Jonas Mekas
Photograph: Liz Wendelbo
Jonas Mekas at the Serpentine Gallery The Serpentine Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of Jonas Mekas’ film, video and photographic works from throughout his remarkable and prolific sixty-year career. 5 December 2012 – 27 January 2013.]]>
Source: Serpentine Gallery
‘I want to celebrate the small forms of cinema, the lyrical forms, the poem, the watercolour, etude, sketch, portrait, arabesque, bagatelle and little 8mm songs. I am standing in the middle of the information highway and laughing, because a butterfly on a little flower somewhere just fluttered its wings, and I know that the whole course of history will drastically change because of that flutter. A super-8 camera just made a little soft buzz somewhere, on New York’s Lower East Side, and the world will never be the same.’
Jonas Mekas
This exhibition will survey Mekas’s work with moving images, poetry and sound, presenting a selection of film and video dating from the 1950s through to the present day. The show includes the world premiere of Mekas’s new feature-length film, presented as an immersive installation. Stills, film portraits of friends and family and ephemera will also punctuate the Serpentine’s spaces, offering a fascinating insight into Mekas’s life and work.
On his arrival in New York in 1949, Mekas bought his first Bolex camera and began to record brief moments of the world around him. He quickly became a central figure in the burgeoning arts community, alongside friends and collaborators such as Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg and film-makersKenneth Anger and Maya Deren. A tireless champion of the new independent and avant-garde film movements, he wrote the ‘Movie Journal’ column in Village Voice, set up and edited Film Culture magazine with this brother Adolfas, and founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Anthology Film Archives, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2011. Hero to successive generations of film-makers, from Martin Scorcese and Jim Jarmusch, for whom he is his ‘leader and mentor’ to Mike Figgis and Harmony Korine who cites him as a ‘true hero of the underground’, Mekas continues to exert a powerful influence on the film world and beyond.
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