The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009. In this film, Aiken’s allusion to “the frontier” and iconic imagery like the cowboy suggest that the American West Coast as a cultural construction. These notions are reinforced by two key elements in the film: its protagonist, the iconic West Coast artist Ed Ruscha, and its reference to the cinematic and the experience of the movie theater. The film is structured as a journey in time, from day to night. The completed film was shot in different places around the globe, including Los Angeles, Rome, South Africa, and Israel, which suggests the blurring boundaries of the unknown and emphasizes both fictive and real landscapes.
Doug Aitken’s work started to draw international attention when his installation Electric Earth earned the International Prize at the 1999 Venice Biennale, which was organized by renowned Swiss curator Harald Szeemann. Interested in breaking conventional narratives, Aitken emphasizes circularity and non-linearity in his monumental site-specific installations. This monumentality is usually expressed in Aitken’s tendency to combine apparently disconnected fragments in order to create epic films. Although this aspect of his work differs from the all-encompassing wholes sought by modernism, Aitken’s films play with the imaginary and surreal in a way that flirts with the notion of utopia. The artist uses pop culture and, especially, the film industry as sources for his compelling and immersive environments. Aesthetic elements such as coloration, light and space and a careful editing process give his films a contemplative mood.
Continuing Oursler’s broader exploration of the moving image, Absentia is one of three micro-scale installations that incorporate small objects and tiny video projections within a miniature active proscenium...
In the video The Syphilis of Sisyphus (2011), Reid Kelley transported her heroine to the French demimonde...
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...
Kadar Brock creates dynamic abstract paintings that are born from a process of painting, scraping, priming, sanding, and painting again...
The film Line Describing a Cone was made in 1973 and it was projected for the first time at Fylkingen (Stockholm) on 30 August of the same year...
This is not in Spanish looks at the ways in which the Chinese population in Mexico navigates the daily marginalization they encounter there...
Data mining is a computer software process that can involve the neutral or benign analyzing of internet data for patterns, however, it can also imply the more sinister activities of surveillance or subject-based information gathering...
Kelley’s 2015 portrait of the poet Charles Baudelaire is one of a series of poets, rappers, and other thinkers who have influenced the artist’s ideas about beauty, creativity, and expression...
The title Untitled Passport II was first used by Felix Gonzalez-Torres in an unlimited edition of small booklets, each containing sequenced photographs of a soaring bird against an open sky...
In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action...
The work La Loge Harlem focuses on the history of Harlem and its development over the last 200 years...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...
Situated in German-occupied Belgium at the end of World War I, Y ou Make Me Iliad by Mary Reid Kelley focuses on the story of two...
This score is a graphic record of the detailed choreography of one of Anthony McCall’s Landscape for Fire performances...
Towhead n’Ganga, enclosed in darkness, lorded over by the sexualized folded high priestless form reflects many of Kelley’s works, in both its compositional and semantic qualities...
Blindseye Arranger (Max) (2013) features a greyscale arrangement of rudimentary shapes layered atop one another like a dense cluster of wood block prints, the juxtaposition of sharp lines and acute angles creating an abstracted field of rectangular and triangulated forms composed as if in a cubist landscape...
To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey...
In 1977, as an already-established artist best known for his films, Bruce Conner began to photograph punk rock shows at Mabuhay Gardens, a San Francisco club and music venue...