Captioning sponsored by THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Hey, this is Grant Hill.

Being a successful basketball player and businessman allows me to support one of my greatest passions-- contemporary art.

In this program, we will look at the theme of play in art.

I think I know a thing or two about playing.

But there are big differences between an athlete and an artist.

For one thing, we get to watch athletes play live.

We rarely get to see an artist playing.

We only see the results of their play-- their artwork.

This show takes us into the artist's studio to catch a glimpse of their own private courts.

Welcome to art:21.

Check it out.

STOCKHOLDER: Um, can we mix some... abaca with yellow?

STOCKHOLDER: Well, I was invited to make some paper here at Dieu Donné-- something I've never done before.

The experience of it is deceptively simple.

It doesn't feel highly technological.

It's also something that would be very hard to do without the help of the people in the paper mill.

Paul has a lot of experience with paper and with all the techniques and the history of papermaking.

The whole papermaking studio is filled with water, so it's a very clean and fresh feeling.

There's the possibility nevertheless to make things that are bright and sharp and crisp, you know, really plastic-colored.

You know, part of me would like to make stuff that's minimal and very well organized and neat and clean and quite comprehensible.

I love the chaos, which is why I do it.

I don't make minimal controlled things.

I always feel kind of embattled, and it takes me a while to really know which ones I like best after I'm finished.

I think there are lots of different kinds of thinking.

Um, you know, your hands learn to do things that you could spend a whole day trying to write about and articulate.

What's intuition?

You know, it's a kind of thinking, it's not stupidity.

Um, and, uh, so... so I think there's a discomfort associated with trying to put all those different ways the brain works together.

You know, so I kind of like to avail myself of that discomfort.

You know, I...

I like being in the studio alone.

I don't like... ( laughs ) I don't hire people to help me in the studio.

And, um, you know, when I do the installation work I have to work with people to get things done on time and to do things that I couldn't do by myself.

And in here I like to be alone.

I mean, part of the parameters I work within are that I can carry the stuff up here by myself and do everything by myself.

And, um, and it's odd to be in the studio and not know what you're going to do.

You know, it's...

I think being an artist and choosing to put yourself in a circumstance where you don't know just how things are going to work out and what you're going to do is, uh, is very exciting and rich and also difficult.

These pieces are more like pieces of furniture.

You know, they're not furniture but they're of the scale of furniture in the room.

They address the architecture as furniture does.

And furniture is also built for the body.

And these are like that, too, though they don't serve any particular function most of the time.

And I love plastic.

I also just love color and they're a really great vehicle for color.

And they embody color.

They're colorful all the way through.

Plastic-- it's cheap and easy to buy.

And my work participates in that really quick and easy and inexpensive material that's part of our culture.

In that way, my work engages the means of production that we live with.

At the outset, my work was about as nonverbal as you could get.

Because I had two very verbal parents, I needed to find a place to kind of ascertain the nature of my experience that wouldn't be argued with.

To work with the physical world was a place to do that.

But now, having grown up, I find it interesting to put words parallel to this work.

When I make these pieces I don't have a literary story in my mind.

I mean, I'm thinking about what things are going to look like visually... and then afterwards can put words to what I'm doing.

Drawings are a way of planning what I'm going to do, a way of putting myself in the space and thinking about being in the space and mapping out what's of interest in the space for myself.

Maybe they're like recipes for action.

In the studio I don't have a plan, but for the installation work I need to have enough things planned so that I make use of the time I have.

And then I feel sort of prepared to go and do the installation.

But... but it's always a kind of uncomfortable feeling because I can't do any more work until I get there to start work.

I mean, this pile of light bulbs here-- I have done that before and have some sense of what that would be like.

It's a nice color.

Lower, lower.

All the way down.

Held right against here.

There we go.

STOCKHOLDER: It's being responsive to what's there... ( screw gun whirring ) Or what materials we actually were able to find.

The sizes of everything, what the colors look like.

I mean, it's like setting myself down with a bunch of different color paints and starting work.

Many things could happen.

STOCKHOLDER: Went shopping last night to find something blue.

You know, I didn't want another cooler.

There's a lot of colored plastic geometric shapes, um, in coolers, but I'm using all those coolers out there.

And I wanted something blue and plastic, something that had this color, that wasn't very specific, you know, that was like, you didn't right away think, "Oh, it's a..." And this seemed kind of perfect, so I was lucky.

( chuckles ) Refrigerators and freezers I've always enjoyed, because they are the place of food in a house.

And food and cooking has to do with loving and giving in a family.

