Liz Magor: Everyone Should Have a Studio | Art21 "Extended Play"

[Liz Magor: Everyone Should Have A Studio] If I'm not here, I want to be here. And I want to work. It's a quiet space. It has really good light. The light comes from the East. A lot of people don't know I'm here. I don't have my name on the door. I meet my friends outside of the studio. It's my space--totally my space. Working might be a placating or calming situation where I have no distractions. I was going to say it's like meditating, but what do I know about meditating? [LAUGHS] Not very much! It's a way to keep myself on a single focus-- on a single track-- and there's something pleasurable about that. So I'm here for pleasure, in a way, although it's not fun. When I cast my material into this mold of a paper bag, then I get a positive. That yellow will come to the outside. And it's part of my wanting to make these objects have some vitality or vivaciousness. The contents are going to be pushing for your attention. The yellow is pushing to get the bag to be alive. I keep the studio in a very rudimentary state in terms of the technology and the systems that I use. I'm not investing in equipment-- I'm not a factory. It's because I want to be able to quit whatever thing I might be interested in and move on to a completely different thing. I'm thinking, so I need to be mobile. This might sound pretentious, but it's like a place for physical philosophy. I talk a lot about the "below the radar" or the "ever-present-but-unacknowledged" things. And to me, these are part of that realm because they're brilliant. This is brilliant! And I want my mold making to register them. Although that's... those are air bubbles. --So this is the front and that's the back. --And the front has fragile things sticking out. I need a very quiet studio, because a work starts with me acknowledging those ever-present, not noisy operations in the world. They're always there, but they're not always acknowledged. Those are the things I'm interested in. Everyone should have a studio. They should be issued by the government as health-mandated items. Because it is a place where you kind of line up all those dissonances and have a good look.

Channel: Art21

Views: 69,675

Rating: 4.8882236 out of 5

Keywords: contemporary art, Art21, Art in the Twenty-First Century, Exclusive, Art21 Exclusive, documentary, Liz Magor, sculpture, Vancouver, studio, Canadian artist, Canadian art, artist studio, art studio

Id: FPvh4pDQKw4

Length: 4min 10sec (250 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 10 2017