Josiah McElheny: Making a Projection Painting | ART21 "Exclusive"

[Josiah McElheny: Making a Projection Painting]

Today we're at my friend's studio

and we're projecting lost footage--
or abandoned footage--

by the great filmmaker, Maya Deren.

Long after Deren died, they found the
leftover tails of shots

and unused shots that she did complete

that were then preserved as
just kind of a reel

with no kind of edit to them.

And what I thought to do was to create
a sort of performance

in which we would project the film,

and then I invited a film crew to come and
film the film

as it's being projected on the screen.

And the idea was to film from the worst seats.

So imagine you're in a theater

where you're stuck five feet in front of
the screen,

so that when you're looking up,

you see all this, kind of, distorted vision.

One comes from an unfinished and lost film
called "Witch's Cradle"

in which she collaborated with Anne Matta Clark
and Marcel Duchamp

and was filmed at the famous
Art of the Twentieth Century gallery.

I'm trying to understand this relationship
of abstraction and the body.

She navigates this area between abstraction
and the body.

The body becomes almost abstract
in some of her works.

In the end, the film will be shown not as
a film,

but as a painting on a kind of structure

in which the front of the painting
is a piece of glass

and behind it is a kind of fractured landscape,

which will then further distort
on the painting itself.

When we showed narrative film on these
distorting sculptures,

it didn't work at all.

It just looked like we were
commenting on it,

or that you really felt us looking at this
preexisting work.

Whereas using the unfinished film,

it transformed itself much easier.

It became something new almost instantly.

That was really interesting to realize

actually how enviable, in some sense,

an original work of art can be--

how complete it can be,

and you can't, somehow, distort it.

That the unfinished is what felt more malleable.