Adam Milner Takes Care of the Details | Art21 "New York Close Up"

(wind blowing) (birds tweeting) [Adam Milner, artist] (soft ambient music) I think people would think of me as a collector. (ambient music continues) I feel more like I'm just a magnet and objects are just flying at me all the time and then I have to then deal with them. (ambient music continues) [Adam Milner Takes Care of the Details] My artworks are always intermingling with personal stuff. So I turned to tidying philosophies or home decor TV shows. A lot of these philosophies are about getting rid of things, but I'm really interested in this idea of vibrant matter or this idea that everything is active-- and how when we're done with something, it still exists in the world. Immediately I think of trash, and I love trash. (upbeat synth music) I will just walk around the neighborhood and look at trash. (upbeat synth music continues) A spilled bag of Cheetos on the sidewalk is a stunning composition that I have to take a photo of. (camera clicking) And then I come home and I start to use something I learned from those Cheetos in the work. I find their accidental compositions to be really exciting. (clanging) I like the flattening that happens in thrift stores where there's functional things next to artworks next to things that seem worthless. (glass tinkling) I get a lot of ideas and a lot of materials and a lot of objects from the people in my life. When my friend Jen from high school wanted me to cut off all her hair and keep it, it felt like a weird trophy. Now I've lived with that hair and protected it and cared for it for longer than it was on her head. So is it my hair now? Even as I approach something out of hair or closeness with a person, there's also kind of a domination or a control. It's always going to be Jen's hair, but it's now also been in the Warhol museum. (piano synth music) I'm realizing that arranging is kind of my primary discipline. I made this sculpture with these little things I had collected, and then I carved these stones that I would find to hold them. I think some of the items are safer in the stones than they were before. (ethereal synth music) It needs just a little bit of yellow, actually. (water running) (water dripping) The exhibition I'm working on right now is with a museum called Black Cube. (ethereal synth music) We're showing thirteen sculptures at a thrift store, a bodega, one sculpture is in my friend's car. This exhibition is about letting these objects have these temporary contexts that change how you read them and maybe help you access them, and that aren't just this white cube environment. (quiet violin music) Sometimes at an art museum, the brackets that are hand painted to look like marble, those hand-painted brackets are more exciting to me even than the bust. They're trying to disappear, but then they become even more conspicuous through this careful labor. (ambient violin music) A museum has its own rules of organization and display just like the store or the archive or the hoard. I'm interested in teasing out the similarities among them, disrupting that hierarchy a little bit. (drill running) I have a really fraught relationship with my things, and I realize that I'm, basically, defending the hoarder. With hoarding, you do blur with your stuff. Your body becomes part of the hoard. (ethereal synth music) I think everything is porous, and everything is always absorbing the thing next to it. (ethereal music continues) If it's confusing where things begin and end, it's a lot harder to divide and segment. I'm always trying to resist the clean category. I like when things are messier and blurrier. (ethereal music continues) (soft guitar music)

Channel: Art21

Views: 7,172

Rating: 4.9096045 out of 5

Keywords: contemporary art, Art21, Art in the Twenty-First Century, New York Close Up, Art21 New York Close Up, documentary, art, artist, Adam Milner, sculpture, installation, Black Cube, Public Sculptures, public art, pop up art, found objects, readymades, hoarders, collecting, arranging, thrift store, home decor, apartment design

Id: dvU_LjzDXlY

Length: 8min 30sec (510 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 14 2021