Three doccies about the eternal drive to create, express and reflect on the world

With FNB Art Joburg returning next week at the Sandton Convention Centre and the accompanying Open City program taking place now, the Johannesburg air is thick with the smell of artworld expectation and inevitable pretension.

In celebration of all things artist, artistic and artworld related, here are three documentaries to watch about the eternal drive to create, express and reflect on the world around us.

The art house essential

Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present — Rent or buy from Apple TV +

Made in 2012 when one of the world’s most respected and renowned performance artists, Serbian-born Marina Abramović was 65 years old, director Matthew Aker’s equally celebrated documentary focuses on a simple but poignant show that Abramovic staged at MoMA in New York in 2010.

“The Artist is Present” was a work in which Abramovic sat silently in the gallery all day for three months while onlookers were invited to sit opposite her and stare into her eyes for a moment before moving on.

What happened as a result of this seemingly benign intervention was a kind of mass possession normally reserved for religious miracle pilgrimages as the audience began to emotionally breakdown under the glare of the artist’s unflinching gaze.

Jumping back in time between the increasingly tense experiences of the performance piece, candid behind-the-scenes interactions with the artist and a solid archive and rich overview of her decades long practice and rise to the summit of the art world, the film paints a picture of a woman with a fierce dedication to her practice, a piercing intelligence and a certain inscrutability that allows her to make the most of her sometimes confrontational engagements with the flawed but all too human insecurities of her audiences.

It all adds up to a fascinating examination of a simple but effective practice that continues to intrigue and sometimes exasperate viewers across the world.

Trailer: 

The stone cold classic

The Andy Warhol Diaries — Netflix

Released earlier this year and produced by Ryan Murphy, director Andrew Rossi’s Emmy-nominated, six-part docuseries offers an extensive look at the life, art and loves of the 20th century’s most famous but also elusive artist, using Warhol’s own thoughts as recorded in his diaries as the basis for its narrative.

It’s a difficult task to interrogate the inner life of a man who spent so much time working to make the man behind his iconic white-haired persona essentially unknowable, but thanks to some innovative technological trickery — including the use of an AI voice-over that narrates extracts from the diaries in Warhol’s own voice — Rossi gets closer than many previous biographers and experts to revealing something approaching an idea of the “real Andy”.

At its core the series makes a convincing argument that for Warhol, his greatest artwork was not his legendary prints of mass commercial objects such as washing powder boxes and Campbell’s tomato soup cans but rather himself.

The film also benefits from focusing on Warhol’s rocky attempts to maintain relevance after the glory days of his 1960s Factory, Velvet Underground, celebrity-surrounded New York heyday and his near fatal shooting by feminist warrior and author Valerie Solanas in 1968.

This period saw Warhol undertake thousands of pay-to-play commissions and gigs and the legendary brief but creatively invigorating partnership with the tragic genius Jean Michel Basquiat that like so many seemingly unbreakable bonds in Warhol’s life ended in misunderstanding and resentment.

It’s ultimately an exhaustive, sometimes frustrating, but always mostly revealing and bittersweet portrait of a desperately insecure and lonely genius who spent much of his life vainly searching for love and acceptance but was seldom satisfied with the results.

Trailer: 

The diamond in the rough

Black Art: In the Absence of Light — Showmax

The veteran documentarian of Black American experience, Sam Pollard, shines a light on the world of Black American artists in this timely and necessary re-evaluation of the now hugely popular but for too long overlooked history and presently creatively vibrant and invigoratingly varied state of the Black American artworld.

Beginning with an examination of the controversy that surrounded curator and artist David Driskell’s seminal 1976 exhibition “Two Centuries of Black American Art”, which, in spite of protests from white curators at the Los Angeles Museum of Art, went on to sold out shows across the country, the film asks the question of why such a show was necessary in 1976 and, to a lesser extent, why this film is so needed almost half a century later.

Featuring interviews with and studio footage of some of the pre-eminent Black American artists working today — including Kerry James Marshall, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, Amy Sherald and Theaster Gates — the film makes a convincing argument for the excellence of Black American art that stands on an equal and often superior footing with its white contemporaries in spite of the exceptional nature of the cultural, political and social challenges its artists have had to face.

Trailer: