Alfred Leslie
A WEEKEND WITH ALFRED LESLIE
London Whitechapel Gallery
21 & 22 April 2007
Alfred Leslie is a pivotal American artist-painter-filmmaker whose work spans the past fifty years. A celebrated contemporary of the Abstract Expressionists and a key figure in the extraordinary social milieu of downtown New York from the 1950s and 60s to the present, his own canvases were amongst the most revered of his peers. In 1958-59 he made Pull My Daisy with the photographer Robert Frank and in 1964 collaborated with the inimitable poet Frank O’Hara on The Last Clean Shirt. In 1960 he edited and published the amazing collection of texts and drawings that form the “one shot review” The Hasty Papers – in and of itself a summation of cultural activity with contributions from Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery and Fidel Castro amongst may others.
Leslie dramatically moved away from abstraction to make giant almost hyper-real portraits, the majority of which were destroyed in the now infamous fire that ripped through his studio and its neighbouring blocks on 17 October 1966. This utterly devastating event, that completely destroyed paintings, films and manuscripts, continues to inform his practice today. Invariably articulated by an initial process of reconstruction Leslie’s recent work makes memory new through its radical re-imagining. He lives and works in New York.
This weekend-long season is the first major presentation of Alfred Leslie’s films in the UK. It is introduced and discussed by Leslie who is an extraordinary orator and includes two exclusive screenings of works in progress.
The Last Clean Shirt (Alfred Leslie & Frank O'Hara, 1964)Saturday 21 April 2007, at 3pm
THE CEDAR BAR
THE CEDAR BAR
Alfred Leslie, USA, 2001, video, 84 min
Originally written as a play in 1952 based on actual conversations between abstract expressionists Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, April Yabolonsky, gallerist John Myers and critic Clement Greenberg in their eponymous hangout, The Cedar Bar, this video a work of such magnitude that it mocks description in its self-declared "WAR BETWEEN THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE ART AND THOSE WHO WRITE ABOUT IT". Spectacularly elusive, The Cedar Bar, genuinely yokes the push-and-pull of a once 'new' painting style with the enormity of expressionist opera into an uncontainable psycho-tornado!
Saturday 21 April 2007, at 5pm
THE LAST CLEAN SHIRT & USA POETRY: FRANK O'HARA
USA POETRY: FRANK O'HARA
Alfred Leslie, USA, 1966, 35 min
Frank O'Hara discusses with Al Leslie, a filmmaker and artist, his work and the relationship between poets, playwrights, and artists. O'Hara also reads some of his poetry and talks about some of his friendships with other artists. Filmed off-air by WNET on March 5, 1966 at the home and studio of Frank O'Hara in New York City.
THE LAST CLEAN SHIRT
Alfred Leslie & Frank O’Hara, USA, 1964, 16mm, 39 min
In a letter to his friend and collaborator, the poet Frank O'Hara, Leslie writes: "We will shoot for two SEPERATE LEVELS on the film. One is the VISUAL, the other the HEARD & the spectator will be in TWO places or more SIMULTANEOUSLY. NOT AS MEMORY BUT AT THE SAME MOMENT. PARALLELISM! MULTIPLE POINTS OF VIEW!" It is a blueprint for The Last Clean Shirt in which a man and a woman take a car ride through the streets of downtown Manhattan. A clock on the dashboard foregrounds the fact that the film is a single shot. The woman speaks in Finnish gibberish, interpreted by the beautiful and brilliant story told via O’Hara’s subtitles that run throughout.
Saturday 21 April 2007, at 7pm
ALFRED LESLIE INTRODUCES
BIRTH OF A NATION (work in progress)
Alfred Leslie, USA, 1966-present, c.40 min
Referring to – and revising - D.W. Griffith’s notorious film of the same name, Alfred Leslie's Birth of a Nation is a reconstruction of a never-completed, mutating essay. Originally shown in a variety of unfinished states, this current version reworks the only remaining 11 minute fragment to survive.
AND OTHER WORKS
Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie, 1959)Sunday 22 April 2007, at 3pm
GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933
GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933
Mervyn LeRoy, USA, 1933, 16mm, 96 min
Virtuosic, geometry-defying choreography from Busby Berkeley combines with Depression-era slapstick wisecracks. Gold Diggers of 1933 is an outstandingly delirious film reflects Leslie’s love of the musical, and the influence of a form that combines comedy, spectacle and song on his own practice.
Sunday 22 April 2007, at 5pm
ALFRED LESLIE IN CONVERSATION
Al Leslie discusses his work plus screenings of The Anatomy of Cindy Fink and Pull My Daisy.
THE ANATOMY OF CINDY FINK
Richard Leacock, Patricia Jaffe & Paul Leaf, USA, 1960, 16mm, 12 min
Cinema verité portrait of a teenage girl’s first jazz dance audition in a Greenwich Village studio. With Larry Rivers, Al Leslie, and Louise Lassier.
PULL MY DAISY
Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie, USA, 1959, 16mm, 27 min
Based around Jack Kerouac's narration from the last section of his unproduced play 'The Beat Generation' (itself based on an incident between Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn), Pull My Daisy as much a document of its own unravelling as it is footage of some of the most acclaimed writers and painters of its generation at play. Caught between the socio-historical cult of itself and its Beatnik players, and the excitement of its discreet yet radical formalism, Pull My Daisy has been pawed over by the watchdogs and self-appointed guardians of avant-garde film since its first double-bill showings with John Cassavete's 'Shadows' in the late 1950's. With its bawdy gags and caustic, iconoclastic humour, the film is actually predicated on the delicacy of a subtly shifting interplay between modes of 'depiction', between record and fiction, self-awareness and dubious, willful naivete, debunking the ordinarily stable registers its surface (and our own viewing habits) would otherwise invoke.
Sunday 22 April 2007, at 7pm
LOST IN THE FIRE
LOST IN THE FIRE (work in progress)
Alfred Leslie, USA, 2007, video, c.50 min
A rare screening of Alfred Leslie's work in progress Lost in Fire, an intimate memoir based around the 1966 studio fire that had such a radical and lasting impact on Leslie’s practice.
AND OTHER WORKS
at
Whitechapel Gallery
80-82 Whitechapel High Street, London, E1 7QX
Nearest Tube: Aldgate East
MAP OF AREA
Single Screening: £5
One Day Pass: £15 / £12 (members & concessions)
Full Weekend Pass: £25 / £16 (members & concessions)
Telephone: 020 7522 7888
Email: film@whitechapel.org
www.whitechapel.org
London Whitechapel Gallery
21 & 22 April 2007
Alfred Leslie is a pivotal American artist-painter-filmmaker whose work spans the past fifty years. A celebrated contemporary of the Abstract Expressionists and a key figure in the extraordinary social milieu of downtown New York from the 1950s and 60s to the present, his own canvases were amongst the most revered of his peers. In 1958-59 he made Pull My Daisy with the photographer Robert Frank and in 1964 collaborated with the inimitable poet Frank O’Hara on The Last Clean Shirt. In 1960 he edited and published the amazing collection of texts and drawings that form the “one shot review” The Hasty Papers – in and of itself a summation of cultural activity with contributions from Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery and Fidel Castro amongst may others.
Leslie dramatically moved away from abstraction to make giant almost hyper-real portraits, the majority of which were destroyed in the now infamous fire that ripped through his studio and its neighbouring blocks on 17 October 1966. This utterly devastating event, that completely destroyed paintings, films and manuscripts, continues to inform his practice today. Invariably articulated by an initial process of reconstruction Leslie’s recent work makes memory new through its radical re-imagining. He lives and works in New York.
This weekend-long season is the first major presentation of Alfred Leslie’s films in the UK. It is introduced and discussed by Leslie who is an extraordinary orator and includes two exclusive screenings of works in progress.
The Last Clean Shirt (Alfred Leslie & Frank O'Hara, 1964)THE CEDAR BAR
THE CEDAR BAR
Alfred Leslie, USA, 2001, video, 84 min
Originally written as a play in 1952 based on actual conversations between abstract expressionists Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, April Yabolonsky, gallerist John Myers and critic Clement Greenberg in their eponymous hangout, The Cedar Bar, this video a work of such magnitude that it mocks description in its self-declared "WAR BETWEEN THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE ART AND THOSE WHO WRITE ABOUT IT". Spectacularly elusive, The Cedar Bar, genuinely yokes the push-and-pull of a once 'new' painting style with the enormity of expressionist opera into an uncontainable psycho-tornado!
