Vitro Nasu

Richard Brody New Yorker

One of the best documentaries of 2016, “Tower” (available on Netflix), is about a mass murder that took place on and around the campus of the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, when a twenty-five-year-old man named Charles Whitman, equipped with a trove of high-powered firearms, climbed to the observation deck of the school’s central tower and, from its vantage point, fired down on random passersby. The director of “Tower,” Keith Maitland, conducted extensive interviews with survivors of the attack, as well as with officers and civilians who, together, brought it to an end. He uses them ingeniously, weaving voices together to tell a multifaceted story from multiple perspectives while taking an original approach to the overfamiliar technique of rotoscoped reënactments. It’s too good to spoil, but suffice it to say that the fifty-year gap between the events and the making of the movie are built into the story dramatically and movingly.

Brave Hollywood (see trailer)

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The Start of the Lion Hunt – at the gallery

A R Penck dies

German artist A. R. Penck has died, aged 77. The artist and his work personified Germany’s division during the Cold War.

With James Lee Byers

See his art at Arnet

Close tie with Immendorf (scroll down)

Via

Performance Test (1969)

Vito Acconci homepage

His wiki

Vito Dies at 77 (art news)

Vito Hannibal Acconci (January 24, 1940 – April 28, 2017)[2] was an American designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist.

(Saw this at the gallery in Soho).

Question everything

digital image
Portrait from the artwork Veto Vito by Jonathan Harris.

“My early work nearly ruined my career,” Vito told Harris by email, “and also nearly killed me,” he told later him in person. “What does a body artist do as a body grows old? It seemed necessary to find a new direction.”
In the mid-1970s, Acconci stopped doing performances, and turned to architecture, to which he’s been committed ever since.

Bric a Bra (links to his giant bra installation)

or see it here

Hannah Weiner, Scott Burton, Anne Waldman, Vito Acconi, Bernadette Mayer, Eduardo Costa and John Perreault, NYC, 1969
photo via

Google Vito Acconci

Burroughs with Howard Brooker from “Uncle Howard”

Reflection on film

BRINGING BACK HOWARD BROOKNER – AN ARTIST LOST TO AIDS

Howard Brooker

Born: April 30, 1954
Died: April 27, 1989 (age 34) in New York City, New York, USA

photo of Jim, Sara and Howard

‘Uncle Howard’ Remembers NYC Filmmaker Howard Brookner

NYtimes (1989) Directors race with aids ends before his movie opens.

”Howard was kind of a weasel in figuring out how to get things done,” says Sarah Driver, who, along with the director Jim Jarmusch, was his closest friend at N.Y.U. ”Jim and I thought he would weasel out of his illness somehow.” ‘Wanted All the Gory Details’

Like many of his friends, Madonna is haunted by a specific memory: ”Long before I knew anything, Howard asked me if I had ever seen anybody die. He wanted all the gory details about a friend who had AIDS and I nursed him to the end and was in the room when he died.”

Earlier, when the disease had touched his body with lighter fingers, Mr. Brookner made a video diary of his sickness. Seeing himself as a film maker was so central to his identity that he was determined to stay alive for the opening of his movie. ”It was like that O. Henry story when a woman knows she will die when the last leaf falls off an ivy vine, and so a friend paints a leaf on the wall,” Mr. Gooch says.

Aaron Brookner (Howard’s nephew) and Jim Jarmusch at the Burroughs’ bunker.

via

Jonathan Demme (Vanity Fair)

rest in peace
Oscar-Winning Director Jonathan Demme Dies at 73

NYtimes Obit

“I can’t think of any other director who is so instinctively and democratically interested in everybody he shows you,” Kael wrote.

Love his documentaries.. we’ll miss you Jonathan.

Stf- Retrospective.