But also freezers and refrigerators are cold and frozen, and that has to do... if you have an emotional mirror, that has to do with withholding and not loving.

So, for me they kind of embody that duality which is probably also in the gallery.

The gallery and our institutions of art are both full of possibility and extraordinary feeling, and they're also... they also put art in a place of remove.

So it has less power in some ways than if it weren't removed.

In my work, I'm interested in systems... and how things are geometric or systematically organized... how a thinking process can meander in unpredictable ways, in contrast to a system that's been planned and that's shared amongst people.

I wrote a little text about this piece.

It's a kind of poetic text; referred to the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz.

I think all of those kinds of fantasy fictions have resonance with what I do here.

My work is about posing this possibility for some other experience, world than the one that we experience as mundane... even while this is made of mundane things.

My work's really about pleasure.

It's not always pleasurable to make it; sometimes it's excruciating and it's hard.

And I think that pleasure matters a great deal.

I mean, I think what kids do that's play is a kind of learning and thinking.

And, uh, it's a kind of learning and thinking that's, um... doesn't have a predetermined end.

So I think I am involved in that.

It's an ancient technique.

( siren blaring in distance ) ( Gallagher sighs ) This is almost done.

You can take over.

GALLAGHER: I think it's in the work-- that play with joy.

I think artists know that you can take a kind of... an advertising sign and make something joyful and, um, other with it.

And I think it's sometimes hard for people who don't make things to understand labor and joy and attention and, uh, whimsy.

I didn't really come from a fine arts background, although, you know, I certainly went to museums as a kid.

I came from it from a carpentry background and I worked in Seattle building a bridge connecting Mercer Island and Seattle.

It was a floating bridge that has since collapsed, but... ( laughs quietly ) So when I went to art school about a year later, that was what I knew how to do.

And I built a latticework grid and stretched the canvas over that.

That way I could sit on the canvas as I, um, began gluing sheets of penmanship paper down.

Penmanship paper, for me, is more about gesture.

It's not so much about grammar as it is about how you make your letters.

So there's this watery push and pull between the watery blue of the penmanship paper lines and then the gestural marks made inside and around them.

The large works are made in a similar way as the earlier penmanship paper works in that they are built from found material.

I'm basically collecting archival material from the 1930s through the '70s, these Ebony magazines-- Ebony, Sepia and Our World.

They were kind of manifestos in a way, you know.

And, um... but they were magazines.

They still were entertainment, and, um... but they, they had a kind of urgency and a necessity to them, also a whimsy.

I'm collecting advertisements and stories and characters.

And I see them as conscripts in the sense that they come into my lexicon without me asking them permission.

There's still yet a specificity in each person's...

I don't know, the way they hold their body or some subtle key that says, "This is who I am at this time."

It seemed to me to be about identity in the most open sense of that word.

No matter how uniform or how altered, it just refuses to be stamped out.

You know, when you're reading a magazine or a book, that's a particular kind of reading.

It's a kind of sequential, page-by-page, and you, you know, remember what you've just read five pages ago or you don't.

And... but that's how you keep that information.

And the reading of a painting, what I loved was this idea of opening up the pages so that your sequence was then more spatial rather than sequential.

In the paintings, there are characters that repeat and recur.

Peg-Leg is one.

Sometimes there will be a compass next to Peg-Leg.

Those kind of signs are in the paintings to, um, activate Peg-Leg as both Ahab and Peg-Leg Bates.

I'm attracted to the visceralness of the body of Ahab, that wooden leg.

I also like the way in Moby Dick you're so aware of people's physical presence and the sound that, you know, this idea of these men hearing this sort of scraping of the wood as Ahab dragged his leg across.

Paintings for me functioned as a gate into the Watery Ecstatic realm.

And then that room in the back was another kind of cabinet, the species cabinet.

That work is work I made as I traveled either in Cuba or in Senegal.

And in Cuba is where all those colors came from, the green in particular.

And the red came from this berry that you use to dye meat and rice.

So the kind of coral, red color came from that.

They're also made by scratching directly into the paper and carving into the paper, much like scrimshaw.

I liked that idea of making something so focused in this, um... in my case, in a new environment.

And I think in scrimshaw, it's interesting to me that you would make something on a... a bone, so, like, these detailed worlds that, while you are out in the middle of nowhere, trying to catch this giant monster.

I think there's a way in which my interest in the water and travel in some specific ways may have to do with the idea that my family arrived here by water.

My father's family came on whaling ships from Cape Verde.

But the Irish came a while ago.

In a way the films do, literally, what I would hope people would do with their paintings in their mind.

