Jonas Mekas (1922 – 2019) accomplished much in his long life. And that’s not just in the realm of underground film! Mekas practically lived a lifetime under Nazi rule before reluctantly coming to the United States in 1949.
At the Underground Film Journal, we love our timelines, so we’ve decided to maintain this list of important events in Mekas’s life whether it relates to his passion for the cinema or his personal achievements not related to film.
The plan is to update this timeline using multiple reference sources. Currently, we are using four.
One is a profile of Jonas written by Calvin Tomkins that was first printed in the January 6, 1973 issue of the New Yorker magazine; and reprinted in the book collection The Scene: Reports on Post-Modern Art.
Another source is the “Introduction” to the book of essays To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas & The New York Underground. The “Introduction” is written by David E.
At the Underground Film Journal, we love our timelines, so we’ve decided to maintain this list of important events in Mekas’s life whether it relates to his passion for the cinema or his personal achievements not related to film.
The plan is to update this timeline using multiple reference sources. Currently, we are using four.
One is a profile of Jonas written by Calvin Tomkins that was first printed in the January 6, 1973 issue of the New Yorker magazine; and reprinted in the book collection The Scene: Reports on Post-Modern Art.
Another source is the “Introduction” to the book of essays To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas & The New York Underground. The “Introduction” is written by David E.
- 12/24/2021
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
For all its promise, the new Whitney Museum of American Art is and will be marked by an invisible original sin that can't be lifted. That sin? An aesthetic one that perfectly mirrors America's hysteria and mania around race, what D.H. Lawrence called the fear of our "old, hoary, monstrous ... unspeakably terrible ... and snow white ... abstract end."After boldly commissioning eminent American artist Charles Ray to design a sculpture to be permanently installed on the public plaza outside the new museum, the Whitney blinked and declined Ray’s proposal. According to Calvin Tomkins, the museum feared the work would "offend non-museumgoing visitors." And just like that, a gigantic chance was lost. The proposed work, since made and exhibited in Chicago's Art Institute, is not only a 21st-century sculptural masterpiece, it embodies so much of America’s past and current struggles that had it been placed in the front of this...
- 11/6/2015
- by Jerry Saltz
- Vulture
Siah Armajani: The Tomb Series Alexander Gray Associates September 4 - October 18, 2014
Iranian-born Siah Armajani, inarguably one of the finest sculptors in America to have emerged out of minimal and conceptual art, the main aesthetic strategies of the late 1960s, creates deeply affective rigorous and ruminative work. It appears to be at once elementarily simple and tautly complex.
The Tomb Series, Armajani's affective and whip-smart show at Alexander Gray Associates, reaffirms that no other artist doing public works has so richly mined the legacy of the Russian Constructivists with such complexity, finesse, and exalted depth of feeling. No other artist has been involved in creating a public art that provides a reminder of shared, communal values and does so without pandering or sentimentality. No other artist has invested so many years on an extended public meditation on moral excellence in relation to civic pride and civic virtue. In one of his early writings the artist stated,...
Iranian-born Siah Armajani, inarguably one of the finest sculptors in America to have emerged out of minimal and conceptual art, the main aesthetic strategies of the late 1960s, creates deeply affective rigorous and ruminative work. It appears to be at once elementarily simple and tautly complex.
The Tomb Series, Armajani's affective and whip-smart show at Alexander Gray Associates, reaffirms that no other artist doing public works has so richly mined the legacy of the Russian Constructivists with such complexity, finesse, and exalted depth of feeling. No other artist has been involved in creating a public art that provides a reminder of shared, communal values and does so without pandering or sentimentality. No other artist has invested so many years on an extended public meditation on moral excellence in relation to civic pride and civic virtue. In one of his early writings the artist stated,...
- 10/2/2014
- by Dominique Nahas
- www.culturecatch.com
Dakota Group and Submarine Entertainment will produce a documentary about influential art collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim. The film will be directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, who directed last year’s look at another cultural icon “Diana Vreeland: the Eye Has to Travel.” Principal photography began in June. The film will look at Guggenheim’s championship of a number of legendary modern artisits such as Marcel Duchamp, Vasil Kandinsky, Willem de Kooning, Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock. It will include interviews with some of the men and women who knew her such as journalist Calvin Tomkins, novelist Edmund White, philanthropist Eli Broad,...
- 9/13/2013
- by Brent Lang
- The Wrap
George Condo told the New Yorker that West asked for a controversial image.
By James Montgomery
Kanye West's banned cover art for <i>My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy</i>
Photo: Def Jam/ twitpic
Remember back in October, when Kanye West complained that the cover of his My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album had been banned? Well, it turns out that may have been 'Ye's plan all along.
In a brand-new New Yorker profile of Fantasy cover artist George Condo — which, in true New Yorker fashion, is not available online — author/art critic Calvin Tomkins writes that West specifically asked Condo to create an image that would stir up controversy.
"A couple of weeks before my first visit to Condo's studio, Kanye West ... asked him to do a painting for the cover of his new album," Tomkins wrote. "West said that he had seen paintings by Condo, and wanted to collaborate with him.
By James Montgomery
Kanye West's banned cover art for <i>My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy</i>
Photo: Def Jam/ twitpic
Remember back in October, when Kanye West complained that the cover of his My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album had been banned? Well, it turns out that may have been 'Ye's plan all along.
In a brand-new New Yorker profile of Fantasy cover artist George Condo — which, in true New Yorker fashion, is not available online — author/art critic Calvin Tomkins writes that West specifically asked Condo to create an image that would stir up controversy.
"A couple of weeks before my first visit to Condo's studio, Kanye West ... asked him to do a painting for the cover of his new album," Tomkins wrote. "West said that he had seen paintings by Condo, and wanted to collaborate with him.
- 1/11/2011
- MTV Music News
The man behind the initial album art for Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy has revealed that the rapper wanted the piece to be banned. In an interview with The New Yorker, painter George Condo told the publication's Calvin Tomkins that West hoped to create drama by commissioning the explicit image, which featured a man having sex with a phoenix. "A couple of weeks before my first visit to Condo's studio, Kanye West, the rapper, asked [Condo] to do a painting (more)...
- 1/11/2011
- by By Jennifer Still
- Digital Spy
In a New Yorker profile of artist Julie Mehretu, Calvin Tomkins writes of the semiabstract painter’s place in the art world: When Mehretu’s work was being widely shown in Europe in the mid-2000s, and included in the Whitney Biennial, “In market-obsessed New York … not many people knew her name.” That has surely changed. Mehretu’s new solo show of paintings opens May 14 at the Guggenheim Museum.
- 5/14/2010
- Speakeasy/Wall Street Journal
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