This year’s most inspiring project is Ways Of Something (2014) — BBC’s seminal Ways of Seeing (1972) documentary series remixed/remade/updated/re-contextualized, one minute at a time. After celebrating its New York premiere at TRANSFER gallery on Saturday, ANIMAL is incredibly excited to share Ways Of Something: Episode 1. Click to watch above!
For this 30 minute episode, artist and curator Lorna Mills invited 30 web-based artists from all over the world to create original 60-second-long artworks to replace the visual track. They kept the soundtrack, John Berger’s narration now scoring twisted 3D renderings, pop culture gifs, experimental short films, sexy webcam performances — all throwing that elite-ish explaining of the Art History narrative arc into the world of the artist after the internet.
At minute four, as Berger pontificates on how a camera’s reproduction of artworks effects the ways we see them, we are looking at the brutal WikiLeaks collateral murder video mixed with flashes of every painting on permanent display at the MoMA, Ai Weiwei and a vandal smashing Ai Weiwei’s vase. At minute five, a chorus sings and Berger drones sophisticatedly about spaces informing the context of old paintings and we’re transported into a sublime, digital landscape filled with floating, reflecting orbs. At minute 24, exposed digital software interfaces live-distort classical images as the documentary serenades some “unforgettable contrast with the powerful whites vivid flesh tones where the detached strokes reach a peak of breadth and strength” and we’re looking at ruptures and bursts and forced 3D perspectives, which are as exciting now as chiaroscuro was a very long time ago. Every piece contributes a new idea, and it comes together quite miraculously as a narrative, exploding in all directions. It’s pretty fucking amazing.
Ways Of Something Episode One will continue to screen in Brooklyn’s TRANSFER Gallery, immediately followed by Episode 2 which you can’t watch online for awhile. It’s a doozy, dealing with the female nude, art muses mansplained and a bevy of outdated concepts in desperate need of subversion. (September 13th, 20th and 27th, at 4pm and 6pm.) Stay tuned for Episode 3 and 4, coming in the future.
Lorna Mills was invited to curate the project by Julia van Mourik, the director of The One Minutes at Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam.
Episode 1, participating artists: Minute #1 – Daniel Temkin; Minute #2 – Rollin Leonard; Minute #3 – Sara Ludy; Minute #4 – Rhett Jones; Minute #5 – Jaakko Pallasvuo; Minute #6 – Dafna Ganani; Minute #7 – Jennifer Chan; Minute #8 – Rea McNamara; Minute #9 – Theodore Darst; Minute #10 – Matthew Williamson; Minute #11 – Hector Llanquin; Minute #12 – Christina Entcheva; Minute #13 – V5MT; Minute #14 – Marisa Olson; Minute #15 – Joe McKay; Minute #16 – Carla Gannis; Minute #17 – Nicholas O’Brien; Minute #18 – Eva Papamargariti; Minute #19 – Rosa Menkman; Minute #20 – Kristin Lucas; Minute #21 – Jeremy Bailey & Kristen D. Schaffer; Minute #22 – Giselle Zatonyl; Minute #23 – Paul Wong; Minute #24 – Alfredo Salazar-Caro; Minute #25 – Sally McKay; Minute #26 – RM Vaughan & Keith Cole & Jared Mitchell; Minute #27 – Andrew Benson; Minute #28 – Christian Petersen; Minute #29 – Faith Holland; Minute #30 – Jennifer McMackon.
