complex, which is a model of every school I ever went to plus the home I grew up in, with all the parts I can't remember left blank.
I think I want to try it when these cheerleaders get to about here, to give me a big scream, you know like, "Whoa!" Like that's the most wonderful thing you've ever seen.
The audience should do a big scream? Should they raise their arms like at? No, no, just just well, let me I don't know, let me see it.
Let's hear a big "Wha!" ALL: Whoo! Yeah, arms is good.
Lift the arms up.
Whoa! ALL: Whoa! Action.
Action.
( drum cadence playing ) KELLEY: All these videos are based on high school yearbooks.
It's not because I have any interest in high school or high school culture, but it's one of the few places where you can find photographs of these kinds of rituals.
WOMAN: Cut.
Stand this way a little bit.
Yeah, let's go for it.
MAN: Okay.
It's really close.
It won't be the same.
Okay, it's fine.
The the image is the same.
MAN: The image is KELLEY: The relationships are the same.
Almost all of this comes from writing, and and then later I tried to say, well, how can it be visually interesting? It has narrative elements, but it's it's not straight narrative.
KELLEY: Cut.
( laughs ) WOMAN: Good job, Stan.
All the writing is is associative, and it comes from my own experience, but it's very hard to, say, to disentangle memories of films or books or cartoons or plays from "real experience.
" It all gets mixed up.
So in a way I don't make such distinctions.
And I see it all as a kind of fiction.
I can't walk by myself.
I'm not responsible.
KELLEY: When I was younger, all my writing was generated for performance work.
I'm the sailor, but I don't have sea legs, sea legs.
But I don't walk and I don't talk.
( whistles ) So this project is very much a way for me to get back into writing and-- because I don't have the time just to do it.
I have to work it into my work somehow.
It's like music.
I didn't have time to play music anymore, so I had to make a project where I had that had to have music in it, so I forced myself to make music.
( Kelley playing eerie melody on electric organ ) KELLEY: Never had any musical training.
I grew up in a household where there was really very little interest in music, and they didn't teach music in school.
And, uh I grew up on rock and roll music, and all the musicians I knew were self-taught.
I've been playing noise music for many, many years.
But this project is really different because this is like no other music I've ever done, because it's all based on really, uh typical forms, but I know enough about that where I can fake it.
And, I mean, I don't know what I'm doing.
Say, I can't say, oh, that's this chord or that's this note, but I know what it sounds like.
And so we can piece it all together and it's believable.
Am I going to hear the, uh the orchestra sample too? MAN: Uh, yeah, you'll hear, you'll hear what you just did.
Okay.
Here we go.
KELLEY: With the computer, we can do everything ourself.
We don't need to get an orchestra; we can do all the editing here.
We can make films by ourselves.
( cymbals resonating ) ( drum cadence playing ) ALL: Whoo! KELLEY: My dream is to perform it live.
MAN: Let the final procession begin.
KELLEY: So that the whole thing is performed like, say, in a 24-hour period, so the day stands for the year.
( drum cadence continues ) It's very much like a passion play.
Though a somewhat formalized and ridiculous passion play, though its ridiculousness is purposeful.
CAST ( harmonizing ): Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary KELLEY: I think that's the joyfulness of it.
But then it's a black humor; it's a mean humor, so it's a critical y.
It's, you know it's negative joy.
But that's art, I think, you know, for me at least.
That's what separates it from the folk art that I'm going to-- that I still think the social function of art is that kind of negative aesthetic.
Otherwise there's no social function for it.
( women squealing ) ( upbeat jazzy music playing ) SUGIMOTO: This is my studio in New York, and I am on the 11th floor facing north sky.
This is a very traditional 19th-century painters studio in Paris.
And I I'm not using any artificial light here.
And all I do is this, you know, shading up and down and then I can control the light.
To me, this system, this method, still makes the best quality picture.
Our, uh we think we keep making inventions and makes tools as sophisticated as possible, but to me contemporary people tend to tend to rely onto the computer method and all the machines.
That's not good enough.
You need something more than that.
So this system, it's very hard to control, but it still makes the best picture.
So I'm against a kind of evolution, you know, this is ( laughing ) I am sticking to the traditional method.
( machine beeping ) I am very craft-oriented person.
But at the same time, I want to make something artistic.
The fossils works almost the same as photography.
To me, photography functions as a fossilization of the time.
( liquid dripping ) How my architectural series started, I visited so many early 20th-century architecture.
They are all famous.
They look so beautiful in the book, but if you actually go there, it's 60, 70, 80 years old.
They are, most of them, in very bad conditions.
To make them out-of-focus picture, all the wrinkles disappeared.
Stillness, well, that's something I'm not intentionally, you know, promoting it, but most of the people sees it and it's very quiet and serene.
In seascapes case, my subject matter is water and air.
That's the kind of most kind of abstract theme.
I find a spot that I want to stay, and I stay there maybe sometimes one week, sometimes a couple weeks, two, three weeks.
And then I just stay there, and just feel like I'm a part of this, you know, nature and landscape.
