Sophie Calle is the Grand Dame of French contemporary art. Her famous works of art usually involve following a set of rules or a procedure – following a stranger to Venice; obeying a set of instructions from writer Paul Auster; or working as a hotel maid. Her art combines romantic autobiography and detached conceptualism. She gives Ben permission to make a film about her on one condition: he has to think up a ritual or set of rules for her to follow, similar to the rules which govern her works of art. Ben visits gallerists and theorists to take advice on what to suggest to her. He submits idea after idea. She rejects one after the other. Finally, in a final encounter with the artist, Ben realises that this ritual of rejection is the set of rules he wanted Sophie to follow.
Maurizio Cattelan is the world’s funniest artist. His ultra-realist works of art are three-dimensional cartoons about the contradictions and follies of the art world, art history and, beyond that, of Western civilization. Born in Italy in 1960, Cattelan made his name with sculptures like “The Ninth Hour”, a waxwork of the Pope struck by a meteorite (1999) or ‘Him’ (2001), another super-realistic waxwork, this time of Hitler as a little boy kneeling in prayer. He stuck his Italian gallerist Massimo De Carlo to the walls of his gallery with wrapping tape and dressed up his French one, Emmanuel Perrotin, in a penis outfit. He made a portrait of supermodel Stephanie Seymour for her husband, art collector and newspaper magnate Peter Brant, in which he created a bust of Seymour protruding out of a wooden plaque like an nineteenth century hunting trophy with the head of a stag.
Born in 1967, Barney grew up in Idaho, and studied at Yale. There he excelled as a sportsman and enrolled in sculpture classes. He put the two together, and began producing a series of works from 1987 onwards, which enlarged the physical attributes of sport and biological processes into metaphors for artist creation. Taking as a model, the way muscles are built up in sport by encountering resistance (being strained and then healing stronger), Barney began trying to draw while encountering various ‘restraints’. In one early performance, he scaled the walls of a gallery, using rock-climbing equipment as if he was scaling a mountain. He made small drawings suspended awkwardly above the floor and smeared himself in the sports and body medication, Vaseline.In their form these works shared the utilitarian aesthetic of seventies body-art by Vito Acconci or Marina Abramovic, but, in the Cremaster Cycle, Barney translated these themes into colourful and complicated allegories, full of characters in strange costumes, incredible locations and bizarre storylines.
Ben Lewis returns for a new series travelling the world in search of contemporary art. He begins by looking at the work of controversial Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, whose work includes Cloaca, a machine based on the human digestive system. Delvoye is now tattooing pictures onto pigs - so the presenter decides to see how much a similar mural etched on his own back would fetch.
Ben Lewis looks at the work of controversial Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, who has recreated his downbeat view of the globalised economy and corruption in the art world by paying drug users to tattoo a line across their backs and filling a German museum with mud. Ben follows Sierra across the world from Hanover to Seoul to Dubai.
If Gregor Schneider was a film-maker, he’d be John Carpenter or Wes Craven. He is contemporary art’s answer to the Horror movie, an artist who makes sinister and disturbing rooms, corridors, hallways and other interior or enclosed architectural spaces. In 2007, he exhibited “White Torture” in Hamburg – a corridor and linked rooms, all in white, like a hospital, that smelt suffocatingly of wet paint and plastic. It was full of doors, some of which were locked and some of which lead into cells. In London in 2004, he showed ‘The Schneider Family’, in which he took two neighbouring terraced houses and created identical scenes in each, not only in terms of the interior décor, but with actors too. There was a man in the bathroom of each house who appeared to be satisfying himself, and, in another room, a little girl wrapped in a plastic bag. That is typical of Schneider. His work has incredible precision. It uses the discipline and simplicity of minimalism, but it also often has elements that seem to come from cheap TV drama.