Amy Taubin on Ken Jacobs

THE VISIONARY American motion picture creator Ken Jacobs has created an extraordinarily vast body of work that is both varied and obsessive. The task of exhibiting a selection of nearly seventy pieces of temporal sights and sounds lasting from less than a minute to ninety minutes – not to mention drawings, paintings and writings epigrammatic and pedagogical – is breathtaking. But curator and archivist Andrew Lampert, working with New York University’s 80WSE gallery, has come up with a brilliant strategy to not only show nearly a third of Jacobs’ films and some of his drawings as well, but also to illuminate the liminal condition of the moving image in contemporary art.

“Ken Jacobs: Up the Illusion” is a site-specific installation located in the gallery’s annex – the glass-fronted, street-level storefront at the corner of Broadway and East Tenth Street in Manhattan – where you can shop -showcases on the work of Jacobs, playing 24/7 on digital monitors. These are not excerpts but entire films, accessible via QR codes so you can watch and listen to them while navigating the city where Jacobs lived for ninety years and which is the inspiration for much of his work. Or, if you prefer a more focused viewing experience, you can stream the movies from the home gallery website. The exhibition is divided into three sections, each lasting approximately ten weeks. (Jacobs is already filming and editing new works specifically related to the corner of Broadway and Tenth for inclusion in later installments.) There will also be screenings at movie theaters in New York City, Roxy Cinema and at Brooklyn’s Light Industry.

Beginning as a painter in the 1950s, Jacobs became a follower of Hans Hofmann’s “push and pull” theory, according to which the composition of colors and shapes in an abstract painting can create the illusion of a dynamic three-dimensional and thus add the dimension of time, that is, the time it takes for the eye to perceive depth. All of Jacobs’ work invokes the ecstasy of seeing in 3D – on canvases, on screens, and in what we call real life. He manipulates his own and other people’s films to make the wonders of deep space more apparent. Unlike most filmmakers, who shape time through storytelling, and unlike avant-garde giant Stan Brakhage, who pioneered space-shrinking techniques to privilege the present moment of perception, Jacobs has modified analog projectors and cameras and since 1999 has used the digital process. —to discover worlds in less than a second of film. (The patent for his “Eternalism” process is displayed in one of the windows on the Broadway side.)

orchard street (1955/2014) is the first film in the exhibition. Inspired by the now classic documentary by James Agee, Helen Levitt and Janice Loeb In the street (1948), Jacobs acquired a 16mm camera in the mid-1950s and began recording, with the same lack of editorialization achieved in In the street, the open-air frenzy of selling all manner of goods — from fish, high-end leather accessories, second-hand clothes and more — to a melting pot of shoppers in New York City. That Orchard Street is gone, and today’s Canal Street peddlers and designer handbag shoppers belong to a world of only passing interest to Jacobs, whose identification with the culture of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. the East is fundamental to his life’s work. What this exhibition clearly shows is how much Jacobs’ work is prefigured in orchard street. He does not yet have the dexterity with the handheld camera that would be fully and furiously realized in the exquisite framing and cropping of the demolished buildings in The Sky Socialist (shot in 1964-1966 and finally edited in 2019, thanks to digitization). But Jacobs’ fascination with the ordinary movement of faces and bodies as performance and his attraction to portraiture are evident, as is his dedication to making the third dimension – the marriage of space and time – the condition determinant of filmed moving images. There’s a close-up in the first half minute of orchard street of eyeglasses arranged on a rotating circular stand that also bears handwritten signage begging us to COME UP! UP! Looks like it was made with 3D technology.

All of Jacobs’ work invokes the ecstasy of seeing in 3D – on canvases, on screens, and in what we call real life.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York, which has acquired the Jacobs Moving Image Archive, will install orchard street as well as two more Jacobs films in its mid-century gallery on the fourth floor in November. Context matters, and it’s up to major museums to place moving image artists like Jacobs – or Bruce Conner, or Arthur Jafa, or Joan Jonas – in the same rooms as great painters, sculptors and photographers of plateau. (Leaving aside MoMA’s retrograde and intellectually awe-inspiring “Signals: How Video Changed the World” exhibit, which currently takes up the entire sixth floor and is drawn from the museum’s video collection, most of which should have remained in storage. .) Context matters differently in “Ken Jacobs: Up the Illusion,” where the arrangement of monitors in each window generates connections across decades and between analog and digital recording and editing. Take, for example, this rotating glasses holder in orchard street and the most dazzling and kinetic piece of this episode, When Timofeev moves, everything moves (2022). The final piece shows a shimmering, pulsating slow-motion skater, working his balance magic on and off steps and concrete blocks in a fenced-in play area that also vibrates – stretching, contracting and spinning in opposition to the skater . The titular skater is Viktor Timofeev, one of three assistants – the other two are Antoine Catala and Nisi Jacobs (his daughter) – digital engineers, coders and editors who have worked with Jacobs over the past two decades on his “Eternalisms” , some including transpositions of his live performances in double analogue cinematographic projection “Nervous System” and “Nervous Magic Lantern” (more than forty titles between 1975 and 2010), others based on digital sequences from the 21st century. One would assume that every moving image that Jacobs has shot or salvaged from the trash can of film history will be reborn as an eternalism, in which three-dimensionality is streamlined and digitally heightened. As he explains, he and Flo (his wife Florence Jacobs, née Karpf) no longer lug around two analytical projectors, and no one needs 3D glasses. Even one-eyed people can see eternalisms in 3D.

While the desire to produce multi-dimensional moving images underpins all of Jacobs’ work, this obsession is rarely presented as an abstraction. Jacobs is a figurative filmmaker who works in many genres: portraits, cityscapes, performances, rescuing and investigating existing images, and even political (anti-capitalist, anti-fascist) analysis of historical events and conditions. Nissan Ariana window (1968) is a 16 mm “home movie” transferred to digital but without the process of eternalism. Almost embarrassing in its directness but consciously staged in the way the portrait painting is staged, the film depicts Flo during her pregnancy with her and Ken’s first child, then the child (Nisi Jacobs) during her first year. It’s unlikely that Jacobs has ever done any work that wasn’t confrontational, but standing on Tenth Street, staring out a window at a monitor displaying an extreme close-up of Flo Jacobs’ lactating breast, I felt like at anytime someone would call the cops to shut down the exhibit, like the cops shut down a screening of Jack Smith Flaming Creatures (1963) and arrested the programmer (Jonas Mekas), the theater manager (Ken) and the ticket taker (Flo).

Jacobs met Smith and Smith’s friend Bob Fleischner around 1956. Smith performed for Jacobs and Fleischner’s cameras, and Jacobs used Smith’s footage of Fleischner in the extremely underground picture/sound collage. blonde cobra (1959–63). This fragile collaboration is commemorated in Two heartbreaking departures, first presented as a live screening of “The Nervous System” a few months after Smith and Fleischner’s death, in 1989, then transferred to DVD in the mid-90s and now an eternalism of nearly four -ninety minutes featuring a quirky and staggering performance by two ghosts who refuse to leave the mind’s eye. Ken had already absorbed the influences of Smith and Fleischner when, in 1960, he met a painting student, Karpf, already fascinated by avant-garde cinema. They quickly became a couple and married in the mid-1960s. I have written elsewhere of his pivotal contributions to the work of Ken Jacobs, including as a performer in his “Shadow Plays” and the “Nervous” live screenings. System” (none of which is presented in this exhibition in its original form). But his presence is everywhere in “Ken Jacobs: Up the Illusion”. The biggest show in New York this summer and winter would not have been possible without her.

Amy Taubin is a contributing editor of Arts Forum.