On and off, the stage has two primary directions: one may enter; one may exit.  Questions of how to fill the stage and how to empty it/take it apart are probably the two most fundamental questions of theater.  Choreographer Akram Khan finds that “the more you fill it with something the more you take away from something else.”  Collaboration provides a way for him to find that balance collectively.  In his latest collaborative dance piece In I, Akram Khan invites actress Juliette Binoche to dance out a highly charged romance against a pared down domestic theater set by Anish Kapoor.  For Khan, dance provides a means to not only reveal, but to relive personal experience on stage.

—Richard J. Goldstein

Juliette Binoche and Akram Khan in In I at BAM, September 2009. Photo by Richard Goldstein.Photo by Richard Goldstein.

Akram Khan and Juliette Binoche perform against Anish Kapoor wall in In I at BAM, September 2009. Photo by Richard Goldstein.

BOMB On the Inside: On the Scene is a series of multi-media discussions with artists on creative vision posted on the BOMBlog. The audio was edited by Elise Oh.

Photo by Brooke Guthrie. Courtesy of HarperCollins.

BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America Series
“This Is Not a Love Story” by Lydia Peelle
Read by Lydia Peelle
Ketch Secor on fiddle
Running Time: 26:45

“This Is Not a Love Story” by Lydia Peelle appears in her collection Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, out now from Harper Perennial. It is the sixth installment in BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America series. Check back with BOMBsite.com with each new issue to listen to audio versions of these stories. For more from Lydia, read her interview with Gillian Welch in the Fall 2009 Issue of BOMB here.

To listen to this podcast on your mp3 player, subscribe to our RSS feed and it will automatically download to your iTunes library.

Our intrepid film correspondent Montana Wojczuk caught up with Jem Cohen for this Podcast. They had a broad ranging discussion covering topics from 8-mm film to Jeff Koons.

But in 1930, as favor turned from the avant-garde to a state-sponsored Social Realism, and things became less fun, Mayakovsky shot himself in the head. Stalin nonetheless proclaimed the poet to be a “hero of the revolution,” and photographs of the three taken by Rodchenko were elevated from mere snapshots into icons of the mythic propaganda that now came to surround the poet and his circle. Amazingly, their cultural significance persists well beyond even the Cold War, in the United States even. You can buy postcards and T-shirts with Mayakovsky or the Briks on them in the same places that you can pick up kitschy posters or statuettes of Lenin and Stalin. And they turn up time and again on album covers, most notably The Ex and Franz Ferdinand. Somehow these iconic images continue to turn up in the most popular works of monumental propaganda that we come to associate with the Soviet Union. A testament to the cultural influence of Stalin the dictator or of Rodchenko the artist and consummate ad man?

Obviously, the relationship between a work of art and the social and political situation within which it is produced is invariably complex and difficult to reduce to a simple cause and effect. But art and politics aside, Rodchenko’s photographs of Mayakovsky and the Briks inadvertently document a love triangle between three remarkable figures—a ménage à trois writ large on the era’s cultural landscape and reflected all around us today.

Recently, while walking down Broadway, I noticed a banner hanging off of a building with that arresting wide-eyed woman’s face from the cover of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s long poem Pro Eta—or “About This.” Lilya Brik, the general darling of the Russian avant-garde during the 1910s, ‘20s, and ‘30s, was Mayakovsky’s muse for some 15-odd years, as she would also inspire the pioneering photographer and graphic designer Aleksandr Rodchenko. Most people today might not know who Lili Brik is but, with reproductions printed on posters, t-shirts, and postcards today, Rodchenko’s image has come to represent the Russian avant-garde to those who don’t know a thing about the Russian avant-garde. On Broadway, it was being appropriated by the Manhattan-based video production company Red Car, perhaps to show just how cutting-edge they are.

Ten years earlier, a billboard-size poster of Lili’s first husband, the critic Osip Brik, loomed menacingly just around the corner at Houston and Lafayette streets. Brik was an early supporter of avant-garde poetry and a purveyor of controversial literary ideas—he once claimed that if Pushkin hadn’t written Eugene Onegin, someone else would have gotten around to it. The billboard, towering high above one of the country’s most recognizable shopping districts, was all the more ominous to anyone who knew of Brik’s early affiliation with the Cheka, the precursor to the KGB.  But conspicuous consumers could rest assured that he was only there in 1998 to advertise the incredible Rodchenko retrospective held that summer at MoMA.

In July 1915, Vladimir Mayakovsky turned up at a literary salon hosted by the Briks and read “A Cloud in Trousers,” an intense poem on the subjects of love, revolution, religion, and art written from the perspective of a spurned lover. Having never met the poet until that evening, Osip Brik offered to publish the poem on the spot. For her part, Lili fell for Mayakovsky before the cloud was back in its trousers.

In 1918, Lili wrote, “After testing my feelings for the poet, I was able to tell Brik with confidence about my love for Mayakovsky. We all decided never to part and to pass our lives remaining intimate friends, closely tied by mutual interests, tastes, and work.” They arranged a life “in the Cheryshevsky manner”—a reference to the 19th century radical thinker and early advocate of “open marriage”—and lived as a family under one roof.

