Category: Uncategorized (Page 305 of 1086)

 

‘Ashley Bickerton, an artist who became the toast of the New York art world in the 1980s, only to depart the scene in a surprise move during the ’90s, died on Wednesday at 63 in Bali, Indonesia. Last year, he was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which impacts the nervous system and can prove debilitating.

‘During the ’80s, Bickerton became known for a beguiling body of work that parodied consumerist impulses. He made mixed-media pieces that he termed self-portraits, yet they were composed only of logos for TV channels, car companies, cigarette manufacturers, and more. And he at one point even made a brand for himself, SUSIE (full name: Susie Culturelux), which he said would act as an “Index/Name Brand/Artistic Signature” for future art historians.

‘Yet as his style shifted, he began to elude critics, and in the early ’90s, he left the city altogether, departing for Bali, where he continued to operate a studio up until the end of his career. Thanks to the efforts of galleries like Lehmann Maupin, Various Small Fires, and Gagosian, as well as to artists such as Damien Hirst, Jordan Wolfson, and Jamian Juliano-Villani, Bickerton’s work has had a critical revival in the past few years.

‘During the mid-’80s, Bickerton became a market sensation in New York. He was featured in a famed 1986 show at Sonnabend Gallery that solidified the Neo-Geo movement, which revived geometric abstraction with a new postmodern bent, and rose alongside his compatriots Peter Halley, Meyer Vaisman, and Jeff Koons.

‘The works for which he was known at this time were bizarre metal assemblages affixed with elements like leather covering and aluminum pieces. Some invoked the visual language of modernist abstraction, only to suggest that it had lost any transcendence and become corporatized, as Bickerton did in Abstract Painting for the People #3 (1985), in which images of bathtubs, urinals, and toilets in profile are accompanied by the word “ABSTRACT” repeated four times over.

‘Slick and highly polished, these works looked as though they had just rolled off the assembly line. He called them “contemplative wall units”; others sometimes grouped them under the vague label “commodity art,” used to refer to the many artists who incorporated branding into their work.

‘Asked to explain what pieces like this one were about, and why he included so many ideas into them, he told Artforum, in a 2003 interview, “My work was culture.”

‘Once he had made his career with the consumerist works, Bickerton began to push his art in stranger directions that were even harder to parse. He made a group of sculptural pieces that seemed to function as flotation devices; they were emblazoned with the name of his SUSIE alter ego. And he began to focus on the myth of artistic genius, which he exposed as something empty and patriarchal.

‘In 1993, Bickerton’s work took a sharp left turn when he relocated to Bali, where, as he said in the Brooklyn Rail interview, postcolonial concepts began occupying his mind. There was a shift away from the consumerist imagery, toward concerns about what people had done to the paradisiacal nature that could be found in locales like Bali.

‘He began to make paintings that seemed to capture materialism pushed to the extreme—they were filled with mostly nude figures who seemed totally unaware of their surroundings, peeing as they smoked cigarettes and often looking monstrous. In one, Bickerton represented himself, with his body looking less like a human’s and more like a snake’s.

‘In 2021, Bickerton was diagnosed with ALS, and he shortly thereafter announced it publicly. He refused, however, to let his illness consume him. “Life is to be lived and got on with, and I’m busy—too busy—for that,” he told Los Angeles Magazine.

‘Speaking to ARTnews earlier this year, he noted that since his diagnosis, his art has “naturally [been] seen through the prism of my mortality—staring at the infinite. The work I’m doing now will probably be even more so. There’s something sort of ghostly about it. I have no problem talking about it, but I don’t want to be known or judged by this.”

‘But more than anything, what long motivated his art making was a desire to encapsulate every part of life. He said, “I want to be able to address whatever the hell is going on in the world: a sour break-up, a beautiful vista, a tender moment, a yearning sentiment, or some political outrage sweeping the nation.”’ — Alex Greenberger

 