The films, they're also this grid, and it's this grid where each frame erases the frame before it as you move forward.

So it's literally a projection of a grid in space, but it's in the same place over and over again.

The first film in that, in Murmur, that I made, is Watery Ecstatic... which is made much like the series of drawings Watery Ecstatic through thick watercolor paper, cutting into it and drawing over it.

The grid to DeLuxe is each individual page is its own drama or its own stage.

( tool buzzing ) I wanted to mark him.

But I...

I certainly couldn't give Isaac Hayes a wig.

I also didn't want the tattooing to obliterate his face.

And his shoulders just seemed to be so beautiful to highlight.

The two marks on the shoulders will be printed in black, and the face will be printed in a transparent base, sort of just an embossment over his skin.

Oh, wow.

So cool.

You can see it from the side.

Love that it's so beautifully inked that the engraving just looks like soft velvet.

It's beautiful, thank you.

My pleasure.

The necklace, which is this sort of magic constellation, is traced on the computer... and then a laser cuts all along the tracing lines.

That's then removed, plucked away from the skin of the paper.

This idea of repetition and revision is central to my working process.

You know, this idea of stacking and layering and building up densities and, you know, recoveries.

He's been altered in a way that the character that is now my conscripted Isaac Hayes should be altered to be in my lexicon.

I think there is a nostalgia in my, uh, gathering of this material and looking at this material and trying to hold it still for a moment in these paintings or in the films.

It's not just a nostalgia in terms of looking backwards; it's a way of imagining forwards.

As a way of constantly looking for home, you know, yet you're in that gesture, you're continually moving forward and continually seeing the world.

HERRERA: Collage is something that you could do very inexpensively.

When I started I had no space.

You know, money was tight and so this allowed me to move forward without the elements that are required, like canvases, brushes.

You need X-Acto blade, scissors, glue and paper.

It was accessible, it was, uh, in the studio and you could actually do it on a table with very little resources.

This pile has been added for many years.

When one thing was at the beginning easily recognizable as a foot or as a hat, now it's just become just a shape of color.

You have the... in the pile of fragments there is huge variety-- handmade and also found.

This is from one of my drawings from a printed book.

Here is paper from coloring books.

This is a watercolor shape, acrylic on paper, crayon and ink, construction paper, printed paper, finger painting or paint directly applied from the tube, uh, crayon also, marbleized paper, paint-by-numbers found in a secondhand shop, here you see is very old.

And I'm interested in how can an image that is so well composed and is so clear and is so objective, it's made out of these disparate fragments... Glued, forced to be together to create, uh, image that will have a different reading from what the fragments, you know, uh, say.

Structure is a preoccupation of mine.

I'm always looking for something that will hold the image into place.

What I want to create is basically an image that has, you know, aesthetic and also these conceptual powers.

The world of cartoons and animation is now a universal language.

And I think everybody has specific memories to specific characters or stories.

The idea of memory with images of childhood or images of, uh, that are represented in the, you know, pop culture are as important as any other image.

So people seem to have very strong attachments to those.

I think being Latin American, you're made up of so many fragments from different cultures.

Being from Venezuela, you are a mixture of things.

I mean, you're both, uh, from the region and you're also North American, South American, Central American.

So you're American.

And being there, you know that you're part of the European tradition and the American tradition.

It was totally, uh, natural for us to shift from, you know, uh, from going from a European film to a samba concert, uh, from a Walt Disney cartoon festival to, uh, to folk... folkloristic dancing from Venezuela.

So it was all very natural.

It was a... it was never any kind of division about what consisted in high culture or low culture.

So we...

I think everybody in Latin America takes everything, because you know that you are just a mixture of things.

Moving to a new country and now living in Berlin is, uh, allows you to, uh, try new things.

The beginning, when I moved here, was difficult, because I wanted to keep working with the same... at the same rhythm as I was working in New York-- producing, producing, working, producing without thinking too much.

And here it's the other, it's the opposite way.

There's more time to think, there's more time to reflect on what you're doing.

( camera whirs and clicks ) ( whirring and clicking ) And trying to use the camera lens as a... as a blade that cuts rectangular fragments from my own drawings.

And then once the roll is done, then I put it into water.

And that's where another much more specific, uh, way of chance happens.

And, um, the way the water seeps into the film and if it's hot water or cold or coffee or, you know, with ice cubes, then that will affect the emulsion on the film.

It's interesting to me after I did the photographs is that, um, images that I thought that were already finished in the paper form and its collages have a complete different life now.

Life is made of just connecting things.

We're not really clear about why we connect things.

Our emotional life is, you know, a very important part of this.

