Very sad to hear that the great American underground filmmaker and video artist George Kuchar passed away on September 6.
There’s lots of information available about him online, but I wanted to share an abridged version of an essay I wrote on Kuchar’s video diaries from the 1980s and 1990s for my MA thesis in film and video studies at York University, Toronto (finished 2004). Kuchar’s unique worldview was totally foundational to my appreciation of queer moving images, and he will be sorely missed.
All of his videos are available through Video Data Bank, and his films through Canyon Cinema and others. RIP, George.
Truth Wrapped in Trash and Vice Versa
George Kuchar found poetry in the gap between American life and Hollywood, between our painful, banal, shame-laced lives and the promises of beauty, success and fame offered by our cinematic mythmakers. Kuchar’s practice offers a model of a transformative way of seeing others with an empathy based on a shared sense of failure and shame. Through his cinematic gaze, Kuchar democratized glamour and imagemaking while creating an affecting persona from artifice and trash.
Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger (1921-2006) started his carreer in the late 40ies/early 50ies when he started taking pictures for the first international homosexuals’ magazine «Der Kreis/Le Cercle» (The Circle), for which he worked under the alias “Jim”. In the late 50ies he started portraying the style of the “Halbstarke” (“half strongs” / greasers), a youth culture dominated by young men from the working-class, who where mixing elements of the fashion of the American pop culture figure of the “rebel” (which was especially associated with the biking culture of the time and male icons such as James Dean and Elvis) with their own ideas of a non-conformism and delinquent fashion. The book “Rebel Youth” published by Rizzoli in February brings together these pictures of the Swiss subculture of the sixties and is an awesome document not only of the stylistic playfulness and inventiveness of the early youth cultures, but also of Weinbergers “authentic” style. The book features a foreword by John Waters and can be ordered via Rizzoli. Here’s a little preview:
Rumi Missabu (picture above by Christelle de Castro) is one of the few surviving members of San Francisco’s gender-bending performance groupe The Cockettes. Fans of the troupe will know her especially from her hilarious performance as the “rebellious elevator girl” Maxine in the legendary Cockette movie “Elevator Girls in Bondage” from 1972 (picture (c) David Wise) – the film was re-released on DVD two years ago and can be ordered directly from Rumi by sending an email to cocketterumi@gmail.com ($27.95 incl. shipping/handling).
Today the Oakland based artist owns a huge archive of the group’s work and aside from her job as the official Cockettes archivist is still a very active performer: In 2009 she has been starring in the successful stage production “Pearls over Shang-Hai” at the Hypnodrome Theatre, San Francisco, in which she played the “Madame Gin Sling” (see video below by Ben Wa). She has also recently appeared in couple of independent movies such as “The Glitter Emergency” by Paul Festa, “Uncle Bob” by Robert Oppel and the Cockettes documentary “Children of the Cockettes” by Ben Wa.
Rumis most current project is the video to “Interior”, the new single by NYC duo Mirror Mirror (new album “Interior” due August 16), which is another proof that she is still an exciting performer.
In an interview with Opening Ceremony which was published on their website just a few days ago, Rumi has also announced that she will be touring New York this October, supported by artists such as Jean Franco and French singer François Chaignaud. The interview also features a couple of really nice pictures of the artist from the last few years, so go check it out.
I unfortunately missed to inform you guys about the presentation of Jon Davies‘s book “Thrash” about the Warhol / Morrissey film that took place at Arsenal cinema yesterday – I had found out about the nice little event hosted by Marc Siegel only a few hours before it started. Davies ist a writer, curator and queer film theorist from Toronto and is not only in Berlin to promote his book, but also to present films by queer video artist Colin Campbell (1942-2001), which will be shown at Berlinale today and tomorrow (Mai 3+4). The program of the screening series “People Like Us: The Gossip of Colin Campbell” can be found on the Arsenal Hompage, as well as a little introduction to the artist and the focus of the screenings. You should also check out this extensive website dedicated to Campbell and his work for more background information about this artist who’s still quite unknown in Europe. Here’s a snippet of his film “The Woman From Malibu” from 1976, which will be shown today at 7:15.
