Sculpture

This is a three-part tape shot in 1975, ’76, and ’78 as Winsor was working on three pieces: 50/50, Copper Piece, and Burnt Piece. The rhythms and rituals of her working process as well as her comments on the work are documented. Part III is the only filmic record of the final stage of construction of Burnt Piece.

French performance artist Orlan uses her own body as a sculptural medium. Since 1990, she has worked on La Reincarnation de Sainte-Orlan, a process of plastic surgeries that she “performs,” making elaborate spectacles with surgeons dressed in sci-fi costumes and broadcasting the operations live via satellite to galleries worldwide. By exploring a total transformation of self, Orlan delves into issues of identity and the malleability of the flesh. She lives and works in Paris, exhibiting and performing internationally.

Nebula is a hallucinogenically immersive spectacle: a complex, long-form audio-visual composition, which pays playful homage to science fiction fantasies. Captured for video by means of stop-motion photography, objects made of glass, glitter and tulle, are nestled within a kaleidoscopic flow of computer-generated imagery. Drawing from Thomas Wilfred's Clavilux color organs as well as experimental abstract filmmakers such as Mary Ellen Bute, and James and John Whitney, Nebula also recalls liquid light shows and the marvelous sightings of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Best known for her carved wooden heads wrapped in black leather affixed with zippers, glass eyes, enamel noses, spikes and straps, Nancy Grossman has a broader body of work accomplished in draftsmanship, assemblage, and relief sculpture in addition to these meticulous carvings. After growing up on a farm in upstate New York, Grossman went to Pratt, where Richard Lindner’s emphasis on the figure and in the integrity of his personal syntax became an influence. In the 1960s her head sculptures brought her notoriety and five solo exhibitions before the age of thirty.

From her earlier sculptural work, Mary Miss has moved into concerns with illusion, distance, and perception. The work has grown to environmental scale and frequently uses both ancient and modern architecture as references. “A lot of things I do are illusionistic or have been almost like painting, like flattening something out while trying at the same time to give the experience of space. I’m interested in that very thin line that happens between these two different things,” Miss says in this interview with Kate Horsfield.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1978.

Robert Cumming is a photographer/sculptor/bookmaker who borrows from the artifice of theatrical sets to construct his elaborate and often absurd images. He has also published several books of photography and narration. “I started to go against the avant-garde ‘less is more’ and began to work on more varied levels—sculpture, photography, and writing that has a number of layers. Illusion worked in under that guise,” Cumming says in this interview with Alex Sweetman.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1976.

After seeing an installation of Steina’s Machine Vision, involving mechanized cameras moving to pre-programmed patterns, sculptor Bradford Smith suggested that his work be used as the subject of a video investigation. Slowly panning over the encrusted surfaces of the sculptures, Steina’s camera records a fantastic landscape of twisted figures and gruesome armor. The varying speed, orientation, and distortion of the images transforms the three-dimensional sculptures into a visceral four-dimensional experience.