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

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    [Josiah McElheny: Making a Projection Painting]
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    Today we're at my friend's studio
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    and we're projecting lost footage--
    or abandoned footage--
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    by the great filmmaker, Maya Deren.
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    Long after Deren died, they found the
    leftover tails of shots
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    and unused shots that she did complete
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    that were then preserved as
    just kind of a reel
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    with no kind of edit to them.
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    And what I thought to do was to create
    a sort of performance
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    in which we would project the film,
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    and then I invited a film crew to come and
    film the film
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    as it's being projected on the screen.
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    And the idea was to film from the worst seats.
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    So imagine you're in a theater
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    where you're stuck five feet in front of
    the screen,
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    so that when you're looking up,
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    you see all this, kind of, distorted vision.
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    One comes from an unfinished and lost film
    called "Witch's Cradle"
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    in which she collaborated with Anne Matta Clark
    and Marcel Duchamp
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    and was filmed at the famous
    Art of the Twentieth Century gallery.
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    I'm trying to understand this relationship
    of abstraction and the body.
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    She navigates this area between abstraction
    and the body.
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    The body becomes almost abstract
    in some of her works.
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    In the end, the film will be shown not as
    a film,
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    but as a painting on a kind of structure
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    in which the front of the painting
    is a piece of glass
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    and behind it is a kind of fractured landscape,
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    which will then further distort
    on the painting itself.
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    When we showed narrative film on these
    distorting sculptures,
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    it didn't work at all.
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    It just looked like we were
    commenting on it,
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    or that you really felt us looking at this
    preexisting work.
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    Whereas using the unfinished film,
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    it transformed itself much easier.
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    It became something new almost instantly.
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    That was really interesting to realize
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    actually how enviable, in some sense,
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    an original work of art can be--
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    how complete it can be,
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    and you can't, somehow, distort it.
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    That the unfinished is what felt more malleable.
Title:
Josiah McElheny: Making a Projection Painting | ART21 "Exclusive"
Description:

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Video Language:
English
Team:
Art21
Project:
"Extended Play" series
Duration:
03:55

English subtitles

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