David Byrne’s tribute here (Slate)

Jonathan helped me as I was developing True Stories, I wrote a song for his film Something Wild, a score for Married to the Mob and we made a test sequence for a never completed documentary featuring Robert Farris Thompson called Rule of the Cool. Jonathan went on to make a lot more features—some hugely successful, others not so much. He interspersed these with a number of documentaries and music films. The documentaries are pure labors of love. They tend to be celebrations of unsung heroes—an agronomist in Haiti, an activist (cousin) and pastor and an ordinary woman who does extraordinary things in New Orleans post-Katrina. The fiction films, the music films and the docs are all filled with so much passion and love. He often turned what would be a genre film into a very personal expression. His view of the world was open, warm, animated and energetic. He was directing TV episodes even this year, when he was in remission.

Jonathan, we’ll miss you.

Robert M. Pirsig

“His well known book ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ was rejected by 121 publishers.”

Persig

Early photos

Lila (wiki)

NYtimes obit

One of Mr. Pirsig’s central ideas is that so-called ordinary experience and so-called transcendent experience are actually one and the same — and that Westerners only imagine them as separate realms because Plato, Aristotle and other early philosophers came to believe that they were.

But Plato and Aristotle were wrong, Mr. Pirsig said. Worse, the mind-body dualism, soldered into Western consciousness by the Greeks, fomented a kind of civil war of the mind — stripping rationality of its spiritual underpinnings and spirituality of its reason, and casting each into false conflict with the other.

In his part gnomic, part mechanic’s style, Mr. Pirsig’s narrator declares that the real world is a seamless continuum of the material and metaphysical.

“The Buddha, the Godhead,” he writes, “resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”

Magdalena Abakanowicz died at 86.
See another photo of her from Daily News Obit here.

Hess Collection

From quite early in her life, Abakanowicz has held a deep regard for the rough stalwartness of the Polish peasant culture and the utilitarian weaving done by Polish women.
“The fiber I use in my works derives from plants and is similar to that from which we ourselves are composed…our heart is surrounded by the coronary plexus, the most vital of threads…handling fiber we handle mystery. When the biology of our body breaks down the skin has to be cut so as to give access to the inside. Later it has to be sewn on like fabric. Fabric is our covering and attire, made with our hands it is a record of our thought.”
There is also an intriguing dichotomy in most of Abakanowicz’s work, one involving the powerful contrast between organic vitality and death. The wood trunks from the cycle War Games, for instance, invoke images of both victim and weapon, as the impoverished tree has been sculpted to resemble the axe that hewed it.

(Standing Mutants, 1992-1994 © Magdalena Abakanowicz, photo: by Jan Kosmowski)

Magdalena Abakanowicz:Crowd and Individual

Guardian (April 13, 2017)

Felipe Dana has spent the past three weeks photographing the Mosul offensive. He spoke to us about his experience.

Felipe Dana is from Brazil – (homepage)

In Iraq, hundreds of US troops have been sent to reinforce the assault on Mosul, with many more waiting in the wings

Click and see Children play inside a damaged car amid heavy destruction in a neighborhood recently retaken by Iraqi security forces from Islamic State militants on the western side of Mosul, Iraq.
(Instagram – Felipe Dana)

Felipe Dama won Pulitzer Prise for photo journalism

Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder worked together on 16 films. (via)

Indiewire obit

Martin Scorsese

He gave me an education, and he changed my way of thinking about what it is to make a film. He was a great artist. He was also a precious and irreplaceable friend, and this is a great loss for me.”

Michael Ballhaus was a German cinematographer. In 1990, he was the Head of the Jury at the 40th Berlin International Film Festival

Ballhaus was influenced by family friend Max Ophüls,[3] and appears as an extra in Ophüls last film Lola Montès (1955).[4]

He came to prominence with his work on sixteen films for Rainer Werner Fassbinder beginning with Whity (1971) and, including The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Chinese Roulette (1976) and The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978)

Martha

Quiz Show

Under the Cherry Moon

Gunther Kaufmann

Best Intentions – Max Von Sydow played Ingmar Bergman’s grandfather. (Directed by Bille August, scripted by Ingmar Bergman, won Palm d’Or at Cannes)

Max Von Sydow became a French citizen in 2002. He has appeared in many films in many languages, including Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, German, English, French, Italian, and Spanish (via wiki)

See a photo of Max Von Sydow by Julian Schnabel (previous post) here.

