Jonas Mekas
November 8, 2008 – March 1, 2009
Bischofsgartenstraße 1,
D-50667 Cologne
After an odyssey lasting almost five years as a forced labourer in Germany, and as a displaced person after the war, Jonas Mekas (*1922 in Lithuania) arrived in 1949 in New York. This marked the beginning of his new life, which from then on he has dedicated in numerous ways to film. The solo exhibition in Museum Ludwig show-cases Mekas’ wide-ranging influence, his sheer passion for film, and his enduring influence on artists and film makers of several generations, and on the very way film history is written.
With documents, publications, film posters and visuals, the exhibition will present Jonas Mekas as initiator and mediator, film curator and film critic. In 1955 he co-founded the journal Film Culture, from 1962 on he organised the Film-Makers’ Co-operative, and likewise from 1964 on the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque; since then he has curated film programmes showcasing avant-garde and underground films. Finally his commitment meant that at last the Anthology Film Archive, which he co-founded in 1970, could in 1985 be given a permanent home in a building acquired six years earlier, and thus has a permanent place as a film museum.
The main emphasis of the exhibition will be on Jonas Mekas’s artistic and cinematic output, which will be shown in a dedicated film programme and a number of installa-tions. Since the 1960s Jonas Mekas has developed his own distinctive style which arose from his many years of documenting his daily life and the passing events with a small hand-held camera, a Bolex. The short diary-like sequences have been pieced together in such a way that, when combined with his collages of original sound ma-terial, his memories and commentaries spoken from off camera, or the noises he col-lects, they are woven together into an exceptionally complex poetic fabric. Since the early 1990s, he has taken this method, as exemplified in such films as Walden or As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, and trans-lated it into the new media as “Frozen film stills”, such as in To New York with Love, or video installations. Alongside his most recent work, Museum Ludwig will be showing his large-scale 365 Day Project, for which Jonas Mekas filmed one video every day for a whole year.
The exhibition has been curated together with Jonas Mekas. A catalogue will appear in collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery, London, published by Koenig Books, London.
At the same time in Museum Ludwig:
Looking for Mushrooms. Beat Poets, Hippies, Funk, Minimal Art
San Francisco 1955-1968
Forty years on from 1968, the year in which society underwent radical change, it is time to turn our minds back to the art scene in a city which was regarded in the 1960s and ’70s as the Mecca of experimental culture and lifestyles (Beat Poets, the hippie movement, counterculture). Not in New York, but at the »end of the world« on the West Coast of the USA around San Francisco, the taboos of a work-centred post-war modernism were broken in ways that allowed an intensive flow of ideas between all of the arts.