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<P></P><NYT_DATE><FONT size=-1><STRONG>September 9,
2001</STRONG></FONT><BR></NYT_DATE><NYT_KICKER></NYT_KICKER><NYT_HEADLINE
type=" " version="1.0">
<H2>Savoring the Slowness of Art at the Speed of
Television</H2></NYT_HEADLINE><NYT_BYLINE type=" " version="1.0">
<H5>By KAY LARSON</H5></NYT_BYLINE><NYT_LINKS_ONSITE type="main"
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<DIV align=right><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman, serif"
size=-2>Angel Franco/The New York Times</FONT></DIV><FONT
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on inflatable chair, watches a Chinese dance during the
filming of "Art21" for PBS.</FONT><BR><BR></TD></TR><!---->
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align=left alt=I
src="http://graphics.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/i.gif">N the haze of
a chill Manhattan dawn — streets the colors of breath on marble — a
cadre of Asian women gracefully practice martial arts routines in a
vest-pocket park in Chinatown. The dance, half Kung Fu, half Chinese
opera, is known as Muilen. It has six parts: two done with hands,
two with swords and two with bright flashing red fans that snap open
with a pop.
<P></P>
<P>As the women wheel their fans through the April air, the artist
Laurie Anderson, behind them, all in black, dangles her legs from
the seat of a 10-foot-tall inflatable white nylon wing chair. The
chair haunts the scene like a ghost from some great baronial
ur-library out of Jorge Luis Borges's mind. Ms. Anderson talks into
a hidden microphone while a dozen-odd people — a camerawoman, a
photographer and a film crew foraging in the inevitable box of
bagels — hang out in the foreground.</P>
<P>Three long days of filming, plus studio time, will end up as two
minutes of television: the opening segment of an ambitious four-part
PBS series, "Art21: Art in the 21st Century," which will be
broadcast at various times nationally and on Channel 13 in New York
at 9 p.m. on Sept. 21 and 28. "Art21" rewrites the possibilities for
art on television. Its true subject is inspiration, and its method
scraps all the formulas by getting rid of narrators and allowing
artists to tell us in their own words how they work and why they do
what they do. </P>
<P>On Sept. 21, Ms. Anderson introduces the first hour, "Place," and
five artists follow her: Richard Serra, Sally Mann, the team of
Margaret Kilgallen and Barry McGee, and the black-Hispanic
installation artist Pepón Osorio. The second hour, "Spirituality,"
begins with a video piece by Beryl Korot and narration by the
actress S. Epatha Merkerson from "Law and Order." They're followed
by the installation artist Ann Hamilton, the part-American Indian
sculptor John Feodorov, the Pakistani miniature painter Shahzia
Sikander and the earth artist James Turrell.</P>
<P>In Ms. Anderson's segment, the white wing chair is a stand-in for
those gray eminences who introduce programs on public television.
The chair alights on a SoHo rooftop, rolls out of a car wash, glides
past the Statue of Liberty and caroms down a Japanese supermarket
aisle (in New Jersey), all in the space of a breath or two. "How do
we understand place?" Ms. Anderson asks in the voiceover. "By moving
through it" is her answer. You could say the same about art on
television.</P>
<P>Art is best served by long contemplative viewing, but television
chops everything into stew meat. A slow art in a fast medium: can it
take the pace? To solve the problem, television has always imported
talking heads — Robert Hughes, Sister Wendy — who interpret for us.
Or is pontificate the right word?</P>
<P>A surprisingly simple and effective alternative is to let the
artists have the last (and only) word. That's the prospect that has
so energized Ms. Anderson. During a break in filming, she said:
"Like I'm the authority here? I mean, please! I mean, let me tell
you about place in art?" She rolled her eyes and waggled her head.
"It would be hideous to have somebody explaining art."</P>
<P>When the artists do the talking, something fascinating happens.
The world opens out and begins resonating with the unexpected.
Artists may charm, irritate, instruct, entertain, confound. But they
achieve their effectiveness, essentially, just by being themselves.