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Further

Ashley Bickerton Site
AB @ Lehman Maupin
AB @ Various Small Fires
Ashley Bickerton’s Art Is Having a Resurgence—but His Body Is in Decline
Visions Apocalyptique
Ashley Bickerton Creates Colorful Seascapes with Debris Washed Ashore
Is Ashley Bickerton Damien Hirst’s Bitch
Trouble in Paradise: The Dramatic Story Behind Artist Ashley Bickerton’s Tropical Hideaway
The Life & Work of Ashley Bickerton | A Neo-Geo Sensation
Ashley Bickerton turns trash into treasure and continues to forge a path untrodden
INTO THE GREAT WIDE ANYTHING WITH ASHLEY BICKERTON
Ashley Bickerton with Dan Cameron
Surfing Sin City
Outside the box: Ashley Bickerton
An Interview with Ashley Bickerton
Paul Theroux on how artist Ashley Bickerton became an alien in paradise
Living Content 47. Interview with Ashley Bickerton.
Burned Out on Bali: An Apocalyptic Conversation With Ashley Bickerton
Ashley Bickerton: Artists are dyed poodles dancing through fiery hoops for the one percent …

 

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Extras

ASHLEY BICKERTON Bali Studio Tour

Ashley Bickerton at LEHMANN MAUPIN and O’FLAHERTY’S NYC

Gray – Gray – The Mysterious Ashley Bickerton

Ashley Bickerton in conversation with Aaron Curry

 

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Interview
by Dan Cameron

 

Dan Cameron (Rail): Do you still feel like a New York artist who just happens to live in Bali?

Ashley Bickerton: Well, my identity was forged there, and my language was forged there. Even my sense of being an artist in the larger world was forged there. In that sense, I’m a New York artist, always will be.

Rail: I agree with you, and I think that the terms by which you began your practice in public are still very much the terms that you’re operating with now.

Bickerton: We could also parse what being a New York artist means—in my case, a New York artist who went to CalArts and studied with John Baldessari, who then went on to work with Jack Goldstein. These are all very LA kinds of connections.

Rail: Also, you were dealing with conceptual art in a way that other CalArts students ended up doing. You were deeply interested in the object. In your own words, you were after Judd, you were on his trail.

Bickerton: Yes, it’s so funny now to think that at one time I saw god in those boxes, and now I just see an expensive box. He made the empty container so you could pour in whatever you wanted, and people poured god in, they poured in the world, the universe. They became these sort of ornate Mandarin ritual artifacts.

Rail: Every biography that mentions you starts with “Ashley Bickerton came up in the East Village with Peter Halley, Meyer Vaisman and Jeff Koons,” and in retrospect it seems completely inaccurate, like pretending that the horse race itself is art history. Is that one reason you left?

Bickerton: At the risk of fingering slipshod academics and lazy journalism, that is the case. You just get processed like a taxonomical artifact, like some butterfly with a pin through it. You get labeled, indexed, and committed to some construction of “historic record,” and then it all moves on again. It’s stifling in every sense. In many ways it’s a lot like an actor being typecast. The other thing that maybe caused my need to move, to break out, was what I’d actually done to myself. I had set up an artistic dynamic based in many ways on reacting against the work of Donald Judd and turning his boxes against themselves. The box became my tool, and then in the end my prison. So there I was, handily and superficially labeled by a lazy art history on the outside, and structurally limited by the parameters of the box on the inside. I desperately needed to break free, so when New York City went south for me, with my career circling the drain, a marriage in tatters, and facing yet another bleak winter, I just said, “Enough. Let’s just roll the dice, get the hell out of here and see what happens.”

But I want to parse that New York identity thing a bit more. One of the best essays that I feel has ever been written on my work was by Abigail Solomon-Godeau. Reading it the first time was such an odd and surreal experience. It felt as if she was just seeing right through me, like I was some sort of Alex Gray painting. I actually got goosebumps. She reached in deep and strung things together that painted a very different picture than the usual boilerplate descriptions of my work and history. Instead she laid out seemingly unexpected links to artists like Jim Shaw and Mike Kelley. Besides being a longtime California-based intellect of the highest order, Abigail is also a preeminent Gauguin scholar, so she was able to draw in all of this stuff and pull very different lines of thought together—things that I hadn’t even thought of myself. She very clearly laid out the California route and its relationship to both the Pacific and New York. You have to remember, in cultural terms, while Hawaii in many ways is very different from the American mainland, it shares its closest cultural kinship with California. Growing up in Hawaii, my idea of America was California, and I found it very interesting that she was able to see that there was so much California in the work.

