Commissioned by MoMA in conjunction with the 9 Screens exhibition series, Frolic and Detour takes its title from a legal term referring to “employee conduct that is outside the scope of employment and is undertaken purely for the employee’s own benefit.” The video employs both documentary and hallucinatory observations to describe one man’s daily routines and departures as punctuated by a kaleidoscopic mixture of painting, sculpture, cinema, and architecture. Shifting atmospheres ranging from offices, bedrooms, tennis courts, psychiatrist couches, forests, nightclubs, and hospitals provide the backdrops for days in the life of its “lion-in-winter” protagonist, native New Yorker and Attorney-at-Law Arnold Mandell.

Inspired by the opportunity of the 9 Screens project—which replaces the informational screens in MoMA’s lobby with original artist projects—Frolic and Detour describes the relentless variety of dramatic quotidian transitions and blurred divisions: work and leisure, official and illicit, youth and experience, the landscape and the interior, and the ubiquity of visual art in daily life refracted against the charge of a day at the museum.

Still image from Frolic and Detour featuring Arnold Mandell