Hello dear readers and subscribers.
Today we continue our quest for the greatest artworks since 2000.
And today and in two weeks, when we publish part 2, we'll have a look at audiovisual art in the form of video art, but also multimedia installations and digital art.
A category that truly has exploded since 2000 in all possible directions.
So let's get started.
On April 11 of 2002, hundreds of volunteers gathered on the outskirts of Lima Peru and, armed with shovels, formed a single line at the base of a massive sand dune in the Ventanilla desert.
Over the course of the day, they shoveled their way forward in unison, collectively displacing the dune roughly 10 cm from its original position.
The action organised by Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist, Francis Alice, took place as part of the third Ibero-American Biennial of Lima and was conceived as a response to the social and political upheaval that accompanied the fall of President Alberto Fujimori's regime.
The title is simultaneously filled with hope in which faith itself can move mountains, and disillusioning, illustrating how an exorbitant amount of effort results in almost invisible change.
What makes, When Faith Moves, Mountains so enduring is not the spectacle of a dune being moved which, as Alice himself acknowledged, yielded no practical result, but a proposition that a poetic gesture can carry political weight, and vice versa.
The work, as often with Alice, enacts as a parable maximum effort for minimum outcome, a literal rendering of the biblical expression from which it takes its name.
In a Latin American context shaped by decades of frustrated collective action, that futility becomes deeply resonant.
But so does the faith that precedes it.
The conviction that, at times of political upheaval, unity can make the impossible feel within reach.
We have other projects in Real that day.
We are going to do some like drink the Atlantic, melt the Antarctic, paint the sky things of that level, so simple.
In November 2008, Swiss artist Pippi Lottierist achieved something that had eluded almost every artist who had attempted it before.
She tamed the vast and notoriously difficult atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Pour your body, out 7354 cubic meters is a monumental multi-channel video installation in which 25 foot high projections wrap seamlessly across the atrium walls, immersing the entire space in slow-moving, luminously colored imagery.
At the centre sits a large iris-shaped couch surrounded by concentric rings of plush carpeting in blue and fuchsia.
Visitors were invited to remove their shoes and lie down, and many did.
Tourists napped, couples embraced, children played.
The imagery itself is vintage rust, a slow-motion parade of flowers body fruit, water and earth, all drenched in a saturated color and drifting between paradise and unease.
In a moment when video art was often perceived as cold, cerebral or difficult.
Piplotti risks suggest that it could also be generous warm, overwhelming and physical.
The installation drew enormous crowds and remains one of the most talked about site-specific projects in MoMA's recent history.
Cao Fei began planning RMB City in 2007, and with it she created one of the most ambitious and visionary digital artworks of the early 21st century.
Named after the Chinese unit of currency, the RMB.
RMB City is a sprawling, surrealist virtual metropolis built within the online platform Second Life, navigated and curated by cow-face avatar, China Tracy.
The city compresses iconic landmarks into a hallucinatory landscape that parodies China's breakneck urban development while simultaneously inhabiting it.
What made RMB City so groundbreaking was, of course, not its novelty as a virtual world of art, but its function as one.
As a living platform for social, artistic and political exchange.
The city itself officially opened to the public in 2009, with art collector Uli Sieck appointed as its first virtual mayor.
By doing so, by treating this virtual environment as a genuine site for cultural production, CAFE anticipated much of what would later unfold around the metaverse digital ownership and virtual community.
In short, a landmark achievement in the history of net and new media art.
Christian Marclay's The Clock of 2010 is, by almost any measure, one of the most extraordinary artworks produced in the 21st century.
It is a 24-hour video montage composed of thousands of clips from film and television, approximately 12000 in total, each featuring a clock, a watch or a reference to time.
The clips are edited and synchronized so that the time shown on screen always corresponds to the actual time of day.
Markle worked on the project for three years, assembling a team to crawl through vast quantities of footage, while he edited the sequences himself, building loose thematic arcs across the hours.
Waking, walking, eating, commuting, drinking, dreaming, dying.
The work premiered at White Cube in London in October 2010 and rapidly became a phenomenon.
It won the Golden Line at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 and Mark Clay, accepting the prize, thanked the jury for giving the clock its 15 minutes.
A nod to Warhol's famous prophecy, made all the more ironic by the fact that the work itself lost 1440 minutes of them and has remained famous every minute of the day ever since.
And wherever the clock is shown, audiences queue for hours and stay for 24 more.
MoMA drew over 40,000 visitors during a single month-long presentation.
Sadie Smith, writing in the New York Review of Books, described it as sublime.
The Guardian called it a masterpiece.
Today, we simply reaffirm its rightful place in recent art history as one of the most iconic artworks of our time.
Pun intended.
Bukhra Khalili began the mapping journey project in 2008, producing eight video works over three years.
Each follows the same format a single, uninterrupted shot of a geopolitical map upon which a hand draws a thick line with permanent marker, while a voice narrates the journey it represents.
The individuals speaking encountered by Khalili in transit hubs across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East are migrants who have been forced by political and economic circumstances to cross borders illegally.
Their faces are never shown.
What the viewer sees is the hand, the line, and the map.
Khalili refuses the visual codes that typically accompany representations of migration in the media.
No faces, no desperation, no rescue footage.
Instead, she returns agency to the narrators through their own voices and gestures.
The use of a permanent marker is not incidental.
As Khalil herself has emphasised, the drawn lines permanently alter the existing map, as if lived geography were literally overwriting the legal geography.
It remains one of the most powerful and formally inventive responses to the Mediterranean migration crisis and one of the defining works of politically engaged art in the 21st century.
This concludes part one of the selection and, in contrast to our previous videos where we discussed painting the greatest paintings since 2000 and the greatest sculptures since 2000, the complete article for this segment is not online yet.
So definitely subscribe to the channel and also to our newsletter over at contemporaryartissuecom to not miss out on part two, where we also share some critical reflections on this umbrella term of audiovisual arts.
Thank you so much for tuning in today.
Feel free to watch our video on the greatest paintings since 2000 next.
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