Rodchenko collaborated with the happy threesome on posters for the Russian Telegraph Agency, the state news organ, as well as on the arts journal LEF (Left Front of the Art), which stressed the link between leftist politics and progressive art. The most familiar and widely reproduced image of the era is this poster for the Soviet publisher Gosizdat in 1924, which shows a kerchiefed Lili shouting “BOOKS!” Most recently it was appropriated by the band Franz Ferdinand, and before that by the Dutch punk band, The Ex.

In 1930, Mayakovsky unexpectedly killed himself, though it can’t be said definitively whether because of a state-sponsored crackdown on the avant-garde or just because of plain old manic-depression. Lili was devastated, but threw herself into editing Mayakovsky’s collected writings and personally appealed to Stalin to recognize the poet’s significance to the state—which he did, proclaiming Mayakovsky a “hero of the revolution.” He let citizens interpret his remark of “Indifference to his work is a crime” as they would.  Suddenly Rodchenko’s photos of Mayakovsky—and, by association, of the Briks—took on a greater significance. Overnight, the images were transformed from photos of his friends into icons worthy to hang beside any by Andrei Rublev, state portraits of Lenin and Stalin—or outside the windows of a cutting-edge, New York-based video production company.

Kevin Kinsella is a writer and translator (from Russian) living in Brooklyn. His book-length translation of Osip Mandelshtam’s “Tristia” is available through Green Integer Books. He is currently working on a book about the friendship and collaborations of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Lilya and Osip Brik. Kevin blogs about Russian-literature and art at New First Unexpected.

BOMB On The Inside took a quick run through at the opening of Summer Phase of X Initiative in Chelsea, and entered the narrative exhibition spaces of Tris Vonna-Michell, Luke Fowler and Keren Cytter. Each artist has transformed a floor to reveal their personal interpretations of memory, cinematic based free associations and appropriation of film genres.

Check out the exhibition as well as Next Year’s Models, the film and music series that is presented on the X’s roof.

Photo ©Ben Handzo

Jacques Roubaud reads at the French Embassy as part of the OuLiPo festival.

A still from Projection.

Ariel was kind enough to let me interview her on camera during the last stressful under-slept weeks of her senior year, on the condition that I make a cameo as a New York art critic in her video project entitled Projection, where she plays a young artist being “projected into oblivion” (her words, which I read as “nervous about graduating from art school”). She ended up using a good part of what I’d filmed for BOMB in her video installation, which was projected from a lawn chair onto her studio wall, so the whole experience felt more like an artistic collaboration than an interview. What I didn’t know when I was shooting her was that she was in character for part of it (she changed outfits three times), which I didn’t realize until I’d watched her video (which is here). Anyway, here are what I’m assuming are earnest answers to my questions, conducted in her studio and via email, but I’m still not 100% sure. Following the text interview is a video of her talking about her sculpture piece “No More Wire Coathangers.”

Lena Valencia: One of the big drawing points of the Art Program at UCLA is that you guys have some of these celebrity professors. I know you’ve had classes with a couple. What was that like, having these successful artists teaching you?

Ariel Alter: Well, let’s just say that…I want to make burning effigies of both of them.

LV: (laughter) Can you go into detail?

AA: No, I would prefer not to… My advice to someone who’s looking for an art school: If the celebrity teacher thing is the entry point then it’s going to be a very disillusioning experience. The “celebrity” teacher thing means little. When a teacher has made a big name for themselves, they sort of teach from inside an impervious, unattainable bubble, and I don’t think that’s the way teaching should be done. Celebrity teacher or not, the best teachers I’ve had were those who showed up expecting to get their hands dirty, instead of relegating all those roles to the teaching assistants.

LV: Your mother is the painter Constance Mallinson. What’s it like being an artist working in your mom’s shadow, or not working in your mom’s shadow?

AA: Since I don’t want to paint professionally I haven’t felt like I’m working in my mom’s shadow , except when I’m at art openings and the aging LA art scene is pinching my cheek, you know. What’s it like being an artist’s kid? It’s really nice. I sometimes run ideas by her and she tells me if I’m onto something, or not. I get extra-criticism outside the classroom, so my work has been sort of double-edited. She’s seen a lot of art in her lifetime, and I respect her art and her taste in art as well. I’ve never felt ostracized at all for being creative or trying to be creative.

LV: So what’s the gallery scene in LA like?

AA: All I know is I see this hideous hairless dog at every opening, and I was poking around on Facebook, and this dog has its own Facebook page.

LV: (laughter) What’s the owner like?

AA: I have no idea. It was a man but it’s so crazy. I’m never looking at the owner, just at his dog. It was at my mom’s opening, and a couple other openings that I’ve gone to, and I would say this dog summarizes the [LA art scene]. …What’s the gallery scene in LA like? I don’t know. I don’t have a car so I’m subject to people’s whims to go to some kind of gallery or opening, but it’s really hit or miss. You know, you go to one of these art walks in Culver City and you just see crowds of people trying to get into this space…

LV: Free booze.

AA: It might be the free booze, but it seems rather affected to me, this crowd of people trying to get into an opening to see, you know, water color portraits of naked people. It’s totally affected.

