Saturday, August 12 (8pm)
DOCUMENTS, DREAMS, AND DISCARDS
Co-presented by Aurora Picture Show and the Menil Collection
Location: The Menil Collection - 1533 Sul Ross St., Houston, Texas 77006
Free Admission
Co-presented by Aurora and the Menil Collection and held in conjunction with the exhibition The Curatorial Imagination of Walter Hopps on its final weekend, this special film screening features rarely seen short films relating to the artists and sensibilities of Hopps’ formative years as a groundbreaking curator and collector. Curated by Peter Lucas, this collection of cinematic glimpses and assemblages includes experimental works made between the 1940s and 1970s by Joseph Cornell, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Storm de Hirsch, Shirley Clarke, Nam June Paik, and Jud Yalkut. The screening will take place inside the museum’s foyer.
Program:
Ten Second Film (Bruce Conner, 1965, silent, :10)
This extremely short film by assemblage artist and filmmaker Bruce Conner includes ten one-second clips taken from various found count-down leaders–the typically unseen beginning sequences of movie reels. Though it was created as a trailer for the 1965 New York Film Festival, the festival rejected it for being too fast, short, and confusing.
Aleph (Wallace Berman, 1958-76, silent, 7:47)
Assemblage and collage artist Wallace Berman’s sole film, Aleph is a fast-paced montage of a wide variety of hand colored imagery–much of it filmed from the television–with a recurring image of a transistor radio and Hebrew characters incorporating Berman’s interest in Kabbalah. He considered this an ever-evolving, personal film journal, working on the single print for over ten years and showing it only occasionally to friends.
The White Rose (Bruce Conner, 1967, 7:35)
Artist Jay DeFeo’s painting The Rose had preoccupied her for nearly eight years when she was evicted from her San Francisco apartment and work space in late-1965. This film by Bruce Conner documents the removal of the massive art work and also captures the artist as she witnesses its transformation and departure. The Rose was moved to the Pasadena Art Museum, where she finished it and it was eventually exhibited in 1969.
The Wormwood Star (Curtis Harrington, 1956, 9:59)
Legendary artist and occultist Cameron (Marjorie Cameron) worked with filmmaker Curtis Harrington to create this evocation of her unusual visions through drawings and recitations of poetry. Shortly after this was made, the vast majority of the work shown was destroyed, making this film the only document.
Peyote Queen (Storm de Hirsch, 1965, 9:05)
Poet and filmmaker Storm de Hirsch’s Peyote Queen is a celebration of altered consciousness and an expression of freedom. Using split screens, kaleidoscopic lenses, and imagery painted and etched directly on the film stock, she activates a playful visual dance of fish, eyes, breasts, boats, and stars, accompanied alternately by African percussion and American pop music.
Butterfly (Shirley Clarke, 1967, 3:30)
Filmmaker Shirley Clarke made this personal, political protest film with her daughter Wendy to premiere at the Week of Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam at New York University in 1967. Mother and daughter both appear in Butterfly–together, separate, and superimposed. The film is directly scratched, painted, and bleached, with striking sound juxtapositions.
Beatles Electroniques (Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, 1966-72, 2:58)
Video and installation artist Nam June Paik and filmmaker Jud Yalkut created this irreverent manipulation of found media by improvising electromagnetic distortions on the television receiver during a broadcast. Together with Ken Werner’s soundtrack of electronically altered loops of Beatles sound, the piece places the pop icons within an abstracted, electronic world.
By Night with Torch and Spear (Joseph Cornell, ca. 1940, 7:39)
Most known for his shadow box assemblages of found ephemera, artist Joseph Cornell was also a pioneer of found-footage filmmaking. Made in the early 1940s, By Night with Torch and Spear is a dream-like montage of color tinted archival footage from industrial, nature, and ethnographic documentaries–some of it upside down, backwards, or printed negative.
Additional Notes:
Some of the makers and subjects of these films were artists that Walter Hopps knew and exhibited at the Ferus Gallery (which he co-founded with artist Edward Kienholz and ran 1957-62) and the Pasadena Art Museum (where he was Curator and then Director 1962-74). Here are a few notes about those connections:
Bruce Conner
Walter Hopps began showing Bruce Conner’s work at the Ferus Gallery in 1959. He also lived with Conner and his wife in Mexico for a short time in the early-1960s, where he helped Conner with some of the initial cutting for the film that would end up being Cosmic Ray.
Jay DeFeo
One of Jay DeFeo’s earliest solo shows was at the Ferus Gallery in 1960. Hopps was also responsible for saving and transporting her most known painting The Rose (depicted in the film The White Rose). It was moved to the Pasadena Art Museum, where she finished it and it was eventually exhibited in 1969.
Wallace Berman
Wallace Berman was one of Walter Hopps’ favorite artists of the period. Berman’s first exhibition was at the Ferus Gallery in 1957, which was famously shut down by police for indecency, and Berman was arrested.
Cameron
The piece that got Wallace Berman’s Ferus show busted was actually a small work by the artist Marjorie Cameron that was incorporated at the bottom of Berman's assemblage, Temple. The previous year, in 1956, Cameron’s first exhibition took place in Walter Hopps’ Brentwood studio. It featured many of the works shown in the film The Wormwood Star, and most of that work was destroyed by fire there.
Joseph Cornell
Walter Hopps organized Joseph Cornell’s first major retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1966/67, which then traveled to the Guggenheim Museum in New York. That show bolstered his stature as one of the great innovators of assemblage.
Images:
Above: Peyote Queen by Storm de Hirsch, 1965. Image courtesy of the New American Cinema Group/Film-makers’ Cooperative.
Featured on home page: The White Rose by Bruce Conner, 1967, 16mm, black/white, sound, 7 min. Courtesy of the Conner Family Trust © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco. © 2021 The Jay DeFeo Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York