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place
& contemporary art
How does contemporary art address the idea of place? How do artists
working today reveal and question commonly held assumptions about
land, home, and national identity? The Art:21 documentary “Place” explores these questions through the work of Laurie
Anderson,
Richard Serra, Sally Mann,
Barry McGee,
Margaret Kilgallen,
and Pepón Osorio.
special features
See a slideshow of artworks showcased in the “Place” episode, watch
a video preview of the show, or explore a slideshow of artists from
multiple seasons of Art:21 discussing the theme of place in their
work.
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episode synopsis: “place”
"America is a country made of places," writes curator Thelma Golden
for the Art:21 companion book, "not just the places marked by road signs
and maps, but also the less tangible but no less meaningful places forged in
the crucible of memory, longing and desire." “Place” is shot on location
in New York, New York; San Francisco, California; Lexington, Virginia; Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania;
San
Juan,
Puerto Rico; and Bilbao, Spain.
"Most of the work
that I do as an artist, whether it's music, or images or a story,
begins with a place," says renown multi-media performance and recording artist
Laurie Anderson
in the introductory segment she created for Art:21. "A
room, a road, a city, a country...these places become jumping off
points for my imagination." Filmed on location in New York
City and featuring talking and tropical billboards, the Statue of
Liberty, a choreographed dance with red chinese fans, and a trip
to a Japanese grocery store, Anderson's whimsical work plays with
scale, point of view, and virtual spaces to create a fanciful dreamscape.
For this premiere opening segment, Anderson combines the roles of
artists and host. |
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VIDEO: |
Introduction by
Laurie Anderson |
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| The first featured artist
in the “Place” hour is Richard Serra. The segment follows Serra as he guides the viewer through
several massive installations he has done in New York, San Francisco,
and Bilbao, Spain. Having worked with metal for the past forty years,
Serra creates sculptures shape and stretch steel like rubber, carving
intimate moments out of public spaces. "I was surprised that
people who had absolutely no information about sculpture were able
to enter into these pieces," says the artist. "The experience
for them was fulfilling because, in some sense, it was startling,
it was new, because they couldn't locate themselves." |
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| The documentary shifts
to Lexington, Virginia where Sally
Mann is working in her studio on a new series of "dog bone"
photographs. “What I like about these dog bones is their ambiguity.
I mean, I love that aspect of photography, the mendacity of photography.
It’s got to have some kind of peculiarity in it or it’s
not interesting to me.” The work-ethic of Sally Mann, whose
intricate photographic techniques record the historical scars and
romanticism of the South, is as she takes photos both in her studio
and outdoors. The farm where Mann lives and works becomes a meaningful
backdrop as her inspired process of capturing it on film is revealed. |
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| "I like things that are handmade," says
Margaret Kilgallen, referring to the hand-painted signs of San Francisco's
Mission District that influenced her work. "In that they did
it themselves—that's what I find beautiful." The segment
follows Kilgallen as she bikes around the Mission, paints in her
studio, visits the San Francisco train yards with artist and husband
Barry McGee, and creates a new painting installation at the UCLA/Armand
Hammer Museum. While hand-painting wall sized letters on a ladder,
Kilgallen describes her process: "I do spend a lot of time
trying to perfect my line work...when you get close up, you can
always see the line waver. And I think that's where the beauty is." |
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| Barry
McGee, who has a passion for graffiti art, says, "I
like that process of a thing discarded, then picked up, and
intercepted."
In this segment, McGee discloses an urban inspiration for his art.
The segment follows McGee and Kilgallen to the local train yards
where the artists point out their favorite markings and leave some
of their own, contributing to a graphic conversation that spans
train cars across the nation. McGee is also filmed atop a water
tower painting one of his signature figures. Traveling
to the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum, the segment follows McGee as
he installs a new room-sized work, a two-story mural, as well
as a
storefront painting looking out on the streets of Los Angeles.
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| The final artist in the
hour is Pepón Osorio,
filmed on location in his birthplace of Puerto Rico and his residence
in Philadelphia, PA. Osorio leads the viewer on a tour of three
complex, multidimensional installations where the artist's Puerto
Rican heritage and experience as a social worker inform his staged
confrontations between public life and private spaces. Says Osorio,
"When this piece, 'The Scene of the Crime,' was at the Whitney
Museum, it almost felt as if I'd taken a piece of the South Bronx
and placed it in the middle of Madison Avenue." Also featured
in this hour is the work "Home Visits" which transforms
the homes of ordinary people into neighborhood-based galleries for
a traveling work of art. |
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