...more recent posts
dead-silent Guggenheim room / Doug Wheeler
Negotiations have been going on for a few months but it's now offical, a number of my films are going into the MoMA archives. I have to admit it was a head scratcher for me, my stuff isn't well known or great but I didn't put up any arguments. It turns out the museum is collecting films made by filmmakers who were living in and active in the east village in the 80's so I squeaked in despite being kind of peripheral to that scene. Also, the assistant film curator, back before she was at MoMA, was on a selection panel for a film festival I entered Buoy in. She argued unsuccessfully that it should be included in the programming but remained a fan.
Yesterday I shipped a hard drive with the complete elements for Buoy as well as an exhibition copy. I'm going to get my super-8 and 16mm films scanned to the highest resolution possible before shipping the camera originals and negatives because once they have them I will no longer have access to the material.
I'm told that one or two of my early films will be included in this show in October but so far it seems they haven't nailed down the programming so nothing's certain.
Alex, I haven't submitted our collaborations yet but I would like to so let's talk.
Gerald Holtom's peace sign circa '58 (N.D.)
From the outset, he was blatantly fraudulent. Reeking of unabashed insincerity, he cannibalised every -ism he encountered, chewed it up and joyfully spit it back into the faces of the establishment. David Bowie used to say that he wasn’t really a rock star, but an actor playing a rock star. The same could be said for Picabia: he played the role of an artist, producing an oeuvre of spectacular fakeness—fake Cubism, fake Surrealism, fake Social Realism, fake Romanticism, and finally, in his last works, fake Dadaism. For a half century, Picabia brilliantly trolled the art world. Everything he did was purposefully “wrong.”