Film Screening

Howl! presents portraits of two influential artists by Paul Tschinkel from his series ART/new york.

NAN GOLDIN: IN MY LIFE :  ART/new york No. 47
The program features Nan Goldin’s celebrated 1996 mid-career photography retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Goldin’s exhibition filled an entire floor at the Whitney Museum with pictures that chronicle her involvement and fascination with the alternative, “downtown” culture of New York City, Boston, Berlin, Tokyo, etc. Culled from a period that spans more than 25 years of taking pictures, Goldin’s desire to make a visual diary of her friends and lovers, as well as her own life, makes for a moving, highly charged, visual experience. This exhibition was organized by curator Elizabeth Sussman and selected by Nan Goldin and her life long friend and colleague David Armstrong. Included are interviews with Nan Goldin and Marvin Heiferman, a curator/publisher and a director of Lookout in New York City.

ELIZABETH MURRAY :  ART/new york No. 29
Elizabeth Murray’s distinctive and unusual paintings made her one of the foremost artists working in New York. She died in 2007. A pioneering painter, Murray’s distinctively shaped canvases break with the art historical tradition of illusionistic space in two dimensions. Jutting out from the wall and sculptural in form, her paintings and watercolors playfully rejuvenate old art genres—blurring the line between the painting as an object and the painting as a space for depicting objects in 3D. Breathing life into domestic subject matter, her paintings often include images of cups, drawers, utensils, chairs, and tables. These familiar objects are matched with cartoonish figures and floating eyeballs—macabre images that are as nightmarish as they are goofy—which reveal her fascination with dream states and the feminist psychological underbelly of domestic life. The film, made in 1989, includes an interview with the artist, her dealer Paula Cooper, The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, and Robert Storr, curator of Murray’s 2005 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art.

Immediately following the screening of ART/new york No. 29, Jason Andrew, curator and manager of the Estate of Elizabeth Murray will be in conversation with with the poet and author Greg Masters. There will also be a brief Q&A.

GREG MASTERS along with Michael Scholnick and Gary Lenhart, edited the poetry magazine Mag City, and produced the cable TV show, Public Access Poetry, now available online thanks to the Poetry Project. His poems have appeared in a number of glorious obscure publications and he is the author of six books published by Crony Books, including For the Artists: Critical Writing, Volumes 1 and 2.

PAUL TSCHINKEL is a painter with an MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture. In the early 70s he turned to video as an art form and thus became one of the first video artists in this new medium. In 1974, he turned to the fledgling New York cable TV system, producing Paul Tschinkel’s Inner-Tube, a half hour weekly arts program—a gallery on television. In 1979, Paul Tschinkel began taping young bands in New York clubs for the cable show, which aired for three years and inspired and presaged MTV. Since then, he has produced a video series on contemporary art called ART/new york (artnewyork.org/store).