For this work Alÿs purchased a gun in Mexico City then walked through the city streets with the weapon in his hand. After eleven minutes he was arrested by the police. The following day he repeated the action, this time in cooperation with the police. By presenting a record of this dramatic action alongside footage of its reenactment, Alÿs blurs the boundaries between documentation and fiction. Questioning the concept of authenticity, this work demonstrates “how media can distort and dramatize the immediate reality of a moment,” the artist has said. Gallery label from Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception, May 8–August 1, 2011.
Himself
0.0Cecil Taylor was the grand master of free jazz piano. "All the Notes" captures in breezy fashion the unconventional stance of this media-shy modern musical genius, regarded as one of the true giants of post-war music. Seated at his beloved and battered piano in his Brooklyn brownstone the maestro holds court with frequent stentorian pronouncements on life, art and music.
10.0In the fall of 1987, Philippe Haas accompanied the sculptor Richard Long to the Algerian Sahara and filmed him tracing with his feet, or constructing with desert stones, simple geometric figures (straight lines, circles, spirals). In counterpoint to the images, Richard Long explains his approach. Since 1967, Richard Long (1945, Bristol), who belongs to the land art movement, has traveled the world on foot and installed, in places often inaccessible to the public, stones, sticks and driftwood found in situ. His ephemeral works are reproduced through photography. He thus made walking an art, and land art an aspiration of modern man for solitude in nature.
7.0One of Paik’s most overtly political and poignant statements, Guadalcanal Requiem is a performance/documentary collage that confronts history, time, cultural memory and mythology on the site of one of World War II’s most devastating battles.
0.0Mark Rothko, a master of abstract expressionism, created 835 paintings during his five-decade career.
7.0Follows Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar as he finds his artistic voice and develops the socially critical perspective of his work.
7.8Jim Carrey exhibits his talent as a painter and reflects on the value and power of art.
5.8This film tells Jean-Michel's story through exclusive interviews with his two sisters Lisane and Jeanine, who have never before agreed to be interviewed for a TV documentary. With striking candour, Basquiat's art dealers - including Larry Gagosian, Mary Boone and Bruno Bischofberger - as well as his most intimate friends, lovers and fellow artists, expose the cash, the drugs and the pernicious racism which Basquiat confronted on a daily basis. As historical tableaux, visual diaries of defiance or surfaces covered with hidden meanings, Basquiat's art remains the beating heart of this story.
7.0Short documentary about artist Keith Haring, detailing his involvement in the New York City graffiti subculture, his opening of the Pop Shop, and the social commentary present in his paintings and drawings.
We are in the midst of production on a one-hour film on seminal art historian John Richardson, and his work on the fourth and final volume of his biography on Picasso. Richardson shares his insights and observations on Picasso, whom he first met in the 1950s, with Shelley Wanger, his editor at Alfred A. Knopf (a division of Random House, Inc.).
0.0The Ordinary Grand Film is the result of love at first sight with The Ordinary Grand Circus. With film and equipment borrowed from left and right, with the free complicity of all those who appear in the credits, they went on weekends to film a few moments of their tour.
6.0Hours and historical meetings, Pierre Assouline has composed an anthology of the best extracts presented in the form of a primer, which he had commented on by a surprised Bernard Pivot.
0.0Cleto Rojas, a peasant painter in Venezuela, discusses his artwork. From movies and Roman mythology to his own dreams and scenes of rural life, Rojas takes inspiration from all sources and transforms the world around him into fantastic visions. He teaches village children his technique of using house-paint on canvas, as his wife goes about her own housework, singing slowly. The painter is bemused by the attention of anthropologists and art critics, and he talks about the pitfalls of attention. He remembers traveling to Caracas as a young man to meet famous painters and being disappointed in them. His ambitions are more focused on the content of his work - Rojas wishes he could envision and paint one of Venezuela's heroes, Simon Boilvar, as he really was, as no accurate representations exist now. Without looking for fame, he continues painting all kinds of images as he sees them.
7.5This movie chronicles the life and times of R. Crumb. Robert Crumb is the cartoonist/artist who drew Keep On Truckin', Fritz the Cat, and played a major pioneering role in the genesis of underground comix. Through interviews with his mother, two brothers, wife, ex-wife and ex-girlfriends, as well as selections from his vast quantity of graphic art, we are treated to a darkly comic ride through one man's subconscious mind.
5.0North Star: Mark di Suvero is a 1977 documentary film about Mark di Suvero that was produced by François de Menil and Barbara Rose. Born in 1933, di Suvero has become one of the most recognized sculptors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. From about 1975 to 1977, fairly early in di Suvero's long career, filmmaker de Menil and art historian Rose produced this film, which was characterized at the time as "a tribute to the extraordinary work and life of the innovative American sculptor of monumental but delicate constructions." The film shows di Suvero making and installing several of his very large sculptures, and incorporates informal interviews of di Suvero, his mother, and others involved in his career and life at that time. From 1971 to 1975 di Suvero, an American, lived in a self-imposed exile in France in protest of US involvement in war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and the filming spans the end of his exile and his return to New York.
0.0The Whitney Museum of American Art presented the landmark exhibition Jeff Koons: A Retrospective from June 27 to October 19, 2014. It was the largest, most comprehensive survey of Koons’s art ever assembled, spanning four decades of his career and displaying 145 works from every series, including 13 new pieces exhibited publicly for the first time. The film follows Koons and Whitney Chief Curator, Scott Rothkopf, who conceived and organized the show, through every gallery of the exhibition. In addition, insightful interviews with Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s Director, Robert Storr, Dean Emeritus of the Yale School of Art, and Michelle Kuo, Editor of Artforum, help to deepen the investigation into Koon’s art and process.
8.5“This is a film about the end of a friendship. It wasn’t meant to be. Fifteen years ago, they painted my portrait.” (Mariano Llinás)
5.0The inner world of the great painter Max Ernst is the subject of this film. One of the principal founders of Surrealism, Max Ernst explores the nature of materials and the emotional significance of shapes to combine with his collages and netherworld canvases. The director and Ernst together use the film creatively as a medium to explain the artist's own development.
10.0A group of artists settle in a swamp on the banks of the Indre River. Meanwhile, a voice describes a utopian world.
