Category Archives: ART

THE LOST GENERATION: A&E Biography documentary, 2001, 91min

The Lost Generation is a documentary produced by A&E Biography in 2001.  It first aired on November 15, 2001.

The Lost Generation, in general, is the post-World War I generation, but specifically a group of U.S. writers who came of age during the war and established their literary reputations in the 1920s. The term stems from a remark made by Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation.” This generation included artists and writers who came of age during the war such as F. Scott Fitzgerald,[1] T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Olaf Stapledon, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Glenway Wescott, Waldo Peirce, Isadora Duncan, Abraham Walkowitz, Ezra Pound, Alan Seeger, Henry Miller, Aldous Huxley, Malcolm Cowley, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Erich Maria Remarque, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and the composers Sergei Prokofiev, Paul Hindemith, George Gershwin and Aaron Copland.

The documentary focuses on American expatriate writers living in Paris in the 1920s,including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Archibald MacLeish, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and John Dos Passos.

Malick Sidibé : Dolce Vita Africana, documentary by Cosima Spender, 2008, 80min.

Dolce Vita Africana is a documentary about the internationally renowned Malian photographer Malick Sidibé, whose iconic images from the late 1950s through the 70s captured the carefree spirit of his generation asserting their freedom after independence and up until an Islamic coup ushered in years of military dictatorship. The filmmaker travels to Sidibé’s studio in Bamako, Mali, to witness the artist at work and meet many of the subjects of his earlier photographs, whose personal stories also tell the history of Mali.

Commissioned by BBC’s Storyville.

ANDY WARHOL:: OXIDATION PAINTINGS, aka PISS PAINTINGS, 1977-78

“Basically we’d say, ‘we’re making these piss-paintings. Wanna come up and pee?’ And that didn’t work as well.  Uhh, I brought u a girl, and she squats and just makes a puddle.  And Andy went, ‘Oh there’s no brushstroke.’  So we learned the hard way.”   -Ronnie Cutrone

(below,from Warholstars.org)

The Oxidation paintings are sometimes referred to as Warhol’s Piss Paintings. The paintings are generally attributed to 1977-78, although Warhol also referred to them in a 1976 interview. The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné (Vol. 1) notes “In a little-known 1976 interview, when Warhol was asked if there were ‘any old non-representational paintings that no one knows about,’ he replied: ‘The only ones I have are the piss paintings; I have a couple. That was a long time ago. Then there were the canvases that I used to leave on the street and people used to walk on them; in the end I had a lot of dirty canvases. Then I thought they were all diseased so I rolled them up and put them somewhere. Reproduced with this interview was an unstretched canvas, captioned ‘Andy Warhol: Piss Painting, urine on canvas, 46 x 80, c. 1961.'”  Continue reading ANDY WARHOL:: OXIDATION PAINTINGS, aka PISS PAINTINGS, 1977-78

ANDY WARHOL: THE COMPLETE PICTURE, documentary, 2002, 2hours 57min

Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture is director Chris Rodley’s three-part documentary series originally broadcast on Channel 4 in the U.K. The program profiles the life and career of pop artist Andy Warhol, starting with his early days as an advertising designer to his death in 1987. Narrated by Julian Rhind-Tutt.

LAWRENCE WEINER:: THE MEANS TO ANSWER QUESTIONS, interview, Louisiana Channel, 13 min.

A revealing and informative interview with Lawrence Weiner.  A seminal figure in the post-minimalist conceptual art of the 60’s, Weiner’s art practice spans over 50 years.

Jesper Bundgaard’s interview with the legendary conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner discusses the connection between cruelty, hierarchy and rationality. The artist must ask questions past ordinary logic, he says.

In this interview Weiner philosophises on how the artist can present things people might not have noticed. Art is not meant to answer questions, but rather to ask them. Art is about things you don’t know. Art is a means to answer questions. The artist must go beyond logic and risk madness, he explains: “You have to re-adapt your own logic just to be able to communicate with somebody else.” Continue reading LAWRENCE WEINER:: THE MEANS TO ANSWER QUESTIONS, interview, Louisiana Channel, 13 min.

FIELD TRIP TO GORDON MATTA-CLARK’S “SPLITTING HOUSE”, circa 1974, 33min

Holly Solomon, Gordon Matta-Clark, and a schoolbus full of people travel from 98 Greene Street in SOHO to the Englewood, NJ site of Matta-Clark’s site-specific work, “Splitting.”

From the Holly Solomon Gallery records, circa 1948-2003. Archives of American Art. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/hol…

LEONARD BERNSTEIN: THE UNANSWERED QUESTION, Harvard Lecture Series, 1973, excerpt from Lecture #1 , 5min.

The Unanswered Question is the title of a lecture series given by Leonard Bernstein in the fall of 1973. This series of six lectures was a component of Bernstein’s duties as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry for the 1972-73 academic year at Harvard University, and is therefore often referred to as the Norton Lectures. The lectures were both recorded on video and printed as a book, titled The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard.

During his year as visiting professor at Harvard University, Leonard Bernstein had various duties, such as being in residence and advising students, but historically the most significant of these was to deliver a series of lectures. This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make these lectures accessible to an audience with limited or no musical experience, while maintaining an intelligent level of discourse.