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| | Courtesy of Maya Stendahl Gallery | | | Andy Warhol, myself, c. 1974.
From SCENES FROM THE LIFE OF ANDY WARHOL
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Avant Granddad
In "Fragments of Paradise" a poetic vision is captured in film by the legendary and influential Jonas Mekas.
By DEBORAH GARWOOD
Offoffoff.com
The legendary filmmaker and poet Jonas Mekas
continues to surprise and delight at the ripe old age
of 85. Through May 14, Maya Stendahl Gallery presents
an ingenious installation of both vintage and new
works that is beautiful and engaging. No one who's
interested in time-based media should miss it. Mekas's
optimism — his faith in the power of film as an
affirmation of human vitality as well as a vehicle of
resistance to oppressive forces of history — is hard
won. If this show doesn't lift your spirits, you must
already be vibrating on his wavelength.
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| JONAS MEKAS | Exhibition: Fragments of Paradise.
Works by: Jonas Mekas.
| | SCHEDULE | March 3 - May 14, 2005
Gallery: Maya Stendhal Gallery
545 W. 20th St.
New York NY
Phone: (212) 366-1549
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In retrospect, it seems that Mekas was destined to
create a bridge between European avant garde film and
the artistic community of 1960s New York. Born in
Lithuania in 1922, he emigrated to the US and settled
in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1948, glad to be alive
after surviving personal horrors during WWII. Mekas
has said that he's in every frame of his films;
they're his way of being in the world and touching it
at the same time. Film became a way of appreciating,
almost literally, every second of his life. He bought
a Bolex movie camera — a type powered by a hand wound
spring — and began the practice of what he called
"single frame filming." That meant he'd load the
camera with a roll of movie film, some 2 1/2 minutes'
worth, but shoot it ever so slowly: one frame at a
time. Projected at slower than the normal 24 frames
per second, the objects, people, and landscapes are
seen in a kind of animation effect. When he began to
screen these films in the early 1950s, his technique
was likened to the vision of Cubist painting. But he
didn't feel he truly got the hang of the Bolex
until about 1965 — just in time for the Vietnam -
hippies — Beatles era. Artists and celebrities began
to find Mekas and be filmed: John and Yoko, Jacqueline
Kennedy, Salvador Dali — the list goes on.
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| | Courtesy of Maya Stendahl Gallery | | | From my window, Cassis, 1966. From NOTES FOR JEROME.
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Mekas's original style of filmmaking was very
underground at the time; painting ruled. But he met
the collision of art and public personalities
relatively head on, unlike more private
artist-filmmakers such as Joseph Cornell and Rudy
Burckhardt. Mekas believed so strongly in the ideology
of avant garde film, and even commercial films of
soulful quality, that he elected to take on a public
role in order to advance it. Among other things, he
pioneered a column of film reviews for the Village
Voice and started a collection of films, which has
become Anthology Film Archives today.
Not only was Mekas a pioneer of the personal "film
diary" form; he had a genius for coming up with
presentational devices that complemented the ideas
embedded in the media. Film artists of today,
after the generational layer of Andy Warhol and Bruce Nauman,
are his heirs — and they are too numerous to mention. This
exhibition is living proof that an argument can be made against
allowing Warhol and Nauman to constitute a point of origination
for the kinds of art film presented today. Once this
firewall to the past is removed, it's clear that both
of them are quite indebted to Mekas, although they
traded his sense of joy and attentive detachment for
something much colder. Warhol, in fact, cut his
filmmaking teeth sitting on the floor of Mekas's loft,
watching his films. They became friends.
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| Visions of Elvis and John Lennon flicker by, along with travelogues where the scenery changes at unusual speeds. | |
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Fragments of Paradise presents examples of the
artist's varied work in the mediums of film, video,
slide projection, and stills from his movies. The main
gallery contains several short films from the 1960s as
well as videos created since 2000. Visions of Elvis
and John Lennon flicker by, along with travelogues
where the scenery changes at unusual speeds.
Mekas has also valued the collaborative aspects of
film. A work presented in a niche of the main gallery is
an homage to Mekas from a film made by Virginie Marchand,
entitled I killed myself all night long, Jonas please
lend me a bicycle to become famous. A young woman lies
on her back while a black curtain covering the lower half
of her body moves, mysteriously and rhythmically. Even after
you more or less figure out that there's a bicycle behind the
curtain, the surrealistic eroticism of the mostly static
scene exerts its force upon the attention. Your unconscious
is watching the pretty lady have sex, while the machinery of
the film rolls around and around to keep her in your mind's eye view.
In a separate gallery, a work entitled Dedication to
Fernand Leger plays on 12 video monitors arrayed in a
circle on nice old white wooden chairs. The monitors
depict the Mekas family over a period of seven years.
This work takes its inspiration from Fernand Leger's
1933 remark that film might one day record a day in
the life of a family, by some secret method, so that
they would not be aware of the camera. Mekas took a
number of liberties with Leger's idea, notably with
respect to the time period recorded. But it's interesting that
he liked the idea of executing Leger's idea for him,
and that he did not consider Leger's notion of a
secret method as surveillance.
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| | Film became a way of appreciating, almost literally, every second of his life. |
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A new work from 2005 called Rillettes in an adjoining
gallery is especially personal. Three walls of the
room are festooned with Mekas's poetry in his own
handwriting, while projections of cut off frames of
film scroll continuously. A large display case in
the center of the room is piled full of notebooks and
memorabilia, attesting to friendships, conversations,
and the rich ferment of ideas that nourished his
work over many years. Bits of film litter the floor
under this display like a ghost replica of the editing
room. A text explains that rillettes are the cooked
down scraps of meat left after an animal is butchered.
Slow roasting turns them into a delicious spread for
crusty bread. The bits of film on his floor reminded
the artist that his mother made rillettes for the
family when he was a boy, because food was too
precious to waste when a farm animal was slaughtered
to feed the family. Mekas let this association inspire
him to mount a large number of his film scraps onto
slide mounts, minting yet another permutation of the
film medium around which he designed a thoughtful and
intriguing installation.
Every age conceives of dream worlds and utopias
differently, and film was the 20th century's great
medium. Mekas's work is deeply affecting in its
intuitive play with time and modes of presentation.
Instinctively, he finds ways to engage with the
viewer's interior world. His poetic art and visual
poetry belong in the larger context, not just of art,
but of visual culture in the 20th century. As Fragments
of Paradise shows, Mekas is still enthralled by the moving
image as a means of personal expression in the 21st Century.
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MAY 4, 2005
OFFOFFOFF.COM • THE GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE NEW YORK
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