TOP 5 FAVORITE ART DOCUMENTARIES TO WATCH

I'll be honest, in my youth, I didn't care too much about documentaries unless they were of the paranormal variety. It wasn't until I watched my first, Exit Through The Gift Shop, that I had a sudden spark of inspiration, spray painting pink elephants downtown under the light of the full moon at the young rebellious age of 20. Since then, I've watched plenty. Here are my top five favorite art documentaries.

1. Beauty Is Embarrassing

"Part biography, part live performance, Beauty Is Embarrassing tells the story of this one-of-a-kind visual artist and raconteur. The film traces White’s career from an underground cartoonist in New York’s East Village to his big break as a designer, puppeteer, and voice-over actor on Pee-wee’s Playhouse for which he won three Emmy awards. It follows Wayne’s success designing and animating for other children’s shows like Beakman’s World and music videos for The Smashing Pumpkins (“Tonight, Tonight”) and Peter Gabriel (“Big Time”) through a dark period of struggle and self-reflection before emerging in his present-day incarnation as a respected painter and performer. The film, like White, embraces the ragged edges and messy contradictions of life, art, and family with rabid humor and honesty." - PBS

2. Exit Through The Gift Shop (because how could I not?)

"Exit Through the Gift Shop is a chaotic study of low-level criminality, comradeship, and incompetence. By turns shocking, hilarious, and absurd, this is an enthralling modern-day fairytale... with bolt cutters. This is the inside story of Street Arts brutal and revealing account of what happens when fame, money, and vandalism collide. Exit Through the Gift Shop follows an eccentric shopkeeper turned amateur filmmaker as he attempts to capture many of the world's most infamous vandals on camera, only to have famed British stencil artist Banksy turn the camcorder back on its owner in one of the most provocative films about art ever made." - Editorial Critics

3. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

"For years, conceptual artist Ai Weiwei has been bringing worldwide attention to China’s authoritarian regime through his artwork and his deft use of social media. And every step of the way, China’s leaders have been trying to figure out how to deal with Ai as he seeks to bring transparency to a traditionally opaque government.

They’ve tried to enforce his silence in every possible way. They track him constantly. They’ve attempted to bribe him. They’ve demolished his huge, newly completed art studio. They’ve beaten him to the point of needing brain surgery. They’ve offered him government positions. They’ve jailed him for 81 days. They’ve shut down his blog. They’ve taken away his passport. But nothing can keep the burly Ai down, and nothing can muzzle his irreverent dissidence. Ai, one of the world’s most compelling and appealing activists is well known for his use of mocking humor. But he means serious business." - PBS

4. David Lynch: The Art Life

"A rare glimpse into the mind of one of cinema’s most enigmatic visionaries, David Lynch: The Art Life offers an absorbing portrait of the artist, as well as an intimate encounter with the man himself. From his secluded home and painting studio in the Hollywood Hills, a candid Lynch conjures people and places from his past, from his boyhood to his experiences at art school to the beginnings of his filmmaking career—in stories that unfold like scenes from his movies. This remarkable documentary by Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, and Olivia Neergaard-Holm travels back to Lynch’s early years as a painter and director drawn to the phantasmagoric, while also illuminating his enduring commitment to what he calls “the art life”: “You drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint, and that’s it.” - The Criterion Collection

5. Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

"Since the beginning of her career, in Belgrade in the late 1960s, Marina Abramovic has been a pioneer of performance art, creating some of the most important works in the field. Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present accompanies an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art that documents approximately 50 of the artist's ephemeral time- and media-based works from throughout her career. The book also discusses a unique element of the Museum's retrospective, live performance: a new work created for the occasion, and performed by Abramovic herself; and re-creations of the artist's works by other performers―the first such to be undertaken in a museum setting. The book spans over four decades of Abramovic's early interventions and sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances and collaborative performances made with the Dutch artist Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). Essays by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator of Media and performance art at MoMA, and four distinguished scholars examine Abramovic's ideas of time, duration, and the reperformance of performance art as a way to extend it into posterity. The Artist Is Present also includes a CD with audio commentary by the artist that guides the reader through the publication. The artist is present not only in the exhibition but also in the experience of the book. Born in Belgrade just after the end of the Second World War, Marina Abramovicwas raised in the Serbian Orthodox Church (her great uncle was a Patriarch and a canonized saint in the Church) and left Yugoslavia in 1976, having already established herself as a performance artist, living in Amsterdam and eventually New York, where she presently lives."

Much love and art,

Jaqualine | The Altered Diary