Star of the Exhibition
2013; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1543-3404
Autores Tópico(s)Visual Culture and Art Theory
ResumoJonas Mekas Serpentine Gallery London December 5, 2012-January 27, 2013 An exhibition surveying the films, video, photography, and poetry of the filmmaker Jonas Mekas was recently on view at the Serpentine Gallery in London. This was a companion exhibition to a comprehensive video and film series presented by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and BFI Southbank in London. In producing this exhibit, the Serpentine Gallery set itself the daunting task of presenting representative works to reflect Mekas's prolific sixty-year career. Now ninety years old, Mekas has been making films since his arrival in New York City in 1949. Born in Lithuania in 1922, Mekas spent the latter part of the Second World War in a forced labor camp and then spent four years in various displaced persons' camps in Germany before the United Nat ions refugee organization brought Mekas and his brother Adolfas to New York City. Almost as soon as he set foot on American soil. Mekas began making films. By the 1960s he was a central figure in the city's burgeoning arts community, alongside friends and collaborators such as Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, and filmmakers Kenneth Anger, Stanley Brakhage, and Maya Deren. He was an advocate for independent film, writing for publications such as the Village Voice and, with Adolfas, publishing the now defunct Film Culture magazine. He also founded the Anthology Film Archives with a group of similarly minded independent filmmakers. As a companion exhibition, the Serpentine Gallery show was successful in showing the longevity and diaristic nature of Mekas's works by utilizing the tactic of presenting a number of his works in photographic or video grid formats. Two extensive grids of photographic enlargements of film frames were taped to the gallery wall. One of these photographic grids included the recognizable faces of many of the famous friends Mekas filmed over the years: images of fellow New Yorkers such as John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Summarizing filmworks by printing frames is a tried and tested method to illustrate articles for print media, and in the gallery context is also a helpful tactic, conveying Mekas's relationships with powerful influencers and the abundance of his filmic product. Two grids of' monitors were positioned to show the profusion of Mekas's Ems. One of these video grids, Lavender Piece. (2012), consisted of 16mm film transferred to video and presented in a 4x4 monitor grid. Each monitor screened a video loop in segments from five to fifteen minutes long. Presented in this manner, almost all visitors had a singular viewing experience and incomprehension was more or less expected. …
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