So far, I visited so many different seas, but I never be on the boat.
I have to be on the ground.
I start feeling this is the creation of the universe and I'm witnessing it.
Well, this is my miniature seascapes, Day and Night.
And I wind this up and it shakes.
So this is my, you know, famous Japanese earthquake.
Shall I do it here? Whoa.
Well, this is one of my fossil collection, 450 million years old.
And in this cabinet I call this cabinet as my Shinto shrine, portable Shinto shrine.
I have this mirror here and, well, the Japanese Shinto shrine, they always keep the mirror inside, that's probably the reflection of the old memory, ancestors.
And, you know, this is I'm worshiping our ancestors.
This is the earliest stage of the life formation in the world.
So this is what I have to pay respect.
Two years ago, I was commissioned to build a Shinto shrine in Japan.
You know, it's a religious institution and it's still active, but the building itself, it's so old and deteriorated so I was commissioned to rebuild this Shinto shrine.
So this is exactly 30 years since I first came to see this Large Glass, to see this Duchamp piece.
Actually that was the year I came to New York from California, after spending three years in California as an art student.
And that was the first things I did, make a short trip from New York to Philadelphia to see this Duchamp piece.
It seems strong and important.
The way you read it is your own creation.
He is kind of stimulating a kind of very abstract thinking of the kind of metaphors.
So there's no one answer to describe this, you know.
Well, this is the miniature which I made.
This was actually photographed in Tokyo, and what I photographed was the replica of The Large Glass.
I use eight-by-ten camera.
This is the original negative here sandwiched between the two thick glass like this.
And then this side is the positive actually, the contact print from the other side, negative.
I wasn't so aware of Duchamp's influence, but but after reaching at my age now, I feel very strongly how how much effect that he did affect on my career in art.
What I'm working on now is my show at the Cartier Foundation in Paris.
The Cartier Foundation, it's a glass box, it's a huge glass box.
I'm presenting a three-dimensional Duchamp Large Glass presentation in my way of presentation.
This is the bachelor section.
And this is the bride section.
This is each nine figures as a bachelor that's being represented as more like a machine-like figure.
That's why I'm related to this collection of my machine photographs.
The machine models were 19th century.
They served to demonstrate the very basic machine movement for the student.
We are getting into this upper part of the section called the "bride section.
" So this is there's supposed to be a bride with this very interesting formation of cloud-like shapes.
That's kind of feminine to me, so I decided to compare with my mathematical forms, like this.
This was made to be to show a student what's the mathematics, you know, three-dimensional mathematic theories can be seen in actual three-dimensional models.
I was very bad in mathematics when I was a high school student.
I loved physics, but my lack of understanding of mathematics made me think that I am not the proper person to get into physics.
You know, I found that I'm quite a visual person; I have to confirm everything by my eye.
So I became more like a visual artist.
Every museum show, I try to design the space.
It's very important.
It's not just a photography show.
It's more like I'm designing the space.
It's just like a space sculpture, like.
I want people to get puzzled first, you know.
As people walk in, the first probably people may think this is a minimalist sculpture show.
And then came all the way into the space and came back and all of a sudden this is a photography show.
So people pay only one admission and get to see two different kind of show.
It's very heavily discounted.
I have so many ideas being cooked in my brain and they seem like all impossible.
But sometimes it's it becomes reality.
So this is through my translation of my visual, like, visual understanding of how how I see things.
And then make make imagination possible to be able to show to everybody that's the task of artist, I think.
McELHENY: A very important part of what has led me to being an artist is the way that I am was going to Europe and studying these areas where they've always done glass manufacture.
I worked with glass for a year and a half before I went there.
And the reason why I went there in the first place was because I was interested in this story that I'd been told of it being this secretive, romantic, oral tradition that was only passed on person to person.
I think also what I was interested in is this idea of being an apprentice.
And in Europe that's still a very normal idea.
And I didn't go there with any kind of goal in mind except to just experience that.
The people I studied with were actually very much involved in the invention of mid-century modernism, so in some sense they were very, very far from the deep past.
In another sense they were very close to it because the way they were working essentially was unaltered for hundreds of years.
But they were in connection with these famous architects and designers and artists.
and been very instrumental in figuring out a way-- to adapt this tradition to make modern objects.
I've made these works that were about this connection between a glass factory and the designs of Christian Dior.
And they were displayed in an installation that was based on the 1952 Venice Biennale.
Those objects that were parts of that piece, they had to feel like a 1950s glass vase.
They had to look like a figurine, and they had to look like the specific dress they were based on.
And then they had to look balanced, or not too ugly, or not too Yeah, they had to have some kind of elegance.
So a lot of times, it's also, too, a kind of, you know, a basic visual elegance or balance that I'm looking for.
A lot of my work comes from memory in the sense that my work is a memory of objects.
All of my work is essentially derived from some previous source at some level.
A lot of times what I'm doing is sort of reimagining something or transforming it slightly, but it's always very much in connection to its source.
I feel lucky that I have the opportunity to know how to make some things myself.
