Speaking for themselves: "Art:21," a new four-part series on PBS, brings viewers into artists' studios and lets them explain their work—without historical or critical contextualization. . - Art On TV - television program review

Robert Hughes's 1980 PBS series "The Shock of the New" created a fresh model for the presentation of art on television. Bristling with ideas and opinions, the show offered a challenging picture of the rise of modern art against the turbulent back-drop of 20th-century history. Incorporating art, architecture, literature and music, it teased out an assortment of threads that ran from the beginning of the century to its own day. The series has since become something of a yardstick against which similar productions are judged (and against which they usually fail, as even Hughes found when he tried to duplicate the format in his series on American art). It has also generated a reaction by educators and filmmakers who objected to its authoritative tone, its breezy reduction of artists and art works to representations of larger themes, and its essentially canonical approach to art history.

A new four-part television series on contemporary artists, created by Susan Sollins and Susan Dowling, was to have aired on PBS this past fall but was preempted by the events following Sept. 11. At press time, the series was scheduled to appear in select cities on Jan. 17, 24, 31 and Feb. 7. It is accompanied by a handsome Abrams book with essays by Robert Storr, Thelma Golden, Katy Siegel and Lynn M. Herbert. Both titled "Art:21, Art in the Twenty-first Century," the series and book signal the producers' desire to move beyond the retrospective approach and provide a forward looking glimpse of art in the U.S. today. In many ways "Art:21" is designed to be the antithesis of "The Shock of the New." In place of a commanding narrator, it presents artists, their families and their collaborators speaking about their work and lives and demonstrating their working processes. No critics, art historians or curators interfere with the artists' expressions of their own visions. And while each episode of "The Shock of the New" introduced a dizzying array of artists, this series privileges depth over breadth. Each hour of the series focuses on only four artists or artist teams who have clearly been chosen to reflect the ethnic and social diversity of contemporary art.

The four hour-long programs are titled "Place," "Spirituality," "Identity" and "Consumption." Each is introduced by a brief segment featuring artists or public figures who touch playfully on some aspect of the theme. For instance, Laurie Anderson, the presenter for "Place," makes her introductory remarks from a series of unusual perches ranging from a billboard to an oversized chair in a supermarket. For "Identity," Steve Martin sits at a desk performing card tricks and ruminating on the segment title. At one point, his head is momentarily replaced by that of a William Wegman dog; then he becomes a stiff and motionless cutout. The opener for "Consumption" features tennis star/art dealer John McEnroe switching back and forth between tennis court and gallery. Interspersed between his comments on the appeal of art as entertainment are bold red and white Barbara Kruger graphic texts flashing messages like "Buy," "Sell" and "Love." The least campy introduction is for "Spirituality"; it contains a brief statement by actress, fabric artist and filmmaker S. Epatha Merkerson, who speaks about spirituality as the thread that connects us all.

While suggestive, the themes have an arbitrary quality, and many of the artists could fit as easily in one program as in another. The series is most effective when it allows us to feel that we've encountered the artists and come away with a sense of what their work means to them. However, the artists are not always articulate, and when they are not, we find ourselves left with a collection of disconnected sound bites and fragmentary glimpses of art works that fail to come together in any useful way. At one end of the spectrum is Kerry James Marshall, who, perhaps because he is a teacher (we see him conducting a painting class), is able to provide a cogent survey of his concerns, his personal history and his relationship to art history. At the other is Bruce Nauman, who sits in his studio contemplating a work in which he set up an infrared camera to capture nocturnal "mice events" (the resulting installation is on view at New York's Dia Center for the Arts through June 16); later, he rides a horse around his ranch as he muses on the similarity between the work of the artist and the cowboy. With no outside commentator to provide context, an uninitiated audience would have very little sense from this segment as to why Nauman is an important and challenging artist.

As a result, the series is uneven. Mel Chin's playful upending of urban and pop-culture contexts comes through clearly, as does Pepon Osorio's use of South Bronx kitsch to subvert the art world's "Madison Avenue" mentality. Michael Ray Charles gives an articulate defense of his use of caricatural "negrophilia" imagery by linking it to early marketing practices and to precedents in Hellenistic and Etruscan art. Shazia Sikander relays a sense of the push and pull of tradition in her work with Asian miniature painting techniques, while Maya Lin gives us a stimulating tour of her sculpture park in Grand Rapids. The section on Andrea Zittel nicely conveys the quirkiness of her desire to create unorthodox living spaces that are completely self-sufficient.