Imagine a disease so rare there's no cure. Austin Crawford was diagnosed with MSA or Multiple System Atrophy. As his health fades we find Austin building a hot rod from his wheelchair and sharing his story to his followers on Tiktok.
According to the Bible, The Ark of the Covenant was a box that housed the two tablets of stone inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Over the centuries it has remained an object of great mystery, inspiring infinite questions. But can modern science shed new light on what the Ark really was?
Vong Phaophanit showed his strikingly seductive Neon Rice Field when he was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1993. Like much of his rich and complex work since then, this installation exhibits a strong interest in language and light, in the painterly qualities of ephemeral materials and in ideas of cultural displacement. He was born in Laos, educated in France and has worked mostly in Britain since the early 1990s. Much of his work now is commissioned for architectural and environmental settings, including Outhouse in Liverpool. Created like many of his large-scale sculptures with fellow artist Claire Oboussier, this is a transparent glass house (with opaque windows) which serves as a flexible social space for the people who live in the surrounding tower blocks.
Science and Surrealism, ancient myths, Buddhism and feminism are among the frameworks of ideas important to Liliane Lijn’s art. In Paris at the end of the 1950s, in Greece and New York, and in England since 1966, she has worked with light, energy and movement, with archetypal shapes and unconventional materials to produce an art that is clear, complex and strikingly beautiful. Many of Liliane Lijn’s key drawings and sculptures are featured in this profile, which was filmed alongside an important reassessment of her work at the Mead Gallery. The Poem Machines and Koans of the 1960s and 1970s are considered as well as the ambitious “goddess” figures of more recent years.
Lisa Milroy’s paintings are pleasurable and provocative, clear but complex, immediate and yet richly subtle. In 2001 many of her major works were brought together for an important exhibition at Tate Liverpool; this film, the first about her work, was made alongside that show. Her earliest works are depictions of everyday objects: shoes in serried ranks, collections of lightbulbs and household hardware. Later canvases explore the process of depicting images of people, blank facades of buildings, clichés of photographic landscapes. More recent work is looser and less apparently realist.
From previously barren moorland in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh, Ian Hamilton Finlay has created a unique garden as an encompassing work of art. Little Sparta is a magical combination of culture and horticulture, poetry and planting, philosophy and myth. Ian Hamilton Finlay began his work at Little Sparta in the mid-1960s. With friends and collaborators, around a group of old farm buildings he has fashioned landscapes, streams, bridges, glades, lanes, bowers and more. Everywhere there are inscriptions and sculptures reflecting the artist’s preoccupations: the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, pre-Socratic philosophy, garden history, World War Two, the sea and fishing fleets, time and mortality.
In the early 1960s Anthony Caro led a revolution in sculpture in Britain. His abstract steel constructions, often painted in bold colours, forged a new and internationally influential sculptural language. In the years since his fertile and diverse practice has consistently challenged and extended what sculpture is, and what it might be. At the age of 80, Anthony Caro remains intensely active, working each day in his studio and overseeing every detail of an extensive retrospective at Tate. Preparations for the show are featured in this profile, along with many of his major works, filmed in Britain, Germany and the United States.
Ian Davenport’s 48 metre-long painting Poured Lines transforms the tunnel beneath a railway bridge in Southwark, close to Tate Modern. The painting’s numerous vitreous enamel panels were created in a German factory where they were baked at fearsomely high temperatures. This film follows the artist as he creates this remarkable public artwork.
A chronicle of the period from the departure of Charles Taylor to the election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first African woman head of state, that presents the difficulties of rehabilitating a nation destroyed by war. LIBERIA: A FRAGILE PEACE is a perfect follow-up to Liberia: An Uncivil War, picking up the Liberian saga in October 2003, with the departure of the despotic Charles Taylor, the arrival of interim President Gyude Bryant and the deployment of a U.N. peacekeeping force. More than a historical record, however, this film is an ideal case study in how difficult it is to rebuild a society once it has lapsed into anarchy, a condition afflicting more and more nations around the world. The success or failure of the Liberian experience could have long-lasting impact on peace-keeping missions in the future.
Root Hog or Die is a portrait of a living remnant of this once pervasive but rapidly vanishing way of life. Filmed in 1973 in hilltowns across Western Massachusetts and Southern Vermont, it follows the cycle of the farming year from spring to winter. In its course we visit with an array of elders, who reflect on farming's deep natural patterns, share their family histories and personal memories, and ponder the inevitable forces of technological and social change they have endured. The bittersweet nature of their challenges is manifest, as is the quiet pride they take in their lives as farmers.
Short film from the British Pathé collection about an amusement park in Germany - various rides are seen, including a Helter Skelter. Was an item in Eve's Film Review issue number 459.
If you love country music and are familiar with line dancing, this dance exercise video with Denise Austin is for you. The program of exercises shows you how to firm and tone hips, thighs, and buttocks using the latest country line-dance steps.
Paul Young, a teacher of drawing and perspective at the Ontario College of Art of Design, goes from his final classes as a teacher into his first year of retirement. After 33 years of dedication to his students, he strives to become the artist he always dreamed of being.
In April 1969, a small group of Black and Puerto Rican students shut down the City College of New York, an elite public university located right in the heart of Harlem. Fueled by the revolutionary fervor sweeping the nation, the strike soon turned into an uprising, leading to the extended occupation of the campus, classes being canceled, students being arrested, and the resignation of the college president. Through archival footage and modern-day interviews, we follow the students’ struggle against the institutional racism that, for over a century, had shut out people of color from this and other public universities. The Five Demands revisits the untold story of this explosive student takeover, and proves that a handful of ordinary citizens can band together to take action and effect meaningful change.
With amateur footage from the Centre National de l'Audiovisuel "D'Schueberfouer" takes the viewer on trip through the history of Luxembourg fairs. The footage is about the rides, the emotions and the fantasy of the children connected through the different eras of the fairs.
Film-maker John Heyer recounts to fellow film-maker Pat Jackson his film career, especially his award-winning film from 1954, the Australian classic Back of Beyond. At the same time as the two friends are in conversation the "original" Tom Kruse, outback mailman and the subject of Heyer's film, is retracing his journey of over 40 years before across the inland desert of Australia to bring the mail to the isolated people along the 325 mile stock-route from Queensland to South Australia. Heyer's importance to Austraian cinema is acknowledged and we get to see him as a person away from the camera too as he chats and travels across Europe with his friend.
Revealing and complex exploration of Barbara Hepworth's work features two parallel soundtracks. One is taken entirely from the artist's own words, drawn from interviews and letters, and newly recorded by Gina McKee.