Once again, we find ourselves in one of New York City's
many fine boroughs to visit Kate Gilmore, whose
works are a fascinating and highly entertaining
mix of performance, video, sculpture, and painting.
Kate routinely gives herself challenges in her work,
like climbing up a sheet rock tower,
wriggling her way through a tunnel,
dumping paint-filled pots through a plywood structure.
And a camera documents it in all of its awkward, funny,
sometimes painful, but always thought-provoking glory.
Kate also gives other people challenges
in her live performances, like when
she hired five female performers to attack and dismantle by hand
an enormous block of raw clay.
In her work, Kate and others struggle to overcome obstacles.
So what, pray tell, is she going to ask of you?
Let's go find out.
Hi, I'm Kate Gilmore.
And this is your art assignment.
Hi, my name is Kate Gilmore.
You're in my studio in Brooklyn.
In this studio, a lot of things happen.
It's a studio where I plan projects.
A lot of projects come back to me and are stored.
Costumes are stored.
Performances are practiced.
Photographs are made or stored.
And it's probably mostly a studio where a lot of thinking
happens and where I figure out what I'm going to do,
why I'm going to do it, and if it can actually be done--
and then a lot of crappy computer work.
I didn't start making art until college.
I was definitely a creative kid, or an eccentric kid,
you could say.
But I really didn't find an outlet until college.
And I went to a small liberal arts school
in Maine called Bates College.
And that's where I first started taking sculpture classes
and kind of figured out that that was the best
way for me to sort of express myself and to be somewhat sane.
"Double Dutch" was a piece-- it was an early piece.
I think it was, god, 2003 or 2004.
I can't remember.
And it was a piece that was a perforated piece of wood that
looked like Swiss cheese, basically.
And it was me jumproping on this piece
to actually make kind of an island
that I was sort of stuck on, and then everything else
had broken around it.
And that piece was about using my body and my weight
and my individual self, in addition
to these nice high heel shoes to make sculpture.
Your assignment is get a big piece of wood,
as big as you can find.
Don't buy it.
Dumpster dive for it.
It can be crappy-- or a piece of cardboard.
Paint it with whatever color that you
can find that you love.
Paint it heavy.
So use a lot of pain.
And get a pair of fabulous shoes.
And fabulous shoes can be heels, or it can be work boots,
or it can be soccer cleats or anything like that.
And walk.
And when you think it looks cool, stop.
With this assignment, Kate's really
acting as our choreographer, giving us
directions for a kind of performance
that will result in an art piece.
Yeah.
And it also makes you think about the process of art
making.
It's not just about the finished result.
It's also about the work and effort
that it takes to get there.
In the end, whether we're talking about the "Mona
Lisa" or this, the board isn't just a painted board,
it's also a record of what happened on the board.
Oh, exactly.
Sometimes, I feel like I'm really
getting through to you, John.
So since the 1960s, more and more art
has been made that you could call process art, or art that
tells you the steps it took to get there,
that lays greater importance on that act of making.
You mean like Jackson Pollock stuff?
Well, kind of.
Let's take a look.
So you're familiar with the action painting
of Jackson Pollack, who dripped, flung,
and poured his paint onto raw canvas.
But there are also artists like Lynda Benglis, who,
in the late 1960s, poured DayGlo-colored latex and foam
directly onto the floor.
Long after the material dried and Benglis went on her way,
you could still make a pretty good guess
at how it got that way.
There's also Bruce Nauman, who, soon after finishing school,
came to this realization.
If I was an artist, and I was in the studio,
then whatever I was doing in the studio must be an art.
So he started making experimental films
in, you guessed it, his studio, performing
a series of actions in front of a 16 millimeter camera.
Nauman repeated precise activities
like walking in an exaggerated manner around the perimeter
of a square, bouncing in a corner,
or playing a note on the violin while I walk around the studio.
Nauman questioned the role of the artist
by breaking down art to its very basics.
What is art besides an artist doing something in a studio?
What is art but the ghosts of actions performed long ago?
This was the floor from Bryant Park.
And there was something that was like so cool about the marks.
All the marks on here are just from walking.
So the heels are what has made all these lines.
And occasionally, you see like a piece of bread
that's like a burst blister or something, or blood
or something like that.
But it's all the body making these abstract expressionistic
forms.
Well, I think-- because if you're
making really serious art, you're
never supposed to use color.
You should never use hot pink in art.
And you should never wear ice cream cone socks.
And you should never use canary yellow or lavender,
because people will think that you're girly and stupid.
But what happens when you do use color and you're not girly
or you are girly, but you're not stupid?
We all enter work in different ways
with different backgrounds and different ways
of thinking about it.
And for me, color is in conversation
with the way we look at the world
and we look at femininity, clearly,
but also just pop culture.
It means so much-- you can't enter the world
and not see color, even if you see it wrong.
Color is so important in terms of making art.
I'm gonna do this for a while.
You don't actually have to do your walking piece that long.
You can just decide to stop whenever you're ready to stop.
These shoes are not marking as easily as I had hoped.
So this could take a very long time.
Good luck with your piece.
Are they gonna be able to leave comments,
like I hate-- I think-- oh, god.
Don't leave a mean comment.
That is awful.
Put that on here.
Don't leave a mean comment.