ART SAFARI

Innovative, provocative, humorous, entertaining series on art!

Art geek and award-winning documentary maker, Ben Lewis goes in search of great art… and art that might be great… in 8 films that are both analytical adventures and adventurous analyses. In his search he scales skyscrapers, brings sculptures to life, burgles houses, and absorbs copious amounts of French art theory in a determined effort to understand contemporary art.

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Matthew Barney: From fresco to video
The most celebrated American artist of the moment, and partner of Björk. Matthew Barney makes art on a Hollywood scale with videos, sculptures, photographs and drawings. His Cremaster Cycle – the art world’s answer to Star Wars – is still generating queues at the Guggenheim in New York.

Maurizio Cattelan: Conceptual comedy
Best known to British audiences for his photorealist sculpture of the Pope struck by a meteorite (recently auctioned in NY for just under $1M). Cattelan is the court jester of the art world and the cartoonist of Conceptualism. Denied permission to meet and interview the artist, Ben brings Cattelan’s sculptures to life and sends them on dangerous missions to put questions to the artist and his doubles…

Gregor Schneider: Changing Rooms
Schneider won the Golden Lion at the last Venice Biennale by exhibiting his whole house – a house of horrors, a grim series of rooms without doors, doors without rooms, acoustically isolated rooms insulated with lead, fake partitions, and dank dark basements. Convinced that this kind of art can only be explained by a terrible childhood trauma, Ben tries to get Schneider to talk about his past, but the artist is determined to deflect this invasion of privacy…

Relational Art: the ism that isn’t
In the nineties a new global art movement evolved, interpreted by the leading French critic Nicolas Bourriaud as ‘Relational Art’. Among the artists are Philippe Parreno, Carsten Hoeller, Liam Gillick, Angela Bulloch, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. Armed with Bourriaud’s book Ben goes in search of what might be a new ‘ism’. But trouble lies ahead: many of the artists refuse to be related to ‘Relational Art’…

Also see: ART SAFARI 2

Release year:

2004

Director:

Ben Lewis

Producer:

Fiona O'Doherty

Co production:

ZDF, BBC and TV2 Danmark

Episodes:

4

Running length:

29 minutes

Production company:

Bergmann Pictures

 

Categories:

• Arts, Religion & mystery