I also have to say that when I bought a house in Los Angeles and moved back there, I was quite happily surprised by how welcoming many of the artists were. My impression was that it was a general thing amongst California artists that they were so welcoming, but I was told by other artists that it’s not the case. I’m not sure why I was afforded that sort of welcome.

Rail: Well, I think that for an LA artist, if Ashley Bickerton comes back to California, then he’s not just a Californian by default, he’s gonna be welcomed as the prodigal son.

Bickerton: Thanks Dan, one would certainly like to think that. It is true though that when you leave a place, no matter what the reason, there is often a residual feeling of abandonment on the part of the people who you’ve left behind, no matter what your reason for leaving was. I feel I have always had that following me since my departure from New York. The city can wear on you, so when many artists get to a certain age they just want to get out of the grating metropolitan heat trap and move to places like upstate New York, somewhere quieter and more pastoral, more bucolic. Many of my contemporaries did just that, but upstate New York with its frigid northeastern winters was not an option for me, so my upstate New York was located halfway around the world in the tropical belt. That was the only difference. Of course it brought with it lots of other issues, a lot of them technical, some logistical, and more than a few emotional.

Rail: Regarding the artistic transition between New York and Bali, it looked like you were making one body of work after another, pulling people more deeply into what you were after, just as we were all shedding a lot of what the late ’80s were supposed to have been about. I mean, speaking for myself, I found myself in the 1990s attached to more of a post-colonial framework of thinking about art, and dealing more openly with the political realities embedded in artistic discourse. Who of this generation that we’re talking about really expressed any particular commitment to that, other than you?

Bickerton: Yes, it’s a huge problem when you see decades of artworks go through the same repeated formal gyrations, always solipsistic, always hopelessly self referential, mute in the face of the world’s boundless variety and dynamism. When you first encounter these explosions of newly developed artistic languages—Conceptual Art, Pop Art, Minimalist Art—the excitement of their arrival and potential application are dizzying. Slowly it dawns on you that those art forms are only capable of using their considerable machinery to describe themselves. They were hopelessly unable to apply themselves as discursive tools of the larger world in any meaningful sense. Donald Judd’s work is incapable of discussing his feelings when holding his first grandchild, just as Clyfford Still’s work could not possibly be put to the task of describing the anatomy of a toxic relationship, or a gorgeous foreign vista shared with a young lover—they can only add association and background music. And so what the hell was I doing locking myself into an insular feedback loop that lived only to mutely reflect a societal moment? Why wasn’t I able to just use all these new tools as the vehicles they were ideally meant to be, to address the vital world that I saw swirling around me every day?

Rail: What I think is different in your case, Ashley, is that I never knew you to not question the limits of mere style. You were always breaking down that language, and always pushing back against the typecasting. Did the change of physical or geographical context also change the meaning of the work?

Bickerton: That is ironic in a way, because after moving to Bali, I came back and did a show in 1996 at Sonnabend Gallery, and the common reaction was, “Oh, my God, look at what this crazy place he’s moved to has done to his work. It’s like he’s living on the Island of Dr. Moreau.” But the truth was that I planned the entire show out before I left New York. What I wanted to do was get out of the city so that I could have enough time to do that labor intensive work that I could not have done in the city. Over the course of my years in New York, my time had become so intricately tangled in a raft of adjunct distractions. I mean, once you’ve been around for a certain length of time, you feel an obligation to attend the opening of your ex-assistant’s boyfriend, and every other marginal contact you don’t wish to offend. These begin piling up until you come to a point where you start trying to plan out your work week and realize that the entire thing is already booked up. And worse, when you mostly work at night, a six to eight o’clock opening is right smack in the middle of your work day.

Rail: And getting back to work after that…

Bickerton: It’s a 50/50 proposition. So I knew that I couldn’t do the kind of labor-intensive, hyper-realist works that I wanted to do staying in New York. That was what really changed, not so much the content.

Rail: Where, in your estimation, is the critical discourse on your work right now? What has it achieved?

Bickerton: It seems all my support is amongst artists, and particularly younger artists. It’s almost completely non-existent in the marketplace in the west at this point, and also completely non-existent in an institutional context, as you and I have discussed. It’s sort of a mystery. Somebody commented to me recently that I get quite a bit of attention, and I do generate attention or the work itself generates it, but I don’t get institutional support. I’ve never had one regional kunsthalle or one university museum, let alone a one-person museum show of any sort—nothing. The impression this person had was that my seemingly high profile was indicative of both healthy institutional and market support. I do however feel extraordinarily fortunate that I have somehow been able to tread a precarious line through it all that has allowed me to keep making art uninterrupted these past 40 years.

