The Great YouTube Roundup
A growing collection of YouTube links to footage and discussions of public works23 Mar 2009
Editor's introduction
PAR+RS is compiling a series of YouTube playlists featuring significant public artworks, artists, and incidents. Here’s a snapshot from the beginning of our research, but we’ll be updating the list as we find more. And more. And MORE.
Some of these works are more public than others, and some are not by people we would think of as ‘public artists’. All of them however, shed some light on what it might mean to make work public, or perhaps why artists started making public art (as we know it today) at all. Many of these works (particularly in the ‘Know Your History’ section) can be seen to have paved the way for a wide variety of contemporary public practice.
What are currently missing from these extracts are many works we might think of as traditionally monumental, memorial, or permanant urban public sculpture. This is next on the list, and I hope to be able to amend these works’ absence in the not too distant future. Likewise, there is an over-representation of live art and performance to camera. Clearly, YouTube is largely a moving image archive, and so to a degree I am limited by what exists on the site. If anyone has any public art footage they own and would like to add, I’m sure YouTube would be happy to have it.
You can help by sending in your recommendations – email the editor at editor@publicartscotland.com with your favourite links.
We’ll be adding more clips and info here:
Know Your History
Some from the vaults…
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970.
Chris Burden, Shoot, 1971, audio recording and footage of performance, with artist’s voiceover.
Bas Yan Ader, I’m Too Sad To Tell You, 1971
Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Swamp, 1971
John Latham, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1971
Dan Graham, Body Press, 1972
Chris Burden, Through The Night Softly, 1973
“During the early seventies I conceived a way to break the omnipotent stranglehold of the airwaves that broadcast television had. The solution was to simply purchase commercial advertising time and have the stations play my tapes along with their other commercials.”
Gordon Matta Clark, Conical Intersect 1975
Judy Chicago talks about The Dinner Party, 1974-1979
Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Expanding in Space 1977
Interview with Cindy Sherman, 1986
(After) Joseph Beuys, Tree Partnership, Baltimore USA, 2000
Interviews and Lectures
The Guerilla Girls discuss their history and practice. Recorded at MoMA on January 27, 2007
Richard Serra talks about the oxidisation of steel with Charlie Rose
Kara Walker with Philippe Vergne, ‘Contemporary Art in Conversation’ at the Walker Art Gallery. (Poor sound quality on some parts – sorry!)
Lawrence Weiner talks philosophy.
Jenny Holzer discusses ‘Projections for Chicago’
Mark Wallinger on State Britain, 2007
Kenny Hunter discusses Citizen Firefighter
Richard Long speaks at Tate St Ives, 2007
Claire Doherty ‘Curating Wrong Places’ talk given at Falmouth, 2006. Poor sound quality at the start but it gets better!
Sophie Calle talks about her work at the European Graduate School
Stellarc – The Body Is Obsolete
Dan Perjovski at MoMa
Rachael Whiteread talks about House
Roger Hiorns introduces Seizure
All About Now
Documentation and footage of recent works.
The Performing Archive Project by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz in Santa Monica
slideshow of images of Luis Rafael Berrios-Negron installing a temporary intervention work in Kabul.
Baghdad-based artist Laith al-Amari’s bizarre fibreglass-and-copper monument to Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at Bush during a news conference.
Improv Everywhere, Frozen Grand Central,
Rachel Whiteread, House
Seth Wulsin, 16 Tonnes
This is a rough assembly of footage from the upcoming documentary on the Caseros prison and the public art project that was recently completed in the windows of the prison by North Amercian artist Seth Wulsin. The documentary is being made by New York-based filmmaker Kellen Quinn.
Barbara Kruger, City University of New York Window Piece
Markus Kison, Touched Echo, invisible memorial in the Bruehlsche Terrasse (Dresden).
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