Making it in Manhattan
Volume 1 - 59 minutes - $24.95 - Item #AC01 - to order

Informed entertainment about the people who make contemporary art. Artists, collectors, and dealers bring to life the art capital of the world, New York, as it plunges into the 21st Century. A cross-section of artists, the film discusses inspiration, aesthetic issues, and the meaning of success. With Louise Bourgeois, Brice Marden, Chuck Close, Neil Jenney, Elizabeth Murray, Pat Steir, Ashley Bickerton, Gary Simmons, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Caio Fonseca, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Richmond Burton, St. Clair Cemin, Emma Amos, George McNeil, Cletus Johnson, John Torreano, Ivan Karp, Jay Gorney, Matthew Marks, Jerry Saltz, Herb & Dorothy Vogel, and others. From abstraction to figuration, from installation to conceptual art, from the privacy of the doctor's office to the posh gallery opening, the film captures the reality of a special world. (Music by Tom Waits, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Ronnie Jordan, George van Eps, Piero Umiliani w/Chet Baker, & The Don Braden Quintet)

...captures New York artists, dealers, and collectors at their liveliest and most candid. - The Washington Post

This remarkable film gives us the sense of seeing art today with absolute clarity and truth. - Arthur C. Danto, The Nation

Anyone who knows anything about the perils of talking heads and flapping tongues on film must marvel at this insightful job. - Andrew Sarris, Film Critic, New York Observer

Simplicity
Volume 2 - 59 minutes - $24.95 - Item #AC02 - to order

This New Release takes viewers on a revealing trip into the studios and lives of a group of singular artists. On a desert mesa outside Santa Fe, Richard Tuttle invents his mysterious and marvellously humble forms, made of wire, cardboard, string, wood. In Taos, Agnes Martin rhythmically repeats extremely simplified images. In his studio by the Santa Monica surf, John Baldessari, a founding father of Conceptualism, aims for successful juxtapositions combining photographs with text. The imaginative tableaux of Robert Williams revel in surreal cartoon imagery, creations from his living room in the San Fernando Valley. At a cabin in Woodstock, Joan Snyder refines her sensuous art amid a lush birch forest. Mike Bidlo salutes Duchamp at a Manhattan Gallery, while in a Brooklyn brownstone, Carolyn Martin uses charcoal slabs to realize her visceral abstractions. On Sunset Boulevard, Amy Adler reclaims personal history through self-portraits, photographing her original drawings, then destroying the traces. Through this group of memorable iconoclasts, the creative "act" is there to see and study. Along with L.A. Times art critic Christopher Knight, writer/curator Dave Hickey, publisher Mat Gleason, and others, ART CITY: Simplicity touches on artists' relations with the press, ambiguous feelings about showing one's work, distilling concepts into an essence, and what it means to succeed in the artworld. (Music by Beck, Tom Waits, Charles Mingus, Count Basie, Ted Greene, Antonio Carlos Jobim...)

A Ruling Passion
Volume 3 - $24.95 - 58 minutes - Item #AC03 - to order

New Release ... Many artists use the pain, exhilaration and resolution of private desires to express themselves. ART CITY: A Ruling Passion focuses on intense personalities who've used their art to explore the emotional impact, or dark humor of psychological truths. Everything that Louise Bourgeois creates - whether in wood, marble, fabric or bronze - comes from memory of past experience. Michael Ray Charles investigates the marketing of black memorabilia, using early American illustrations and advertising imagery. Elizabeth Peyton reinvents portraiture, using her friends as subjects, as well as historical, and pop culture, royalty. Ed Ruscha's literary landscapes burst from the physical world around him - the world "right outside the window." The comic spirit of Lari Pittman contrasts with his graphic and painterly declarations. Tucked away in a landmark house, Richmond Burton remembers his dreams to build a "psychic field" of abstraction. The telescopic vistas and Pantheon-like arrays of featureless faces by David Deutsch are stimulated by sub-conscious sensations. Along with writer/curator Dave Hickey, New Museum founder Marcia Tucker, and others, ART CITY: A Ruling Passion plumbs issues that affect artists - preoccupations of startling universality - like community, motivation and controversy, finding one's audience, and just "getting it right." (Music by Beck, Charles Mingus, Roy Ayers, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Claude Thornhill, Piero Umiliani, Joey Altruda, Herbie Hancock...)