 

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Show

Tormented Self-Portrait: Susie at Arles (25 Years) (2014)

 

Wall – Wall Sportif #1 (Liberia) (1987)

 

The Ideal Collection 1 (1988)

 

Formalist Painting in Red, Yellow and Blue (1988)

 

Still Life (The Artist’s Studio After Braque) (1988)

 

Seascape: Floating Costume to Drift for Eternity II (Cowboy Suit) (1992)

 

Seascape: Floating Costume to Drift for Eternity II (Elvis Suit) (1992)

 

Mangrove Footprints 1 (2021)

 

Wild Gene Pool: Ark (1989)

 

Wild Gene Pool: Ark # 2 (1989)

 

Ornamental Hysteria (2006)

 

Fat Body on Vespa (2015)

 

Dish (1996)

 

8°36’59.2″S, 179°05’27.9″E 1 (2022)

 

River Vector : GB – OC (2019)

 

River Vector : TB – YC (2019)

 

Floating Ocean Chunk : WM 1 (2019)

 

Seascape: Floating Ocean Chunk No. 1 (2017)

 

Orange Shark (2008)

 

Bismarck Archipelago Shark (2002)

 

TITNW5 (2019)

 

Wahine Pa’ina (2015)

 

Ornamental Hysteria (2017)

 

Good Painting (1988)

 

Bad (1988)

 

Tormented Self- Portrait (Susie at Arles) (1987)

 

Smiling Woman (2009)

 

Wall-Wall SnS-S 2 (2017)

 

Biofragment #2 (1990)

 

Stratified Landscape #3 (1990)

 

Bickerton Sensor (1986)

 

Anthrophosphere No.1 (1989)

 

Wet Landscape No.3 (1990)

 

THE LIMITS OF THE WORLD I (1991)

 

Green Painting with Boats (2002)

 

Snake Head Painting (2008)

 

Seascape: Transporter for the Waste Product of its own Construction #1 (1989)

 

Floating Family Footprints (Flow Tide) 1 (2022)

 

Floor-Floor #2 (Guinea-Bissau) (1988)

 

MV2 (2013)

 

Penelope Aurora Prudence (2008)

 

Untitled (1993)

 

Small Yellow Catalog: Cigarettes, Purple Pigment, Cheese Doodles, Broken Glass (1991)

 

Susie (1987)

 

Gug (1986)

 

Wall Wall #7 (1986)