It was Andy Warhol, who introduced Grace Jones and Keith Haring in the mid-eighties. Haring managed to engange Jones as a living canvass for some of his “tribal” style body paintings like the one he had done in collaboration with dancer Bill T. Jones and which ironically played with ideas of “the primitive” (you find an interesting comment on Jones’ play with race / gender stereotypes through Harings paintings on the Postcolonial Studies website of the English Department at Emory University, Atlanta). The paintings were presented and eternalized in different contexts like a legendary photo shoot with Robert Mapplethorpe (1984)…
… at one of Jones’ performances at the Paradise Garage (1985) …
Peter Hujar was born 1934 in Trenton, New Jersey and later moved to Manhattan, where he died of AIDS in 1987 (you can see the appartment he lived in in Ira Sachs’ film “Last Adress” I posted below). His first book “Portraits in Life and Death” came with an introduction by Susan Sontag and was published in 1976 – it was also the only book by him ever published. Hujar was the one-time partner and mentor of artist David Wojnarowicz, below see a couple of portrait pictures he shot of him (a few of them are NSFW). Like most of Hujar’s pictures, they were shot in black and white. His estate is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery.
“Last Adress” is a short film made in remembrance of artists from New York that have died of AIDS through the last 30 years. The film shows the houses, appartments and lofts in which people like Félix Gonzáles-Torres, Arthur Russell, Jack Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe or Klaus Nomi lived at the time of their deaths. You also find short portraits of all these artists on the beautifully designed website of the film which is worth visiting. Thanks, Aykan!
I’m a little late with this: Drag legend Vaginal Davis is currently showing a 10-day-long performance piece at 122, a performance space in New York. Following the text on the PS 122 website the show “re-examines the heyday of 1970s American daytime television chat and variety programs. (…) Ms Davis isn’t interested in assimilating into the mainstream entertainment complex, but instead wishes to dissect a kind of TV staple and reconfigure it by presenting an array of live and Skype guests from the various worlds of literature, dance, theatre, film and art.” Amongst the illustrious guests of the upcoming evenings are Bruce LaBruce, Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens, Slava Mogutin, JD Samson & MEN, Johanna Fateman, Genesis Breyer P-Orrigge and Joel Gibb. More about the show on the website of PS 122, Vaginal Davis’ blog. You also find a few pics of the appearence of Brian Kenny and Gio Black Peter two days ago on Slava Mogutin’s blog. The picture on top of this post is part of this series.
In the documentary “The Legend of Leigh Bowery” from 2002 filmmaker Charles Atlas explores the life of Australian performance artist and fashion designer Leigh Bowery from his early London years to the nineties when he became the muse and subject of British painter Lucian Freud. Bowery died in 1994 from an AIDS-related illness. The video below is just a trailer, the complete version of the movie can be watched here.
There are a whole bunch of classics of the New Queer Cinema that can be watched legally (or at least semi-legally) on YouTube, most of them in a pretty acceptable quality. Since a lot of the ones listed below are already online for a longer time, it seems like their directors and distributors and are tolerating this kind of online broadcasting, which is especially interesting in the case of Todd Haynes’ “Superstar – The Karen Carpenter Story” which has been banned from any kind of broadcasting after Karen’s brother Richard won a lawsuit against Haynes. But you never know – so please write me a message if any of the links doesn’t work properly anymore. So here’s my little video store:
I just watched the pilot of a new Sundance channel show called “Be Good Johnny Weir” and I loved it. It tells the story of a 11-year-old boy from Pennsylvania who completely falls in love with figure skating after seing figure skating star Oksana Baiul win an Olympic gold medal 1994 and who himself after a lot of ups and downs finally becomes one of best figure skaters in the world. BGJW shows that Weir is not the typical figure skating professional that has been trained to win since his childhood. He has made the decision to become a professional himself and it’s really interesting to see how hard he sometimes struggles with this decision, especially because he seems to be way too clever and reflected for this whole business. For all of you who can’t watch the show (legally): here are some of my favourite Weir moments so far.
“The Lavender Lens – 100 Years of Celluloid Queers” is a documentary by filmmaker David Johnson from 1995, I just found it on the sissydude tumblr (Johnson has uploaded it himself a while ago). The movie is a pretty extensive and uncommented montage of both famous and rather unknown queer moments of all film historical eras, starting with the legendary “Gay Brothers” from 1895, one of the first example of a motion picture. Because of it’s length I think it is a good idea to take the advice given on Best Documentary not to watch the movie in one go, but to “dip into it periodically”. Especially since the resolution of the video is not very high.
