[Man VO] Let there be light.
He can't hide, try as he might.
♪♪♪
A man at night making a pathetic attempt at connection...
[spraying]
to connect with anyone in an empty room.
Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?
♪♪♪
Here is the man.
I've seen the man perform.
I've seen the man try and hide.
[man] Okay, ready to roll?
[woman] You can stand up straight, Alex.
[Alex] Yeah, is it okay?
-[woman] Yeah. -[woman] Yeah, that's fine.
-[woman] We could reach you. -[woman] We can reach.
[Alex] Okay.
[woman] It was just for the top of your head I needed...
[Alex] Okay.
♪ curious jazzy music ♪
[Alex VO] These characters or images or objects exist within a
world of dreams.
♪ curious electronic music ♪
I just want to have my mind be freer than it is and
that doesn't come easy to me, so to spend time with these
characters in this devotional research-based way is to say,
"I don't know if I'll ever change,
but I try to, at least."
There is distance between myself and the people in the past who
have influenced me.
If I think of some kind of icon as a flat symbol,
how do I give it depth?
I want that, I think, of the people I admire or the people
that confuse me.
I want depth.
[Alex] There we go.
Uh, wait, but is it all the way up on the shoulder?
[man] Yes.
[Alex VO] I had a kind of very long and winding path to be an artist.
I was a young person in my early 20s and studying animation,
and I didn't know how to go forward to-- if I wanted to make
sculpture, I just didn't know how to proceed.
All of the people making sculpture were using the wood
shop or the metal shop, and those places did not feel safe
for a young gay guy.
Like, I didn't know how to find myself there.
When I was sort of feeling like I was at an impasse and kind of
had...
had some time to think about how I wanted to make a sculpture,
I looked to my grandmother and started sewing.
In particular, I made this large ketchup bottle.
♪ dreamy ambient music ♪
I filmed myself performing this thing where I replicated a
photograph of Claes Oldenburg carrying a toothpaste bottle
down the street but this was a large ketchup bottle,
and I walked through the streets of Philadelphia with this big
ketchup bottle.
And that was my sort of first entry into sculpture and also
sewing as this kind of powerful act of finding yourself.
♪♪♪
This idea of embracing these things,
softening these things that seem to be hard is my way of taking
down that machismo a notch and to say, like,
"There's room for a gentler,
more tender way of understanding what it means to be human."
♪♪♪
Everyone I work with is doing the same thing and wanting the
same thing of their lives.
There's a whole community of people working towards something
new and unknown.
None of us know what this will be in the end,
and that, I think, is-- that's why we all come to the studio
every day is, like, to just get into what we don't know.
We'll just see how far this gets us.
♪♪♪
Yeah, I mean this will change tomorrow,
but that's...
what we want.
♪♪♪
So this is a remake of Claes Oldenburg's Mouse Museum,
and it's a work that he initially made for Documenta.
I remember, like, wanting to just be around stuff,
small plastic objects.
My room growing up probably had just, like,
lots of buckets of this kinds of stuff that I would
collect.
And I have sort of amassed all of my objects and small
sculptures that I've made and things that are important to me,
things that just kind of made up my sculptural vocabulary,
but in miniature.
This little Big Bird mockup, this was sort of the genesis of
the work for The Met.
[Alex VO] My work, when I'm replicating something,
doesn't end with replica, 'cause for me,
it's also important to collage what has been replicated and put
it into a new world.
♪ uplifting ethereal music ♪
It allows for those characters or images or objects to exist
within a world where logic is kind of reinvented or paused or
slowed down or reversed, and what we think we know
and how we think things should be is now undone.
I guess at an early age, when I said I wanted to be an artist,
I just thought that was making Disney drawings.
I wanted to participate in the magical world that that space
allowed me to exist in.
I grew up in the suburbs of Jersey and Pittsburgh,
and I grew up in Caracas, Venezuela.
As a young person, when you move around a lot,
it can be unsettling, and so I think that's kind of how I
became a dreamer --
because I was living in a place and then leaving the
place, and then you long for the place that you were living.
You kind of live in some sort of space that's not actually
underfoot but quite far away in your mind.
♪♪♪
The homes I'm making, they're very fragmented.
They're collages of many places and many versions,
I think, of myself.
♪♪♪
How does one look forward and then also understand the past
and where they came from?
I have always come to this particular gallery for this
Brancusi.
How I have always understood Brancusi was this notion that,
like, the sculpture --
from the top to the ground --
is all one.
Your foundation or what might be a pedestal is actually part of
the work, and as I interpret that,
our roots and our history matters as much as what is
present or what we see or what is visible at the top.
And so then I think, again, about this work and how to
respond to it or unravel it.
I think that's often what I want when I spend time with these
works is to say, "It worked for you then,
but how can it work for me now?
And let's hug it out."
♪♪♪
[figure in video] When I saw you...
and that girl talking…
♪♪♪
[Scott] All right, let's go ahead and roll.
All right, ready?
And...
action.
[Alex] So we could cut to some kind of version of that.
[Scott] Oh yeah, we can use a piece of it.
Do you wanna do it again or move on?
[Alex] Let's do one more.
[Scott] Okay, cool.
♪ soft piano music ♪
Today, Alex is shooting this sequence of the film in which
Marcel Duchamp gets dressed into drag as Rrose Sélavy,
which is a fictional persona that Duchamp came up with,
and he's going to be performing a song under a pink spotlight.
[Alex VO] You know, my parents pulled me aside and said,
"Well, what does it mean?" [chuckles]
They were like, "Why ketchup and why these characters?"
And I was like, "These are my safe spaces."
And as strange as my ideas may be,
to make sure that they still can communicate some sort of kernel
of what it means to be human, that's what matters to me;
that's, like, the driving force of why I work and how I work,
I think.
[Rrose Selavy] [in robotic voice] ♪ Why do birds ♪
♪ Suddenly appear ♪
[applause]
♪ Every time ♪
♪ That you're near? ♪
♪ Ooh-wee baby ♪
♪ Just like me ♪
♪ They long to be... ♪
[Alex VO] Walking the line between the person that you
really are and the person that you long to be or the person
that you once were,
we are constantly negotiating and renegotiating those things to be,
you know, the perfect human.
I don't know if I'll ever fully understand it,
but I know that one puts things into the world because they want
to ask questions, and I hope I learn something new.
♪♪♪
♪ And that is why ♪
♪ soft uplifting music ♪