THE modern Art Museum (MoMA) of New York has purchased 212 moving images from experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, a mainstay of the city’s avant-garde film scene who turned 90 on May 25. The museum already had 14 works by Jacobs in its permanent collection prior to the purchase announced today, making it the primary institutional repository of Jacobs’ work.
Two of the works acquired will be exhibited in the museum’s galleries from November 3. One is a restoration of Jacobs’ first film, the cinema verité image of life on the streets of the Lower East Side orchard street (1955). Will also be exhibited Joan Mitchell: departures (2018), an experimental examination of movement, surface and texture in Mitchell’s work informed by the filmmaker’s brief engagement with Abstract Expressionism – he trained as a painter with Hans Hofmann in the early 1950s at the ‘Art Students’ League of New York.
Always from Joan Mitchell: departures2018, directed by Ken Jacobs. Courtesy of the filmmaker
“Hofman made me so aware of depth,” Jacobs said in an interview with Metrograph Last year. “He was always talking about depth. And at the same time, says that you have to respect the surface. So what he’s looking for, I finally understand, are representations of depth. But how to represent the depth without reaching the depth? Depth is a sin. You know, it’s a two-dimensional canvas. You don’t want to lie. You don’t want him to do anything he doesn’t naturally. But the focus on depth made me want to see the illusion. So, in my cinema, I was very often immersed in an illusion.
From its beginnings in a purely documentary vein, Jacobs’ work indeed increasingly embraces illusion, stylization and commentary. The cinematographic essay which is considered his crowning achievement, the 440-minute film Star Spangled to Deathbrings together original and found footage he collected over nearly half a century, from 1957 to 2004, to comment on the violence and greed seemingly endemic to life in the United States.
Always from Star Spangled to Death1956-60/2001-04, directed by Ken Jacobs. Courtesy of the filmmaker
Jacobs’ history with MoMA dates back to his teenage years in the late 1940s, when he attended film screenings at the museum. “The Museum of Modern Art immersed me, when I was a teenager, in the unexpected of art,” he said in a statement. Over the next few decades he showed films, performances and experimental installations at the museum. In 2004, the museum hosted the series of films and performances Ken Jacobs: illusions and improvisationco-organized by Jytte Jensen and Joshua Siegel.
“As he turns 90 this month, Jacobs is one of cinema’s living treasures, a filmmaker who over the past half-century, together with his partner and collaborator Florence Jacobs, has awakened a sense of the awe and mystery that 19th century audiences must have felt when confronting films for the first time,” Siegel said in a statement. “With this major acquisition of preprint, film and digital works, MoMA will continue to preserve and exhibit Jacobs’ art for future generations.”