Speaking French in Diving Bell and Butterfly (youtube)

Max Von Sydow, Delphine Seyrig and Omar Shariff were all born on April 10.

(From Stolen Kisses directed by Francois Truffaut)

Margurite Duras called Delphine Seyrig a famous stranger (previous post)

Cool, auburn-haired French actress, born in Lebanon. Spent part of her early childhood in New York, where her archaeologist father was cultural attaché. Acted on the Parisian stage from 1952-55. Returned to New York to attend classes at the Actor’s Studio. Appeared on stage in Arthur Miller’s adaptation of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People”. On the strength of her performance, she was cast in the lead of Last Year at Marienbad (1961) by director Alain Resnais. Subsequently acted in films by major European film makers, including Joseph Losey, Luis Bunuel and Francois Truffaut.
She considered herself a feminist who was additionally socialist as opposed to her friend Jane Fonda, whom she called a socialist who was additionally feminist.

(From Dr Zhivago directed by David Lean)

“Omar Sharif” was not the name given to him by his well-to-do, Catholic parents.

From Movie Interviews
50 Years On, Sharif Looks Back At ‘Lawrence’

“My name was Michel,” he told NPR in 2012. Michel Shalhoub, to be exact. In his memoir, he wrote about wanting an Arab-sounding name that was easy to pronounce in different languages — essential to a man who spoke not just Arabic but also French and English. “I went to the school where the priests were French. And then after, when I was 9 or 8 years old, I went to an English school — thank God. And there was a theater there. And that’s how I started to become an actor.”

Egyptian director Asaad Kelada says this multicultural preparation meant Sharif “was able to travel from nationality to nationality with conviction in the roles that he played. And so he was really the go-to person for any role that was of an exotic or different nature at that time.”

For his next big film after Lawrence of Arabia, Sharif transformed himself from an Arab freedom fighter to a Russian revolutionary poet in Doctor Zhivago

Omar Shariff passed away July 2015.

Isabel Coixet a prolific director was born in Spain and have made films in America, Paris and Tokyo and she was born on April 9.

Photo by Herman Landshoff – Max Ernst in New York 1942 (Guggenheim collection)
Max Ernst fled Europe helped by his marriage to Peggy Guggenheim. He left his girlfrind Leonora Carrington and she suffered a major mental breakdown.

Max had a terrific reputation for his beauty, charm, and success with women. He had white hair and big blue eyes and a handsome beak-like nose resembling a bird’s. He was exquisitely made – ( from Peggy Guggenheim’s Out of this Century).

Leonora with Max Ernst and Paul Eluard Photo by Lee Miller

Leonora Carrington (April 6 was her birthday)

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Max with Lee and Man Ray.
(Via)

Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst in Sedona Arizona.

“F-111” (1964-5)
Mr. Rosenquist’s paintings rarely contained overt political messages, but his best-known work, the enormous “F-111” (1964-5), was a protest against American militarism.

NYtimes James Rosenquist, Pop Art Pioneer, Dies at 83

Miami Hearald obit

Pop Art giant James Rosenquist’s work influenced generations from New York to Miami

His Studio

Slideshow

The Bird of Paradise Approaches the Hot Water Planet (Grisaille), 1989.

Tumbledweed 1963-66

William Acquavella, the New York art dealer, said that Mr. Rosenquist lost a significant amount of work in the fire.
“He just rebounded from it,” he said. “Another guy would have had a tougher time bouncing back. But he enjoyed working, he enjoyed creating things, and he enjoyed painting.”
Mr. Rosenquist also had homes in Bedford, N.Y., and Miami. Recently, he had been spending most of his time in New York City, Ms. Thompson said.
In 2009, Mr. Rosenquist published an autobiography, “Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art,” written with David Dalton. Reviewing it in The New York Times, Dwight Garner called it “a ruddy and humble book, lighted from within by the author’s plainspoken, blue-collar charm.”