And I think that memory is also a very important part of this, and desire.

So when looking at visual images, you could actually be informed by association only.

It's satisfying to see them for the first time up on the wall.

And the whole tone quality is almost like graphite.

It's almost like drawing.

Usually photography is so much about perfect blacks and whites and, uh, these are really about perfect grays.

So I'm interested in this kind of ambiguity about the images.

And they're clearly based on fragments and they're being juxtaposed.

They're being forced to be together.

And yet they're just abstractions.

I think there is a potential for these images to communicate different things to different viewers, uh, in a very touching way.

But that experience is not a public experiences; it's a... very, very private and it's very, very personal.

My interest in wall paintings is that it takes the imagery to a larger scale and provides a different kind of impact for the viewer.

This is the template for the painter who executed the wall painting.

The drawing is to scale.

Every shape has been identified with a color.

The numbers correspond to the Pantone colors.

Any paint stored will be able to reproduce them.

The wall painter will, uh, transfer these lines onto the wall directly, and then he will just follow the template to paint color by color.

It's a little bit peculiar because the final result you really have no idea until you are finished there.

I tend to take into consideration the space where the paintings will be placed.

The wall painting for the museum in Santiago de Compostela, it's a different set of circumstances because the architecture is very prominent.

I've never done this before where an image has, uh, could only be seen from the upper galleries and then you can actually go down and see it from below.

So it's an interesting challenge and the image is... comes from one of the collages, uh, and it's going to be done by a professional, uh, sign painter of movie posters, from Madrid.

What I'm working on right now is trying to give very simple instructions, preliminary instructions to the painter.

So it actually helps to have this file here to be able to think and reconsider different aspects, to tell the painter what to do exactly because I'm not going to be there when he executes this piece.

I have never done a piece that is in a space that is actually dissected like this, and with two unusual elements in it which is a window door on the wall, where the wall painting will be executed, and then a bridge that connects the galleries into that window.

So I don't know what the effect will be, and so I'm hoping that all the elements and the imagery itself will also convey some kind of connection with the architecture.

Santiago is such an important place for pilgrimage.

There is so much history there.

The museum is very close to the cathedral.

So it's a very charged city.

The wall painting actually has these references to movement, upwards or downward, which is interesting to me because in Santiago people come with lots of hopes and ideas, memories.

They go there looking for something which, in a sense, it's a very spiritual connection.

That maybe is what allowed me to take the image and to bring it into Santiago.

I think there's still potential for abstraction to become a viable language of visual communication.

The same thing with collage.

I think we need to explore what else they could do.

I'm going to continue, see what I could say with this... with this language.

The longer you work a thing, the more possibilities you have of creating something.

It just comes through... at least with my case it doesn't come through, uh, divine touch, it just comes through just work.

( florid string music playing ) HERRING: I like things simple.

I like to boil things down to an essence.

Might have something to do with the fact that English is a foreign language to me and that I have to, uh... And as I learned English, I only was able to express myself in crude ways, but that forced me to make my point clear.

The reason I started to knit was in reaction to the suicide of someone I very much admired as an artist.

Well, my work up to that point was very colorful and expressionistic.

I, from, really, one day to the next, took all color out of my work and all of that expressiveness and really subjected myself to this rigorous, monotonous discipline.

It wasn't a conceptual decision, it was an emotional decision.

Knitting can be very meditative and, uh, monotonous.

But exactly that quality gives you time and that time was actually of... that was the crux of the matter.

I never made more than one kind of stitch.

I never got into patterning and any of this because it was never about knitting; it was about performance...

Going through a certain motion repetitively, in this case, for ten years.

People only witnessed the... the outcome of the performance, the legacy of that time spent.

And its sculpture was, um, something that kept me so isolated for so long in the studio.

Once I committed myself to a piece, I had to follow it through, which could easily take two, three months.

So once I started, I was locked into an idea, and the only thing that could really move was my mind.

And I felt that these early video pieces were a way for me to express what was going on in my mind.

( soft jazz playing ) One of my first videos, Exit, starts out with me sitting in the chair that I usually knit in, and then it just turns into this flight of fancy... ( music continues ) Certain fantasies that I dreamt about while I was knitting.

( fractured operatic music playing ) The videos were a way for me to be flamboyant.

In my first few videos I am in it because I try...

I had to try stuff out.

( music continues ) But eventually I replaced myself with other people.

My thing is sort of to bring mostly strangers into the studio-- not always; very often it's friends, too.

But even with my friends, there is this sort of need there to do something out of the ordinary.

( strident, repetitive music playing ) I don't think of the people I work with as models or as actors-- they're not.