I find it very pleasurable to really want to make a certain kind of thing and have an idea of how I want it to be, and then to get fairly close to that.
Stop.
It involves working with other people, and I like that aspect of it.
You can't stop in the middle-- it's like playing a piece of music-- so you know you have to be in its own time throughout the period of making it.
It can be very, very frustrating.
The problem is, is you can't touch it.
If you could touch it, it would be very relatively easy to do, so you have to manipulate it in other ways.
There's this visceral thing that you actually haven't touched it, so once it cools off, you know, overnight or something, I often have the feeling of, like, even though I recognize that I made it, I don't really believe it until I, you know, I take it out and handle it for a few days maybe, and then I start to, like, "Okay, yeah, maybe I made that.
" For me, what being an artist offered was being part of a community of people interested in ideas.
And that was really the reason from the beginning why I wanted to be an artist.
I did this installation based on this famous bar that Adolph Loos designed the same year that he wrote this essay called "Ornament and Crime.
" This famous essay describes how removing ornament from the world is more morally pure.
Basically it says primitive people are the people who decorate; that the natural course of progress in man is to remove this decorative impulse from our psyche.
And it is about making the world white, in the sense of a world without ornamentation, without individuation, without grayness.
Almost immediately it falls apart and becomes something really, really horrible, and especially when it becomes imposed upon the world.
Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome, and Isamu Noguchi, the famous American sculptor, met in a bar in 1929 and had a conversation in which they kind of invented a new kind of abstraction.
And it was an abstraction of total reflectivity.
And it was based on the notion that if you placed a reflective object inside a totally reflective environment that you would have this completely new kind of seeing and this completely new experience of form.
For this particular project, I wanted to use this technique of silvering the inside of the glass so that it's totally reflective to take advantage of this natural property of the glass, creating this perfectly smooth surface.
All a mirror is is coating the back side of a piece of glass with a coating of metal so that the light reflects back at you.
You pour silver nitrate on a piece of glass and it turns into a mirror.
It's very simple actually.
A recent show that I did was titled "Total Reflective Abstraction.
" There were three parts to it, three different rooms that each contained a different kind of approach to this notion.
One was this project about Noguchi and Buckminster Fuller.
I took Noguchi's forms and remade them as reflective objects.
And I created a reflective environment mostly based on his furniture designs and proposals he did for abstract landscapes.
The forms are reflective, and their environment, the base on which they live, is reflective.
They're about a kind of utopia.
And they're the utopia of where everything is connected, everything is perfect, seamless unity.
But it was important for me that these are models-- something that's never intended to go beyond the model stage.
One set of works were what I called "Mirror Drawings," which were essentially just a sheet of glass mirror put directly on the wall.
I made the glass itself, the piece of glass that became a mirror.
And at one point in the process I made this drawing with another kind of glass and then sandwiched it in with more glass on top.
Then when you stand in front of them, then suddenly you see yourself, but you see yourself overlaid with this pattern.
It was sort of this idea of this metaphor of what art is.
The experience of art is a kind of fusion of your experience of yourself and of the object.
In one of the other rooms is two competing versions of the history of 20th-century design objects.
The displays themselves are completely reflective on the outside, and completely reflective on the inside.
And then across the front is a piece of two-way mirror.
And the effect of this is that the objects on the inside of this are reflected theoretically infinitely in the mirror in the backside of the case.
You yourself are not reflected, because it's a two-way mirror.
The objects themselves are totally reflected.
So the reflections move a little bit, but basically all these reflections in the objects stay totally still.
So they have this very airless quality.
The definition of being a modern person is to examine yourself, to reflect on yourself and to be a self-knowledgeable person.
So this is sort of a history of what it is to be 20th century.
Here's these objects that represent culture that you know, that is around us, and then the reflecting on themselves in an infinite regression, in a kind of, you know, infinite narcissism.
So they're sort of, uh yes, this is sort of what the 20th century was.
I'm interested in the question of seduction.
And I'm interested in the idea of how do you seduce people to be interested in what you've done? Seduction often involves presenting something in a very kind of sumptuous way, and that attracts people.
I hope that my work functions to seduce you, so that you want to look at it.
Two sugars, no cream.
Thank you.
You know what I mean, Sam.
I'm not talking about being a star, or buying a house.
I'm talking about real dreams.
POLICE DISPATCHER: 232, we just got a 41.
( sighs ) I'm not even sure if I have dreams anymore.
I doubt it.
I really do.
( indistinct police radio transmissions ) You know, I used to keep this notepad and pencil next to my bed, just in case.
Lots of people do it.
( radio transmissions continue ) You know, wake up in the morning and write everything down quickly.
( laughing ) But when I would reach over for the pencil, by the time I'd grab it, if there ever was a dream, it's gone.
I've missed it.
It's like sitting in an empty movie theater.
Next time on Art:21: Art in the 21st Century.
WOMAN: You use metaphor to extinguish the unknown.
MAN: All anyone is trying to do is to try out some new ideas.
MAN: When you start doing what you really believe in, that's when you do your best work.
MAN: Art, unlike life, needs this heightening of reality.