Jonas Mekas. A small table with a bottle of wine, garlic, sausage, bread.

About

“A small table with a bottle of wine, garlic, sausage, bread” features Mekas’ final work “Requiem” (2019), an 84-minute video piece that, after its debut as part of a live visual/orchestral performance at The Shed in 2019, is being exhibited for the first time in its final single-channel video form. Additionally, the show includes a selection of the artist’s 4-channel video installations, known as “quartets,” as well as multi-projector 35mm slide, sound, and photographic installations made between 2000 and 2018 — most of which have rarely, if ever, been presented in the United States.

Throughout his nearly 80-year-long artistic lifetime, Mekas embraced the diaristic form, arguably more than any other through cameras, sound devices, and written journals, while maintaining a radical dedication to elevating the personal and poetic aspects of daily life, always seeking to capture the essence of the moment. Mekas recorded what was happening in front of him in the present, the here and now. With an emphasis on that which is typically regarded as the small and insignificant, he was unwaveringly committed to sharing “fragments of paradise on Earth.”

“I choose art and beauty, vague as those terms are, against ugliness and horrors in which we live today. […] I feel my duty not to betray those poets, scientists, saints, singers, troubadours of the past centuries who did everything so that humanity would become more beautiful.” — Jonas Mekas, 2015

Made during his final year, Mekas’ “Requiem” is an unrelenting homage to the beauty of nature and a comment on life on this planet by an artist who at the age of 96 was well aware of the horrors of the 20th Century and dismayed by the events of the 21st. The primary imagery of this work — which is culled from footage shot by the artist over three-decades from his first Sony analog video camcorder to his HD pocket-sized Nikon — is flowers.

Cut flowers, garden flowers, wild flowers, and flowers in bloom on trees, hillsides, fields and elsewhere are accompanied by the sounds of nature and Giuseppe Verdi’s “Messa da Requiem.” Inter-titles with translations of lines from the Latin funeral mass sung by the choir are interspersed throughout the work along with other imagery including recordings of TV news reports inspired by themes from the novel “The Betrothed,” a classic of Italian literature set during a time of upheaval and plague by Alessandro Manzoni, for whom Verdi’s “Requiem” was composed.

“491 Broadway,” first presented in Paris in 2009, is a sound/multi-media installation consisting primarily of “a small table with a bottle of wine, garlic, Italian sausage, bread” celebrating the coming together of friends, a major theme in the artist’s work. As part of this work, visitors are invited to sit around the table and eat and drink the beverages and food that Mekas always offered those at his table, while listening to the sounds and conversations of family and friends who visited his Soho loft where he lived for 30 years, including an animated discussion between filmmakers Peter Kubelka and Stan Brakhage on cinema. A series of prints of various sizes feature images of visual materials in his loft such as post-it notes, photos, drawings, and other elements suggesting the original home environment.

For the 6-channel 35mm-slide installation “Rillettes” (2000), Mekas presents a portrait of family life through its more than 250 slides, each containing small fragments of film strips discarded while editing his epic and nearly five-hour 16mm film “As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty,” completed the same year. Mekas writes of the piece, which debuted at the La Beauté Festival in Avignon, France, that upon noticing the hundreds of “little ends and pieces” of films scattered around the floor, he remembered a moment from his childhood of his mother making “rillettes” from the unused portions of the holiday pig and likewise decided to not throw anything out. Mekas says of the images: “… they are related to the film but they do not really appear in the film because I cut them off. So they are something independent and different.”

In the 4-channel installation “60s Quartet” (2017), Mekas poetically captures the time period with scenes originally shot on 16mm film of 1960s New York including the first ever performance by the Velvet Underground with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable presented by Andy Warhol at the Dom; of Barbara Rubin, a young filmmaker at the time, who introduced the band to Andy Warhol; of Warhol at his Factory; and of underground film, protests and marches in NYC, in which Allen Ginsberg and other friends appear.

Another “quartet,” “Memories of Soho” covers three decades of Soho, with recordings from the life of artist and Fluxus founder George Maciunas, who established the first artist lofts in Soho; happenings and other events in the 60s and 70s Soho; a snowy, winter walk through its streets narrated by Mekas in the 90s; as well as footage of Mekas’ empty loft just before his move to Greenpoint, Brooklyn in the mid-2000s.

A photographic installation “Warhol Series #I” (2008) is composed of 40 images selected by the artist from frames of 16mm footage shot over the years of his friend at various locations including The Factory, the Union Square Market, and Montauk, among others. Displayed in a dense grid formation on the wall, the work reveals the potential of moving image for multifaceted durational portraiture when transposed into the photographic medium.