The Cardboard Bernini

2012 documentary

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A documentary about a guy named James Grashow, an artist who works with cardboard.

I like documentaries about artists. I've never heard of James Grashow, but apparently, I have seen his artwork on album covers for people like Wendy Carlos and Jethro Tull. Initially, I thought his work was a little silly, and I thought the giant piece at the center of this documentary--the cardboard Baroque fountain seen above--was ridiculous. As this went on, the art grew on me, mostly because of how meticulously he worked, his philosophies on artistic endeavors, and the details in the corrugated sculptures themselves.

This is, as Grashow himself puts it, a look at an artist "facing disaster and surviving." The fountain winds up outside an art museum where it's subjected to the elements and, as you might expect, crumbles and melts. His mentality and willingness to say something about the transience of art adds another dimension to his work. His medium allows his audiences to see the art all the way to its end. We've got limbless Aphrodites and faded frescoes, but there's something dismally poetic about watching how quickly Grashow's beautiful works in cardboard crumble into nothing and are tossed in a dumpster.

I have a serious gripe with the music in this thing. It was mixed too loud and had an annoyingly inconsistent mix of jazz and twang.