Saturday 21 April 2007, at 5pm
THE LAST CLEAN SHIRT & USA POETRY: FRANK O'HARA
USA POETRY: FRANK O'HARA
Alfred Leslie, USA, 1966, 35 min
Frank O'Hara discusses with Al Leslie, a filmmaker and artist, his work and the relationship between poets, playwrights, and artists. O'Hara also reads some of his poetry and talks about some of his friendships with other artists. Filmed off-air by WNET on March 5, 1966 at the home and studio of Frank O'Hara in New York City.
THE LAST CLEAN SHIRT
Alfred Leslie & Frank O’Hara, USA, 1964, 16mm, 39 min
In a letter to his friend and collaborator, the poet Frank O'Hara, Leslie writes: "We will shoot for two SEPERATE LEVELS on the film. One is the VISUAL, the other the HEARD & the spectator will be in TWO places or more SIMULTANEOUSLY. NOT AS MEMORY BUT AT THE SAME MOMENT. PARALLELISM! MULTIPLE POINTS OF VIEW!" It is a blueprint for The Last Clean Shirt in which a man and a woman take a car ride through the streets of downtown Manhattan. A clock on the dashboard foregrounds the fact that the film is a single shot. The woman speaks in Finnish gibberish, interpreted by the beautiful and brilliant story told via O’Hara’s subtitles that run throughout.
Saturday 21 April 2007, at 7pm
ALFRED LESLIE INTRODUCES
BIRTH OF A NATION (work in progress)
Alfred Leslie, USA, 1966-present, c.40 min
Referring to – and revising - D.W. Griffith’s notorious film of the same name, Alfred Leslie's Birth of a Nation is a reconstruction of a never-completed, mutating essay. Originally shown in a variety of unfinished states, this current version reworks the only remaining 11 minute fragment to survive.
AND OTHER WORKS
Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie, 1959)GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933
GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933
Mervyn LeRoy, USA, 1933, 16mm, 96 min
Virtuosic, geometry-defying choreography from Busby Berkeley combines with Depression-era slapstick wisecracks. Gold Diggers of 1933 is an outstandingly delirious film reflects Leslie’s love of the musical, and the influence of a form that combines comedy, spectacle and song on his own practice.
Sunday 22 April 2007, at 5pm
ALFRED LESLIE IN CONVERSATION
Al Leslie discusses his work plus screenings of The Anatomy of Cindy Fink and Pull My Daisy.
THE ANATOMY OF CINDY FINK
Richard Leacock, Patricia Jaffe & Paul Leaf, USA, 1960, 16mm, 12 min
Cinema verité portrait of a teenage girl’s first jazz dance audition in a Greenwich Village studio. With Larry Rivers, Al Leslie, and Louise Lassier.
PULL MY DAISY
Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie, USA, 1959, 16mm, 27 min
Based around Jack Kerouac's narration from the last section of his unproduced play 'The Beat Generation' (itself based on an incident between Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn), Pull My Daisy as much a document of its own unravelling as it is footage of some of the most acclaimed writers and painters of its generation at play. Caught between the socio-historical cult of itself and its Beatnik players, and the excitement of its discreet yet radical formalism, Pull My Daisy has been pawed over by the watchdogs and self-appointed guardians of avant-garde film since its first double-bill showings with John Cassavete's 'Shadows' in the late 1950's. With its bawdy gags and caustic, iconoclastic humour, the film is actually predicated on the delicacy of a subtly shifting interplay between modes of 'depiction', between record and fiction, self-awareness and dubious, willful naivete, debunking the ordinarily stable registers its surface (and our own viewing habits) would otherwise invoke.
Sunday 22 April 2007, at 7pm
LOST IN THE FIRE
LOST IN THE FIRE (work in progress)
Alfred Leslie, USA, 2007, video, c.50 min
A rare screening of Alfred Leslie's work in progress Lost in Fire, an intimate memoir based around the 1966 studio fire that had such a radical and lasting impact on Leslie’s practice.
AND OTHER WORKS
at
Whitechapel Gallery
80-82 Whitechapel High Street, London, E1 7QX
Nearest Tube: Aldgate East
MAP OF AREA
Single Screening: £5
One Day Pass: £15 / £12 (members & concessions)
Full Weekend Pass: £25 / £16 (members & concessions)
Telephone: 020 7522 7888
Email: film@whitechapel.org
www.whitechapel.org
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posted by Secret Cinema at 4/21/2007 03:00:00 PM
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