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Jack Skelley, Jack ‘Scoop’ Skelley! Whatever that means! Ha ha, that Santa Sabbath clip. Scrappy! Oh, okay, blurb, gotcha. By when? Let’s confer off-blog. No prob, man. Hey, Klaus, whatever happened to your daughter? Love, Saint Nyuk-nyuk. ** David Ehrenstein, Happy to have intersected with your memories. ** NLK, I have so many non-French friends here who are English tutors. It’s strange but maybe not, I guess. Oh, yes, Le Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature! It’s my single favorite thing in all of Paris. It’s in the Marais. Super highly recommended! Next time you’re through Paris, and if I’m here at the same time, let’s have a coffee or something, eh? I think I am very lucky to have a set of friends who can talk Rivette, Duras, etc. and who probably think LeBron is a TikTok influencer. Although they do talk US politics. I don’t think that’s escapable. I’m good, just barreling forward with the preparation stuff mostly. Paris is all Xmas-ed up. It looks good. ** _Black_Acrylic, I hadn’t seen that Jarman/Coil vid or known of its existence before I found it the other day either. Desk! The should be a life changer. Mine sure is, God knows. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, the huge problems guy is still in the project. That’s the one scary part. You know, I think it’s quite possible that if we established the International Wincing Contest it could in fact become a huge thing just because … every must love wincing. It’s just that we haven’t brought that love to their consciousness yet. So, who knows. Eurowinceavision? I guess that’s a mouthful. I was thinking of doing an Orban-related love thing yesterday, but I didn’t want to kill the vibes, but, Lord, what piece of shit! Love opening a museum dedicated to the plastic drinking straw, G. ** Dom Lyne, Hi, Dom. I remember parties like that. Yeah, somewhere in storage I have a whole bunch of Super8 ‘experimental’ films I made in my teens that I really need to either preserve or lock in an impermeable safe somewhere. I’m glad you found things you like in the film program, cool. I’m good, very busy with the film stuff. Wow, the heart of the matter. Intense. And a really good place. Take care, buddy. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Happy you were intrigued. I don’t know why Sadie Benning decided to make paintings and drawings instead of videos at a certain point. I like her static stuff, but I don’t think it holds a candle to her video work. Everyone, Here’s Steve: ‘For Slant Magazine’s list of the 50 best songs of 2022, I contributed blurbs on Zach Bryan’s “Something in the Orange,” Black Sherif’s “Kwaku the Traveler,” Jnr Choi & Sam Tompkins’ “To the Moon,” Taylor Swift’s “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” and Big Thief’s “Simulation Swarm”. ** Jamie, Hey, J-man! Great to see you! Thanks about the film program, pal. Just trying to help fill in the gap left by the exit of your beloved film series. I’m fine, working my ass off — speaking of asses — on the film stuff. I think there’s probably a slave or ultra-piggy bottom escort out there who could imagine a good way to have a head stuck up his ass. London! Hope it clears the air of everything untoward. Have huge fun. Not accidentally kicking over the homeless guy’s cup of change with my big clumsy foot love, Dennis. ** T, T! I’ve been thinking about and wondering how you are! Mm, I remember your two jobs. Is it the one that’s nearish to me? Obviously, I hope a money-exuding other option materialises any second now. Mm, I don’t yet know if I’ll be here in early Feb. I’m going to be back and forth to LA fairly constantly between the end of the year and March, but the exact schedule remains a blur. I’d love to see Moor Mother with you, obviously! Yes! Let me try to figure out my dates as soon as I can. Thank you for the odorous resignation letter. I know just who I would love to receive it from. I hope your Thursday occasions every negative aspect of your current life to throw you a going away party, me. ** Bill, Thanks, Bill. Carter is still plugging away, that’s good. He still holds onto the rights to that ‘porn’ film I wrote for him a thousand years ago, but I doubt he’ll ever make it. I tried to get him to give the rights back at one point so I could turn it into a graphic novel, but refused, so he’d better make it some day. ** Paul Curran, Howdy, Paul! Thank you! Ah, it’s cold, but it’s not murderously cold at least, or at least until maybe tomorrow. How’s Tokyo? I can’t imagine it being frozen? ** Okay. The artist Ashley Bickerton died very recently, and that made me want to do a gallery show of his work, which I’ve always been fond of since back in the 80s when he was the super-buzzy peer of Koons and Richard Prince and all those dudes. I hope you enjoy it. See you tomorrow.

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Tom Chomont Oblivion, 1969

‘Approximately thirty images comprise Oblivion. Most obsessively repeat themselves. Although the images appear to be solarized, the film was actually contact-printed, combining high contrast black and white negative with a colour positive of the same image. The high contrast accounts for the tendency of shots to flood. Images in the film swell and contrast, often disappearing into pure colour… Oblivion employs extremely rapid cutting. Some of the images last as briefly as two frames. The fact that we see so few frames, that a shot is representationally ambiguous, or shown upside down and sideways, often causes the viewer to project his/her own fantasies… When Jean Genet was asked to what end he was directing his life he responded, “To oblivion.”’ — JJ Murphy

‘At the intersection of eroticism, mysticism, and the everyday one finds Tom Chomont. Chomont completed approximately 40 short films between 1962 and 1989. He suffered from Parkinson’s during the last decades of his life; a time in which he also produced a wide range of video works. These later pieces include documents of his struggles with illness as well as his immersion in ritual S&M culture.’ — The Film-makers Coop

 

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Shuji Terayama Les Chants de Maldoror, 1977

‘A “reading film” of delirious image and text, Les chants de Maldoror takes its title and inspiration from Comte de Lautréamont’s 1869 proto-Surrealist poetic novel which, for instance, describes beauty as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table. In the novel’s six cantos, a young misanthrope indulges in depraved and destructive acts. Unexpected encounters abound, with turtles and birds joining Terayama’s regular cast of snails and dogs to wander over books and bare torsos. Feverish video processing posterizes, inverts and overlays images that are further colored by sound—pushing the limits of his literary adaptation. Terayama wrote that the only tombstone he wanted was his words, but, as Les chants de Maldoror demonstrates, words need not be confined to carved monuments or bound hardcopies.’ — Letterboxd

