Ilana Harris-Babou’s Guide to Health & Happiness | Art21 "New York Close Up"

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- Hi everyone, welcome to
the Cooking Show today.

- Thank you so much for joining me.

We'll be building, we'll be cooking,

and we'll be having a great time.

When I started making videos,

I was just watching on
my downtime on YouTube,

a lot of aspirational
media like cooking shows

and music videos and home improvement TV.

I was playing around with maybe
the formal elements of how

the material world is shown
inside of these things

that are halfway advertising
and halfway instructional.

- Then I started to really
think about the hosts

of these things, the perfection
that is tempered with

this often sort of fake
or performed vulnerability

where it seems like certain
things that are probably

beyond most of our own grasp
could be graspable or held.

We'll be right back.

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I grew up in central Brooklyn.

I think I was a pretty
sort of solitary kid.

I would spend a lot of time
just kind of looking at things,

surfaces and the outsides of buildings,

sort of making up stories for myself.

So this is the house I grew up in.

We like to take a kind
of laissez-faire approach

to the front lawn.

I was doing a lot of things
that would sort of seem like

art or felt like art
from a pretty young age.

It was like the space where
the world made sense for me.

This one is like a Halloween,

I think I was a dead house wife,

that's what I said I was that year.

- Even at this age, she was stubborn,

she kind of knew what she wanted to do.

She had her own mind.

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- Early on actually, I had
called myself a painter.

And I think really what
attracted me to that

was like paint itself.

The sort of alchemical magical
way colors came together

on the surface of a canvas.

And I realized that like state of becoming

was what was really exciting to me.

That's how I started making
video, actually was sort of

recording myself in the
process of making paintings

and then remixing that

or reediting that later on to share

what I really cared
about with other people.

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And then that evolved into
sculptures and installations

to sort of house and
recontextualize those moving images.

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Oh look, here's you with
your beautiful face mask.

- If my kids ask me to
go to the moon with them,

I'm gonna try to go there.

You know, I'm learning, she's teaching me.

And that's what artists
do, they enlighten us

because they see things
on a subconscious level.

- I knew that my mom was such a ham.

I never saw her actually
cooking food in the kitchen

when we were growing up, but
we had these long mirrors

in front of the kitchen and
she would do these sort of like

fake Julia Child's
performances for herself

and maybe like burn a piece
of toast and then walk away.

- Today I'll be showing you
my daily clean beauty routine.

This one is so much fun to use.

I'm going to show you how to make this.

- So it felt really natural
to sort of invite her

into my process in that way.

- It smells like Cheetos.

- I do like to kind of
operate in this space

where the videos at
first look like something

you're really familiar
with, and then I start to

insert these uncomfortable things,

maybe these uncomfortable
truths into a familiar form,

and then sort of see what happens

when that friction comes up.

- I think a lot of these themes

that I think about like aspiration

and how we try to seek
control over our lives,

they come so much to the forefront
in this space of wellness

and wellness culture.

And our bodies are obviously
the site where so many

of these things really play out.

In 2019, that company, Mirror,
started doing a lot of ads

on the subway.

You could have this instructor
beam straight into your room

and it could look like high-end design

and they could be kind of coaxing you out

of whatever into exercising.

And so I just wanted to try to make my own

and see what would happen.

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I thought about them kind of
like haunted medicine cabinets.

Rather than giving you clear instruction

about how to work out or
what the weather is like,

they're just as much sort of
asking you for instruction

or giving confounding advice

or they're playing CAPTCHA tests

and maybe wanting you to
help them out with them.

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I called the piece Needy
Machines in that way

because I thought of these
objects as sort of needy.

But also wondering within this
space, especially the space

of the bathroom, if we are
needy machines somehow.

I think it's also a friction I'm living

with constantly, right?

And I think we all are.

Between the sort of space of
fantasy we want to live in

and then the truth that we kind of know

even in an embodied way

about the instability of everything.

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