"... To renew the old world, that is a collector's deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things."
- Walter Benjamin
On Saturday I journeyed to the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde park to see the Jonas Mekas exhibition before it closed and I was delighted I caught it. The exhibition coincided with the Lithuanian artist filmaker's 90th birthday. His website is a plethora of biographical information, films, poems, interviews and images. I really recommend taking a look for just a glimpse into the life of this wonderful man and you can find it here: http://jonasmekasfilms.com/
Mekas is a magpie for images, this exhibition displayed a fraction of his collection that he has been gathering since moving to New York in 1949 and buying his first camera. Mekas is best known as an avant-garde film maker and poet. There is a distinct thread of conversation between the two practices in his work, his films reference poetic structures and his visual poetry flows like film. As the Serpentine Gallery identifies itself as a "contemporary fine art gallery" there was a definite attempt to display Mekas' oeuvre in the manner of a fine artist's practice. Those more familiar with Mekas would perhaps be critical of this, but as a student of Fine Art myself I found this made the work a lot more accessible as it was displayed in a language I'm familiar with. The sheer volume of a life time's work could never be contained within a small gallery like the Serpentine, instead the exhibition succeeded in introducing the viewer to a fascinating man.
In order to mix things up a bit, Mekas' various films were displayed in a number of ways. Some, like The First 40 were projected onto a wall, others played on small, old-fashioned TVs stacked together throughout the exhibition (one of my favourite ways to see video artworks is on clunky old televisions, the more cube-like the better) and others were only referenced by the multitude of film stills displayed on the walls. The film stills all depicted three images mostly portraits of Mekas' friends and loved ones. These odd images, sometimes blurred and out of focus created very tentative intimate portraits that depicted the movement of these fleeting moments. With three successive pictures we learn a lot about that flicker in time, in some we can tell the subject was moving quickly in others the focus darts about the still. To my delight one of the films in The First 40 references my favourite Artist's Manifesto : "I am for an art." by Claes Oldenberg. I can understand why Oldenberg's exalting "call to arms" for artists to create appealed to Mekas. Throughout his films familiar faces appear and fade out again, his films are full of the living and the dead. His daily life was the richest source material he found.
In the middle of the show, under the gallery's central dome Mekas' latest film was debuted "Outtakes from the life of a Happy Man". Mekas narrates as a series of flickering images dance across the wall. His voice is incredible, rich and inter weaved with years of experience as he speaks with the wisdom of someone who has been misunderstood more often then not. With the natural lyrical quality of a poet, Mekas' voice has been stuck in my head for days and it's saying: "Just images.... Passing by.... Just images... Some fragments of this world of, my world, which is not so different from any other, anybody else's world". His voice is like crushed velvet, textured and deep. I could (and have been) listen to it all day. I wonder if all the stories and anecdotes are true such as tales of one clawed lobsters.
"These are not memories" Mekas insists, "they are real, the images are real."
"These are not memories" Mekas insists, "they are real, the images are real."
Lavender Piece (2012), 16 screen installation
An interesting text by Czelaw Milosz is displayed on the wall of the gallery containing Lavender Piece and a series of Mekas' poems. It discusses the relationship between duration and distance in the artist's work: "Distance engendered by the passing of time." Considering duration is important for locating many contemporary art practices and the resulting work created.
Before I went tot he exhibition I ventured to the enormous car boot in Wimbledon stadium. I haven't been so one since I was a child, to my dismay I've gotten a little bit snobbish as I've gotten older and come to regard them as just huge collections of junk. I had totally forgotten the absolute wonder they awoke in me as a child. The Wimbledon one is great, it's muddy and very rough around the edges, just as I remember all car boots being. On every other stall there was something wonderful I had to talk myself out of buying. Until I stumbled upon a stack of strange black and white photographs of old wooden furniture that look like they were taken for a catalog.
They were so wonderful! For 12 quid I got the lot, over 100 of them! Pricey for a car boot but I love them. I have no idea what I'll do with them but I smell a big body of work coming from these humble photographs. Perhaps they will be the beginning of an expansive collection. Who knows, I mention them because that's what Mekas is, at heart, a collector of images and in thinking about it, aren't we all?