‘Beginning with his precocious and often controversial engagement with traditional tanka poetry as a mere teen, Terayama held tight to his belief that genuine artistic creativity was rooted in the act of shattering molds in order to cast them anew. Cinema was a source of fascination for Terayama ever since the childhood days and nights spent in his uncle’s cinema in remote Aomori Prefecture. Casablanca remained a talismanic favorite, cryptically cited throughout his poetry and multimedia practice, appropriated and reinvented in a similar manner as the work of Jean Cocteau and Luis Buñuel. The early death of Terayama’s father would cast a long shadow across his films, art and writing, which are haunted by absent or ambiguous figures of authority. By extension, the questioning of masculine authority that informs so much of Terayama’s art found especially rich expression in his films and their frequently radical destabilization of meaning.’ — Harvard Film Archive

 

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Jack Chambers Mosaic, 1966

‘Immediately from the titleplay we are not just having fun but being told that certain connections will have to be made. Every composition values light and movement above anything else than (its influence on the) framing which is almost never executed so exactly (this latter aspect I am finding it more difficult to encompass with words but it is as though this man is Vermeer and most other people are just making films, is the feeling I get). It is hard to be willing to publish much more on the film now given it so clearly requires rewatching many times over (equally as much to experience the beauty of the images as it will be to better parse the entirety of the vision and perceptions we are given (not just “to make sense of it” as it is already plenty full of sense)).’ — Adam Cloutier

‘The fact IS that the four films of Jack Chambers have changed the whole history of film, despite their neglect, in a way that isn’t even possible within the field of painting. There are no ‘masters’ of film in any significant sense whatsoever. There are only ‘makers’ in the original, or at least medieval, sense of the word. Jack Chambers is a true ‘maker’ of films. He needs no stance, or standing, for he dances attendance upon the coming-into-being of something recognizably NEW.’ — Stan Brakhage

 

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Warren Sonbert Amphetamine, 1966

‘The film focuses on a party of drugs and sex – young men with a deadpan expression injecting amphetamines. Sonbert shows it in a very detailed and meticulous way that makes the viewer almost feel the pain physically, while the joyful pop music creates a counterpoint that adds a playful aspects to these scenes. In this film, Sonbert pays tribute to VERTIGO (1958) [which he had first seen at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York (see WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO?)]— with its spiral and circular motifs. The film begins with a woman’s portrait (framed inside a circle) like the portrait of Carlotta at which Madeleine (Kim Novak) gazes in the museum scene.

‘The music and the structure of AMPHETAMINE are also repetitive, and in one scene the camera moves in a circle around two men embracing, similar to the famous kissing scene between James Stewart and Kim Novak in Hitchcock’s VERTIGO.

‘It’s an homage, but Sonbert subverts gender conventions, showing a homosexual kiss, three years before the Stonewall riots. If Madeleine represents Scottie’s obsessive fantasy world, the party in Sonbert’s film reflects the fantasies and desires of a decade later, the 1960s era – with its forbidden paradise.’ — Chen Sheinberg

‘Warren Sonbert was one of the seminal figures working in American experimental film. He started making films in 1966 while a student at New York University, and before he was 20 years old, his first career retrospective drew the attention of the film critic for the commercial trade journal Variety, who wrote that: “Probably not since Andy Warhol’s ‘The Chelsea Girls’ had its first showing at the Cinematheque… almost a year and a half ago has an ‘underground’ film event caused as much curiosity and interest in N.Y.’s non-underground world as did four days of showings of the complete films of Warren Sonbert at the Cinematheque’s new location On Wooster St.”’ — Lightcone

 

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Marjorie Keller Herein, 1991

‘HEREIN charts the movement from political activism to filmmaking through the metaphor of a dwelling. An FBI film obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Emma Goldman’s autobiography, the making of films on the Lower East Side in New York, street prostitution and drug addiction, all inflect the sense of place, space and history. Ultimately a confounding jumble that somehow works wonders.’ — Tim Gabriele

