Product Description

featuring: Brice Marden, Chuck Close, Neil Jenney, Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Richard Tuttle, John Baldessari, Robert Williams, Elizabeth Murray, Michael Ray Charles, Elizabeth Peyton, Ed Ruscha, Lari Pittman, Ashley Bickerton, Gary Simmons, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Rirkrit Tiravanija, John Torreano, Pat Steir, St. Clair Cemin, Joan Snyder,Mike Bidlo, Amy Adler, David Deutsch, Richmond Burton, Carolyn Martin, David Alan Grier, Mat Gleason, Ivan Karp, Jay Gorney, Matthew Marks, Jerry Saltz, Herb & Dorothy Vogel, Marcia Tucker, Dave Hickey.

ART CITY: Making it in Manhattan

Unlike any art movie you've ever seen, Making it in Manhattan is informed 'entertainmentí about the people who make contemporary art. Artists, collectors, and dealers bring to life the art capital of the world, New York, as it plunges into the 21st Century. Presenting a cross-section of artists, the film discusses inspiration, aesthetics, and the meaning of success. With Louise Bourgeois, Brice Marden, Chuck Close, Neil Jenney, Elizabeth Murray, Ashley Bickerton, Gary Simmons, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Rirkrit Tiravanija, St. Clair Cemin, Ivan Karp, Jay Gorney, Matthew Marks, Jerry Saltz, Herb & Dorothy Vogel, and others. From abstraction to figuration, from installation to conceptual art, from the privacy of the doctor's office to the posh gallery opening, Making it in Manhattan captures the reality of a special world. Music by Tom Waits, Don Braden Ryuichi Sakamoto, George van Eps, Piero Umiliani with Chet Baker.

ART CITY: Simplicity

Travelling around the country, Art City: Simplicity takes viewers on a revealing trip into the studios and lives of a group of singular artists. On a desert mesa outside Santa Fe, Richard Tuttle invents his mysterious and marvellously humble forms, made of wire, cardboard, wood. In Taos, Agnes Martin rhythmically repeats extremely simplified images. Near the Santa Monica surf, John Baldessari, aims for successful juxtapositions of photographs and text. In his North Hollywood living room, Robert Williams revels in surreal cartoon imagery. At a cabin in Woodstock, Joan Snyder refines her sensuous art amid a lush forest. Mike Bidlo salutes Duchamp in a SoHo Gallery, while on Sunset Boulevard, Amy Adler reclaims personal history through self-portraits. Through this group of memorable iconoclasts, the creative ìactî is there to see and study. Along with writer Dave Hickey, and others, Simplicity addresses artistsí relations with the press, feelings about showing oneís work, distilling concepts into an essence, and what it means to succeed in the artworld. Music by Beck, Tom Waits, Charles Mingus, Count Basie, Ted Greene, Antonio Carlos Jobim.

ART CITY: A Ruling Passion

Many artists use the pain, exhilaration and resolution of private desires to express themselves. Art City: A Ruling Passion focuses on intense personalities whoíve used their art to explore the emotional impact of psychological truths. Everything that Louise Bourgeois creates - whether in marble, fabric or bronze - comes from memory. Michael Ray Charles investigates the marketing of black memorabilia, using early American advertising imagery. Elizabeth Peyton reinvents portraiture, using her friends as subjects, as well as pop culture royalty. Ed Ruschaís literary landscapes burst from the physical world ìright outside the window.î The comic spirit of Lari Pittman contrasts with his graphic declarations. In a landmark house, Richmond Burton remembers his dreams to build ìpsychic fieldsî of abstraction. The arrays of featureless faces by David Deutsch are stimulated by sub-conscious sensations. Along with writer Dave Hickey and others, A Ruling Passion plumbs issues that affect artists - preoccupations of startling universality - like community, motivation and controversy, finding oneís audience, and just ìgetting it right.î Music by Beck, Roy Ayers, Sakamoto, Claude Thornhill, Joey Altruda, Herbie Hancock

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53591 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-07-02
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Box set, Color, Full Screen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 3
• Running time: 173 minutes

Amazon.com
Art City: Making It in Manhattan is an art tour of New York City, entering galleries and studios and the homes of collectors. Interviewing critics, collectors, and artists--among them Louis Bourgeois, Chuck Close, Elizabeth Murray, and Gary Simmons--director Chris Maybach looks at the contemporary art scene of the 1990s. Although the video bills itself as an exploration of the New York art community, it is really more a survey of the artists--location has little to do with the end product, it seems. Yet, despite the missed opportunity to exploit the city's influence on the creations, this documentary does succeed in illuminating the artists' struggles and inspirations. Covering collectors, studio visits, the 1980s, finances, daily routines, and success, the film is dynamic, interspersing images of the work with the creators themselves, and avoiding talking heads. For a broad view of a seemingly cloistered artistic community, Art City provides insight into and explanation of the fascinating and varied lives of artists. --Jenny Brown

Robert Rosenblum, Guggenheim Museum
"A perfect time-capsule of the American art world as it goes into the 21st Century. Posterity should be grateful for this vivid document."

The Washington Post
"...captures New York artists, dealers, and collectors at their liveliest and most candid."

Customer Reviews

Very thoughtful and entertaining!!
The most revealing films about artists I've ever seen. If you want to meet artists who have been making the news and get to see what they are REALLY like, in their private moments as well as at gallery openings, these films are for you. Incredibly intimate. I mean that look on Amy Adler's face when she tears up her paintings... Wow.

I saw one of these films in Paris a few years ago on a double bill with Andy Goldsworthy: Rivers & Tides - another favorite of mine. Since then, I have seen all of the Art City films and just love them. The reviewer heckling below is either drunk, or high on crack... or must work for Art 21, a show which is pale and soulless in comparison. I have friends who are art educators and they all prefer the Art City films in their classes. Not only are they informative, but entertaining as hell!

Interesting, worth watching, and enjoyable, but...
No doubt about it, this DVD collection is wonderful addition to any lover of modern art.

The first DVD, Making it in Manhattan, showed how artists were going back and forth about the issue of how artists should focus on working and not promoting their work vs. others who believed that artists should do both. Yes one gets to see them showing their work and explaining their concepts, but the tempo was a bit slow for me.

The 2nd & 3rd DVDs from the set were more alive. At some points one might feel that the number of in-and-out comments by artist Louise Bourgeois was a little too much, but still the lady has a charming character and insight into art and life. Seeing Chcuk Close in action and how he fixes his brushes on a glove to paint since he's physically challenged was inspiring.

I took 1 star out for making Art City focused on New York in particular and a few other US cities. Everyone knows how great New York is as an art hub; yet it would be interesting if a European version or an Asian version would follow this collection.

Bottom line: Is it worth buying? If you saw any of Art:21 episodes or DVDs and you enjoyed it, then the answer is YES. Go ahead!

An impeccable and unique addition to a superb series
Chris Maybach documents art and artist in the actual and intellectual worlds they inhabit. His films are not tricky, not sycophantic, not celebrity worshipping; they are reportage of a unique kind. There is a certain aura around a commercially and/or critically successful artist, and that cannot be avoided. It should not be avoided; it is the working reality of the artist. But the subjects' prominence might obscure Maybach's straightforward working method, one that makes his films sought after by educators and musuem curators, among others in the art world, which is to ask each to address fundamental issues of making art, and after that's done letting each say what he or she wants to say. Sometimes it's a lot, sometimes less than you'd like. But these are honest films, and as such they are valuable -- as well as entertaining and intriguing -- works of cultural history.