They are people who are willing to sacrifice their time.

Maybe we should do it backwards.

HERRING: Well, in the end, these things are collaborations.

Maybe just move her leg slightly out.

HERRING: The two people that are here today are my two old reliables.

I really got to know them very well through making videos.

HERRING: Forward, closer, closer, closer.

There you go.

WOMAN: Okay.

Hold on.

If you can, sort of look at me.

That's it.

Now.

Actually, that didn't work.

Lie like this.

( all chuckle ) HERRING: Now.

Oh, that was just swell.

I don't care too much about the medium.

I don't even care so much about the object.

I really care about the process.

HERRING: Try and get as much in your face as possible.

Oh, this is red.

( shutter clicking ) It's amazing; keep going.

That's a beauty.

Close your eyes for a second.

Okay.

You know, these guys don't react in the way they would ordinarily react to a situation where they meet a stranger.

It's because of... of the circumstances and the eccentricity of it that it becomes... You sort of short-cut a lot of formality and it becomes very, very soon informal.

I don't just mean the fact that these guys spit food dye for hours.

It is a very intimate experience because it's unusual and because you have to really give a part of yourself to do it.

It's, um... it's exhausting.

While these two images formally or in terms of the process are similar, the emphasis is very different.

And I usually wait for a moment that is... that brings out some kind of vulnerability, and it usually hap...

I never know when it happens, it just happens at some point, and there's this very personal connection there that happens, and that's what I'm after.

It's this personal connection with somebody... some stranger in a way.

The focus when I work with a person for one of these sculptures is a very quiet focus, which is much harder to... to endure, especially when you do this on an ongoing basis for two or three months.

I think maybe the intimacy of the process is somewhat disturbing to me because, um, it's not the kind of intimacy that I generate when we... when we make a video where the focus is on fun and action.

The focus when... when I work with a person for one of these sculptures is a very quiet focus.

I'm... trying to match the image with the actual place on her body.

Here is, um...

I place this part and I matched it against her body.

With this figure over there, I didn't have that luxury.

He came in, um, usually at night because he had to work during the day.

Throughout the process when I attached the photographs, he wasn't here at all and I just sort of had to imagine what it would look like.

I carved the structure and then I just took it from there, based on some photographs that I had.

The Sum and Its Parts came about after an accident where I slipped a disk in my neck and I could literally not move one of my arms.

So I felt the only thing I could do was work with one person because that seemed manageable since I really couldn't maneuver around.

( fractured operatic music playing ) I was actually quite happy that the conditions under which I had to work were radically altered, because it made me think differently about what I could do.

( music continues ) One guy who I had worked with in a... in a video before, every week, two or three times we met over the course of three months.

It was really an extended project.

And we just... improvised.

I decided that it might be interesting to cut his hair, for him to shave his hair.

And, um, of course he didn't want to do that.

So... a lot of the time it was about me trying to convince him that he would look much better without hair.

And then in the end he, uh, he... he agreed.

( chuckles ) ( music continues ) Most people are much more unusual and complicated and eccentric and playful and creative than they have the time to express.

( flute trilling ) Play.

It's a thing that we put on hold because we get distracted by so many other things.

We have to make money... we have to pay the bills... we grow up... and these roles that we play, they're not real.

But after a while they become real, they become us.

Play... is, is sort of a reminder of what that was like to be a kid, and, um, we, in the end, never lose that; I think it's always there.

I mean, you carry your past inside of you, that's clear, so why should it ever disappear?

I think whether it's video or performance or, uh, these sculptures, it is really the learning experience of making these things... that give me and my life meaning.

( dramatic classical music playing ) ( crickets chirping ) ( indistinct voices speaking over police radio ) ( coin drops into pay phone ) MAN: Just turn this thing over.

Play it from the other side.

MAN: See, this is exactly what I'm talking about.

MAN: I mean, come on, it just doesn't get better than that, right?

No, it's too late.

( hangs up phone ) POLICE DISPATCHER: North Cliff and Buckner.

Two sugars, no cream.

Thank you.

Wait a second... that one's mine.

( voices over radio ) ( crickets chirping ) ( voice over radio ) DISPATCHER: Yeah, you were clear.

Were you clear?

( chuckles ) ( dispatcher speaking over radio as policeman chuckles ) ( both chuckling ) I'm asleep.

( laughs ) What?

I'm asleep.

( both laughing ) Captioning sponsored by THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH access.wgbh.org To learn more about Art:21: Art in the 21st Century and to download the free educator's guide, please visit PBS Online at pbs.org.

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