‘Marjorie Keller died prematurely in 1994 at the age of 43, leaving over 25 films in 8 mm and 16 mm and a series of critical texts about the kind of cinema that interested her, such as a book about childhood in the work of Brakhage, Cocteau and Cornell, and incomplete research into experimental film by women, from pioneers like Germaine Dulac, Maya Deren and Carolee Schneemann to the young generation of her contemporaries, represented by Peggy Ahwesh, Su Friedrich and Leslie Thornton.’ — CCCB

 

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Derek Jarman Egyptian Basses, 1993

‘As prominent members of London’s thriving gay subculture, the band Coil became friends with the film director Derek Jarman, who had also filmed one of Throbbing Gristle’s concerts. Stephen Thrower featured him in some of his movies, and Coil were involved in the soundtracks to some of them, notably his controversial Blue, and his first full-length feature The Angelic Conversation. This friendship led to Jarman directing a number of short films to Coil’s songs which the band issued as ‘ promotion music videos’.’ — Allmusic

‘On the international stage, Jarman is seen as an important artist filmmaker, probably best known for his 1993 film Blue: simply a single, screen-filling field of glowing ultramarine, over which Jarman weaves a complex soundscape around the cultural and political connotations of his own imminent death. In Britain he is known for a wider range of activities: as the director of feature films, many on queer cultural figures—Caravaggio, Saint Sebastian, Ludwig Wittgenstein—and as a painter, stage designer, diarist, and gay activist. First and foremost, however, Jarman is a charismatic public personality in Britain, a position that seems only to have been strengthened by his death over a quarter century ago.’ — Mark Hudson

 

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Bradley Eros Mutable Fire, 1984

‘A collage film can so easily look like a stream of chaotic puke. It’s hard to define what makes one “work” and another fail. It has to successfully create the mood of the theme, obviously. I don’t think anyone wants to watch random images with no thematic link. Maybe the editing has to make a subconscious mathematical sense to the viewer. Maybe it has to make you think (or zone out altogether). But it definitely has to have good music and/or sound design.’ — AuteurTheory

‘Bradley Eros is an experimental film director, actor, curator, poet, and performance artist who also makes Musique concrète sound collages, music videos, photographs, live projection performances, works on paper and art objects. His work has been presented in multiple screenings and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and is in the permanent collection of the museum. He has also created dozens of ‘zines, posters, soundtracks and unique artist’s books. He is represented by Microscope Gallery in New York City and is known for his work in the field of contracted cinema.’ — The Brooklyn Rail

 

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Lionel Soukaz Maman que man, 1982

‘Lament for the death of a mother, Mom that man avoids, circumvents confidence, memory, nostalgia, in short, any wordy slip into psychology or self-analysis. Around the beautiful and tender figure of Didier Hercend, these are intense blocks of emotion, fury and noise that crystallize; imperishable bursts assail us: poignant appearance of Copi as an alcoholic full of stupor and boredom, of Michel Cressol as mad barista. man: the time of childhood blocks, the farewell to lost children, the Baudelairian hymns to death: “it is death that consoles, alas! And which brings life… “but in rage and fury, always imposed by the very writing and the style of invincible vitality.’ — Rene Scherer

‘Lionel SOUKAZ is a cinematographer and filmmaker. He is one of the pioneers of French queer cinema. His work, especially in the first part of his career, reflects a synthesis of the various avant-garde movements he was drawn to in the 1970s and 1980s. Affiliated with the activists and intellectuals at FHAR (the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action) and the magazine Gai Pied, such as Guy Hocquenghem or Copi, he was also active within the experimental film scene, working to promote Super-8 filmmaking at the Festival des Cinémas Différents (Hyères) or Cinémarge (La Rochelle), and ultimately organising his event in 1978: the first Gay and Lesbian film festival in Paris, Écrans roses et nuits bleues. His films display an uncompromising commitment to self-narration and the expression of desire, and embody his unlimited craving for freedom – as a result of which his work has often faced censorship.’ — IFFR

 

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Sadie Benning Living Inside, 1989

‘When she was 16, Benning stopped going to high school for three weeks and stayed inside with her camera, her TV set, and a pile of dirty laundry. Living Inside mirrors her psyche during this time. With the image breaking up between edits, the rough quality of this early tape captures Benning’s sense of isolation and sadness, her retreat from the world.’ — Jacob Willett

