A fantastic short from PBS’s series “Art 21: Art in the Twenty First Century” featuring Theaster Gates, and american artist exploring social practice through installation art.
In this short, Theaster talks about the power and value of collections, the objects that make them, and the stories tell. Within the act of collecting is a document about how a person or an institution sees the world expressed through objects that, for some reason, were important.
That may sound very superficial on the surface but Gates does a fantastic job exploring the topics that lye within throughout installations that promote interaction and social discourse. It would be easy to imagine the works as simply dealign with the aesthetic of dust and antiquity, but in Gates work the collaborative process with the audience of his work is the aesthetic.