They have made their lives into works of art. Or they have found art
within the stuff of their lives. Or both. They have identified what
suits them, nurtures them and lets their lives expand. And they will
tell you so at length if you invite them. As Maya Lin says, making
art involves "everything you've ever known and everything you've
ever done, somehow percolating up."</P>
<P>Ms. Lin appears on Sept. 28, in the third hour, "Identity," which
is introduced by a dryly surreal opener devised by William Wegman
with Steve Martin. In the midst of it, Mr. Martin reveals his secret
identity: he is one of Mr. Wegman's Weimaraners. Then Bruce Nauman,
on a horse, gallops down through the cactus and dust of his New
Mexico ranch. Part rancher, part artist, he is inexhaustibly, drolly
surprising. He is followed by the self-styled black
classical-history painter Kerry James Marshall, Ms. Lin and Louise
Bourgeois.</P>
<P>In the fourth hour, John McEnroe materializes to point out the
improbable connections between art and tennis, his image
flip-flopping with aggressive graphics by Barbara Kruger on the
theme of "Consumption." Although the whole series oscillates between
the sublime and the risky, the fourth hour skirts provocation.
Michael Ray Charles is a black painter of blackface figures from
popular culture (Little Black Sambo, Aunt Jemima): he argues that
these images are as white as they are black.</P>
<P>Then the perennially off-the-edge Matthew Barney is seen shooting
a video in his "Cremaster" series, a night-of-the-living-dead zombie
movie involving harness-racing horses covered in spandex bodysuits
so that they appear to be trotting corpses. Mr. Barney's father, who
has a small role, says of his son: "Looking back, he wanted to be a
plastic surgeon. It's probably better he went into art."</P>
<P>"Art21" concludes first with Andrea Zittel, who constructed a
floating island off the coast of Denmark and lived on it one summer,
and then with Mel Chin, who has gained national attention for his
"Revival Field," a sculpture park that uses special plants called
hyperaccumulators to ingest toxic metals from polluted soil,
returning the land to health.</P>
<P>Mr. Chin has also worked to transform derelict houses burned in
Detroit during Devil's Night, the prelude to Halloween. He is
clearly being enlisted in "Art21" to represent the utopian
visionary, a role artists have historically adopted when it suited
them.</P>
<P>It suits the organizers of "Art21," too. The idea came from Susan
Sollins, a founder and former executive director of Independent
Curators International, which disseminates traveling exhibitions to
museums. Determined to "de-demonize" contemporary art, Ms. Sollins
turned to television, with its vast distribution system. "There has
been so much bad press," Ms. Sollins said from her Manhattan office,
"politicians using contemporary art as a vehicle for their own
purposes."</P>
<P>Ms. Sollins paired up with Susan Dowling, a former dancer and the
executive producer of the New Television Workshop at WGBH-TV in
Boston. The two producers picked up recommendations from an advisory
council that reads like a Palm Pilot Who's Who of contemporary art
curators nationwide. Ms. Sollins made the final choices and sat
behind the camera at each shoot, invisibly (and inaudibly) prodding
artists.</P>
<P>Enlisting the direct gaze out — the artist speaking to the camera
as if to a friend — Ms. Sollins and the directors Catherine Tatge
and Deborah Shaffer have created a casual yet radical intimacy. By
listening without imposing a narrative, they invited complexity and
contradiction. The old method of putting art on television might be
called colonial; it installed an overseer (in all senses of the
word), whose role was to judge and rule over the unruly aspects of
the imagination. In this new postmodernist style, imagination is
freed from its overvoice. By opening the ears to a whole cacophony
of voices, something happens that is subtly healing. </P>
<P>When you meet people who make art, they prove to be just like the
rest of us, only more inventive. Their introversion and arrogance
are of a piece with their hunger for the spirit, for expressing the
inexpressible. They may have a socially unacceptable side, but also
a universality. Occasionally they may be spiteful, but also genial
and passionate. Their art is entangled in the whole range of human
behaviors because it's made by human beings. To accept what artists
do is to accept ourselves in all our own complexity and
contradiction, our own tangled darks and lights. It's to accept the
possibility of discovering our own freedom, just as they have.</P>
<P>Spreading that message is Ms. Sollins's visionary labor of the
moment. "We are being activists about trying to inform people in
advance," she said. The "Art21" teachers' guide — 5,000 copies in
the first printing — has flown out to teachers, museum educators,
teacher-training schools, university art departments and PBS
stations. There are screenings and artists' dialogues, panels and
seminars over the next few months in various locations, including
public schools and Indian reservations, plus a handsome book
published by Abrams and a Web site (www.pbs.org/art21). "It has been
an amazing national response," said Ms. Sollins — which suggests
that, for many Americans, artists may not be the pariahs painted in
dirty colors by politicians. </P><EM>Kay Larson is
writing a book about the composer John Cage and his importance for
contemporary culture.</EM> </NYT_TEXT></TD></TR>
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