ART:21–ART IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Season 5 of the Peabody Award-Winning Series
Fourteen Artists Reveal their Ideas and Perspectives on World Events in
Television's Only Series Dedicated Exclusively to Contemporary Art
The Peabody Award-winning series is a behind the scenes look at
major contemporary art and artists, demonstrating the breadth of
artistic practice across the country and revealing the richness of
multicultural and multigenerational talent.
Join us for a premier viewing. A 30 minute panel discussion led by Saint Mary’s College art history and art practice faculty follows each viewing.
The Gallery will be open from 6 to 7 PM both nights. Free.
October 7
EPISODE 2: Fantasy
Featuring artists Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons and Florian Maier Aichen
When: October 7, 7:00-8:00 PM
(A 30 minute panel discussion follows each viewing)
Where: Soda Activity Center, Saint Mary's College, 1928 St. Mary's Rd., Moraga. Free and open to the public.
Fantasy presents four artists whose works or personal stories transport viewers to imaginary worlds and altered states of consciousness. With works that seem at times hallucinatory, irreverent, and sublime, each of these artists pursues a vision first held in the mind’s eye.
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.
View the press release Oct. 7, 2009
Check out the trailer: Art 21 trailer-Meet the Artist
October 22
EPISODE 4: Systems
Featuring artists John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum and Julie Mehretu
When: October 22, 7:00-8:00 PM
(A 30 minute panel discussion follows each viewing)
Artists invent new processes to convey the attitudes of today’s supercharged, information-based society, examining why we find comfort in some systems while rebelling against others. Systems features artists who realize complex projects through acts of appropriation or accumulation. In some instances, they create projects vast in scope, which almost elude comprehension.
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.
