Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century
Season Three
Program Two: Memory
Premieres Friday, September 23 at 9 p.m. on PBS
Hosted by: Isabella Rossellini

How does memory function? Who creates history? Whether commemorative, critical or irreverent, the artists in Program Two of Art:21 delve into the past, transforming it and remaking it in their work.

Isabella Rossellini opens the hour, reflecting on her childhood in post-war Europe. As she speaks in voice-over, multiple still photographs of her are animated against a shifting landscape of locations that represent particularly strong memories for her. A closing live video shot of Rossellini provides a surprise ending to the animation, as she invites viewers to explore how artists bring memories to life.

A transplant from New York, Susan Rothenberg produces paintings that reflect her move to an isolated home and studio in New Mexico and her evolving interest in the memory of observed and experienced events. In her early career, she became noted for her series of large paintings of horses. Now, however, she does not find herself creating series. “The paintings are more of a battle to satisfy myself now,” she says. Drawing on material from her daily life, she confesses that in her current work “the second painting seems to complete the series.” Sitting in her studio, Rothenberg speaks candidly about her working process and her occasional battles with artistic block. For Rothenberg, creation is a slow, meditative process. In the case of one painting she has been working on for months, something isn’t quite right, but she can’t rush the process. “I keep looking at this painting and thinking, why can’t I just nail it? Just make it be whatever it’s supposed to be and move on,” she wonders. “It’s constant reviewing. It’s sitting there and looking.”

In a body of work that includes stuffed-animal sculptures, ritualistic performance pieces, and multi-room installations, Mike Kelley explores the notions of trauma and “eternally recurring abuse” in contemporary culture. Many of Kelley’s projects draw on his own memory. Educational Complex, he says, “is a model of every school I ever went to plus the home I grew up in, with all the parts I can’t remember left blank.” That project has led Kelley to embark on the creation of an epic performance/video called Day is Done, which will eventually consist of 365 tapes, one for every day of the year. In a scene that he has been directing and filming, Kelley draws on high school yearbook images to re-stage high school rituals with surreal elements, such as donkeys, devils, and eerie music in a gymnasium. Even though his work deals with pain and trauma, Kelley also believes his own work is beautiful. “I think it’s beautiful because terms are confused and divisions between categories start to slip,” he explains. “And that produces what I think is a sublime effect. Or it produces humor. And both things interest me.”

“To me photography functions as a fossilization of time,” says Tokyo-born Hiroshi Sugimoto, who insists on using traditional photographic equipment to produce images that seek to preserve memory and time. “I start feeling that this is the creation of the universe and I am witnessing it,” he says of his black-and-white seascapes. In other work, Sugimoto photographs fossils from his personal collection. One he shows dates back 450 million years. In a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Sugimoto recalls the influence of Marcel Duchamp on his art, and especially on his exhibition at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, where he has designed the installation to include giant white plinths on which are mounted his photographs of 19th-century machines. These are juxtaposed with his photographs in the same exhibition of three-dimensional models that illustrate mathematical theories. Sugimoto states that he tries to design all his own exhibition spaces. “It’s not just a photography show,” he says, “it’s like a space sculpture.” At first, spectators may think they are seeing a “minimalist sculpture show,” but then they realize it’s a photography exhibition. “So people pay only one admission and get to see two different kinds of shows,” he jokes. “It’s very heavily discounted.”

“All of my work is essentially derived from some previous source,” says Josiah McElheny. “A lot of times what I’m doing is re-imagining something or transforming it slightly, but it’s always very much in connection to its source.” McElheny’s finely crafted glass objects explore history, memory and identity. Having studied as a glassmaking apprentice in Europe, McElheny takes pleasure in the artisanal aspects of his work as well as being part of an intellectual community of creators. In his exhibition Total Reflective Abstraction, he uses a silvered glass technique to build on the theories of Isamu Noguchi and Buckminster Fuller, creating a series of artifacts and mirrors to propose a completely reflective “utopia.” In some cases, the mirrored quality creates an interaction between the viewer and the art; in others it is the objects themselves that relate to one another in an infinite matrix of reflections. “The definition of being a modern person is to examine yourself, to reflect on yourself and to be a self-knowledgeable person,” he explains, as he himself reflects on the meaning of his work.

The hour concludes with an original piece of video art by Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler, commissioned by Art:21 – a unique and poetic meditation on the idea of Memory.