Ask any teen or twenty-something about children’s programs and you should find a mixture of respect and condescension. This condescension is not arrogant but rather a matter of fact about a certain kind of Pollyanna censorship designed to “protect” innocent children. Before Masterpiece Theatre became Mobil Masterpiece Theatre in the early 2000s, I would have disagreed with you that the adult/mature content for PBS also deserves such non-bitter condescension. Now, I’m not so swaggeringly confident. The multi-season series Art 21: Art in the Twenty-First Century fully deserves this anti-Pollyanna mental health treatment and is a typical sanitized vehicle that any artist concerned about being “established” would whole-soulfully welcome.
My effort to pick out the artists that resonate with me is proof that this PBS program is not a total loss. For me, however, the art shows/documentaries that work well with my humanity are:
“Pepón Osorio, best known for large-scale installations, was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, in 1955. …‘My principal commitment as an artist is to return art to the community,’ he says.”
“Sally Mann was born in 1951 in Lexington, Virginia, where she continues to live and work. …Her early series of photographs of her three children and husband resulted in a series called ‘Immediate Family.’”
“Trenton Doyle Hancock was born in 1974 in Oklahoma City, OK. …Hancock’s paintings often rework Biblical stories that the artist learned as a child from his family and local church community. Balancing moral dilemmas with wit and a musical sense of language and color, Hancock’s works create a painterly space of psychological dimension.”
“Janine Antoni was born in Freeport, Bahamas in 1964. …Antoni’s primary tool for making sculpture has always been her own body. She has chiseled cubes of lard and chocolate with her teeth, washed away the faces of soap busts made in her own likeness, and used the brainwave signals recorded while she dreamed at night as a pattern for weaving a blanket the following morning.”
See “Lick and Lather” on YouTube.com. My notes on this work from 2/2010: “…it’s about the woman protecting herself from a role she can’t stop herself from playing in a ‘scripted’ relationship with a male…”
“Martin Puryear was born in Washington, D.C., in 1941. In his youth, he studied crafts and learned how to build guitars, furniture, and canoes through practical training and instruction. …Puryear’s evocative, dreamlike explorations in abstract forms retain vestigial elements of utility from everyday objects found in the world.”
“Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China, and lives and works in New York. … While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995 he explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, leading to the development of his signature explosion events.”
“Fred Wilson was born in the Bronx, New York in 1954, and lives and works in New York. … He questions—and forces the viewer to question—how curators shape interpretations of historical truth, artistic value, and the language of display, and what kinds of biases our cultural institutions express.”
To paraphrase one of Fred Wilson’s notable remarks: your modern European art is our traditional African art—so our modern art must be your cliché.
“Mark Bradford was born in Los Angeles, California in 1961. … Drawing from the diverse cultural and geographic makeup of his southern Californian community, Bradford’s work is as informed by his personal background as a third- generation merchant there as it is by the tradition of abstract painting developed worldwide in the 20th Century. Bradford’s videos and map-like, multilayered paper collages refer not only to the organization of streets and buildings in downtown Los Angeles, but also to images of crowds, ranging from civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s to contemporary protests concerning immigration issues.”
My cryptic praise of Mark Bradford: samo are better than Elvis sightings.