The Adventure: Artists on Art

53 minutes
Color
Recommended audience age range 15-adult

Since Marcel Duchamp, as early as 1914, began exhibiting selected everyday objects - a urinal, a bottle-rack - as 'readymade' works of art, questions about how we define art and what its social function is have been central to all serious artists' concerns. Hosts of Conceptual artists have followed the lead of Duchamp, no longer painting or sculpting in traditional ways, but creating provocative `gestures' and adopting `strategies' for making their viewers think about the nature and rôle of art itself, and how it relates to the major concerns of our lives. In this film, Jorn Merckert of the Berlin Academie der Kunst, says: `Because the human condition today has changed so much, and because there is no longer a system, one single system existing for everybody, giving each person his place, people have lost their identity, they've lost all definition of what they want to do in life and of what they can do in life. And it is there, in that context, that art first of all reflects that identity crisis. Subsequently, art makes us aware of that identity crisis. And finally, every now and then, art provides an answer as to how one might combat that identity crisis.' Artists whose work is looked at include Dutchman Anton Heyboer, who offers as an artistic statement his own taking of multiple `wives'; Wolf Vostell, who strews a floor with knives, forks and barbed wire, in a reference to the Nazi concentration camps; Christo, whose seventy-five-mile Running Fence was erected across California; and Joseph Beuys, who notoriously gave a performance in which he tried to explain art to a dead rabbit. As bizarre as such works will seem to some, this film attempts a thought-provoking exploration of their implications.

Christo Valley Curtain

Director
Carlos Vilardebo

Writers/Narration
André Parinaud
Carlos Vilardebo

Also available in French

© 1998-2008 The Roland Collection & Pira Intl.