‘Sadie Benning’s career began at 15, when they received a Fisher-Price PXL 2000 toy video camera from their father for Christmas. Benning remembers, “I thought, ‘This is a piece of shit. It’s black-and-white. It’s for kids.’ He’d told me I was getting this surprise. I was expecting a camcorder.” Reminiscent of journal entries and filmed mostly in their bedroom, the videos Benning created with the PXL 2000 are a window into their teenage world in Milwaukee. The artist acknowledges, “I got started partly because I needed different images and I never wanted to wait for someone to do them for me.” Suddenly, Benning became a pioneer of a new and rapidly popularizing genre of film: Pixelvision, as the videos were coined for their flat, pixilated quality.’ — MoMA

 

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Mariusz Grzegorzek Krakatau, 1986

‘Some experimental films aren’t about the stories they can supposedly tell, but rather the efforts taken to make them say anything at all. Krakatau, by Mariusz Grzegorzek, is compiled of unrelated footage, works of different gauges, and so many other conflicting elements, all in an effort to have audience members create their own connections. Named after the infamous volcano, Krakatau is meant to cause an eruption of your senses: jarring images, difficult cohesions, and other discomforts for eleven minutes. Combining surreality and anguish, Krakatau is an unforgettable temporary experience that will leave you scratching your head for hours (and perhaps trapped in your mind for even longer).’ — Films Fatale

‘Mariusz Grzegorzek was born on January 20, 1962 in Cieszyn, Slaskie, Poland. He is a director and writer, known for Rozmowa z czlowiekiem z szafy (1993), The Singing Napkin (2015) and Jestem twój (2009).’ — IMDb

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David. As Hedi and Steve also pointed out, Daney was openly gay for a long time. You must be thinking of someone else. Everyone, If it’s possible for you help out the venerable writer, critic and very long time friend of DC’s Mr, David Ehrenstein, who’s in terrible financial straits, please please do via this gofundme page. ** Hedi, Hi, Hedi, hi, great maestro! ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, very busy with film stuff. It’s going really well on Zac’s and my end. We just pray our producers come through on their end. It’s looking most likely that we’ll go back to LA in early January now to put all the final pieces in place. But … sick and spooky are two life’s goals, aren’t they? Well, sick in the mind sense. Yeah, me too on the Wincing Contest. I don’t know where that came from or why it hadn’t been a lifelong dream before yesterday. So you’re saying love smells like me? Well, my shower gel isn’t extremely cheap, although no fancy hotel would ever offer it as a freebie. Love imagining what pop music superstardom would necessitate from aspiring stars if autotune had never been invented, G. ** NLK, Hi, NLK! Thanks! And here’s yet another one. Yeah, ‘Visa de censure no. X’ is wonderful, so agreed. And beautiful description, sir. Thanks for seeing ‘Jerk’. I’m happy know it was still playing here then, I wasn’t sure. Paris is a Halloween wasteland, yes. Every year I think venues and people are going to have wised up and gone full on, but they still haven’t. Thank you very kindly about ‘I Wished’. That means a lot, thank you! How are you? What’s new with you since Halloween? ** Jack Skelley, Hey, Skellster! Best review of ‘Jaws’ ever for fucking sure. I want to see and hear Santa Sabbath, which surely I can do if I hunt on youtube. On it. Was the gig videoed for posterity? Let me know if I can assist with any of those deadlines from way over here. Werner, you used to be so great! What happened?! Love (to you, not Werner), me. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. Wow, not that I’ve read, that’s for sure. Not that there aren’t some real smarties on there. ** CAUTIVOS, Hi! How are you? Yes, very sadly Kevin died. A truly terrible loss. T’would be amazing if Kevin and Dodie could get published in Spain somehow. There was a Spanish publisher who wanted to reprint the George Miles Cycle and translate ‘Period’ for the first time, but I think the deal never happened, unfortunately. Take care, man! ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Thank god for the saintly and ever mind-boggling Semiotext(e). English speakers’ reading lives would be infinitely poorer without them. Sure, no doubt there are Daney equivalents all over the globe that we will likely never read or even know about. What do physical therapy exercises for the ear consist of? ** Okay. I organised a lovely, I hope, most unusual, I think, short films experience for you today if you have the time and inclination. Thank you in advance if so. See you tomorrow.