Still from Projection. The critic judges the final product.

LV: Okay, so I know your work started out as drawing and then morphed into video. How did that happen?

AA: That’s a common morphology, I would say. I think most kids who are artistically inclined start off drawing, start off painting. It’s the easiest thing you can do. I mean, you have a pen, you have a piece of paper, boom. The video thing… I don’t know.

LV: Why do you like it? Why not ceramics…

AA: Ugh. (laughter)

LV: Why not animation, why not graphic novels? Why video?

AA: Because I’m interested in comedy. You’ve chortled and laughed voraciously at a graphic novel, so I don’t want to make any generalizations about what is the most effective medium for comedy. Video in particular, not film, is Very conducive to the comedic act because it’s gritty, and it’s not pretentious. It doesn’t look particularly beautiful, which is sort of linked to Freud’s theory of jokes and the unconscious. (pause) Which I have yet to read.

LV: (laughter) That’s interesting…

AA: I read an essay relating Freud’s theory of jokes and the unconscious to William Wegman’s work, specifically. Have you seen his video work? He made some incredibly hilarious videos.

LV: Oh, really?

AA: His early video work is really good. They’re black and white, deadpan videos.

LV: And then there’s all the improv that seems to go into video, and your work.

AA: Yeah, and that’s something that you just experienced.

LV: You’re always dragging me to these improv shows.

AA: There’s one thing in life that keeps me going and that is laughter that induces pain, where you are just absolutely incapacitated.

LV: What do you laugh at?

AA: Misanthropy and slapstick.

Still from Projection. Maniacal fans carry the young artist from her studio.

LV: Is there a particular subject matter that you find yourself gravitating towards in your video and sculpture work?

AA: I don’t think my body of work is vast enough to pinpoint any overarching themes; I’m still young and experimenting, you know. I’m interested in the juxtaposition between fantasy and reality, and in parody of television and other media in my video work. I’m usually inspired by whatever I’m reading at the moment. I’m also interested in artwork being a quick response to news and current events; although it’s a very illustrational way of working, it’s something I’ll never able to fully relinquish. In my videos, I usually play an endearing main character who has an active fantasy life and reaches some sort of demise via her actual drab reality.

A lot of my work is about art. In my sculpture, I tend to play roles and deconstruct the processes and modes of art making of certain artists—lately I’ve been playing the role of the “outsider artist,” toiling away in the empty parking space in my garage, constructing things from found objects and other meager, abject material, but once again, in a way that is removed and not “serious.” The people in my complex think I’m a freak. That’s not so apparent in the “non-fake” sculpture that I showed you, but, at the same time, there’s still an element of “stepping back” from a whole-hearted creation of an object, if that makes sense. For example, I mentioned that I originally intended the drawings in “No More Wire Coathangers” [below] to reference potential pieces of art. The drawings are a mediation between the idea and the actual object of creation. There’s an aversion to confront the actual object with the clean, cartoony line drawings.

LV: Judging by the cynicism expressed in your video project, it would seem your experience at the UCLA art program has not been entirely positive. Why are you so mad? Do you have issues with art programs as a whole? What could be changed?

AA: I’m not that mad. This year has actually been one of my best years. I had some really amazing teachers who were all young and energetic and totally inspiring. I was a lot more mad when I hadn’t the slightest idea of what I was doing, or what I liked to do. As I said, I came in just drawing and painting and I tried that out here. I realized it wasn’t really happening when my drawing teacher made me draw with a tree branch taped onto my finger. My other teacher blew up at me for incorporating a performance with a presentation of my painting. Now I still don’t know what I’m doing, but at least I have some sort of vague sketch of what I like to do. It’s easy to make fun of art and art school because it’s so vulnerable, especially when it’s competing with digital media, film, TV, and hell, YouTube. You go to an art school that is “de-skilled,” meaning that whatever technical skill you want to learn is completely reliant on your own volition. I wish there were more technical classes here. Despite how much the school wants to believe we are “young artists” as opposed to art students, I think undergrads need to be told what to do to some extent. You have “to learn the rules in order to break them” and arrive at a successful sort of de-skilled slacker look. The result of this kind of school is a lot of bad student work. Then again, it’s complicated. My work wavers in between being beautiful and technically decent, and absolutely gritty, abject, and “bad.” I’m glad that UCLA has afforded me the space to try all of this.

Jon Raymond is the author of two books, the dark adventure tale Half Life and a truly incandescent short story collection, Livability.  Two stories from his collection were made into the films Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy by filmmaker Kelly Reichardt.  Annie DeWitt reviewed Wendy and Lucy on BOMBlog back in February, and be sure to check out Gus Van Sant’s interview with Reichardt in the Fall 2008 print magazine.  And in further news, I just heard that the June issue will feature an interview Jon conducted with Bill Callahan (aka the musician known as Smog).

I talked to Jon about the process of writing Livability and of translating his works to the big screen.  And since he, Reichardt and Van Sandt all call Portland home, we did a bit of geeking out about the city and terrain that electrifies his work like a green fuse.

Jon is also the editor of Plazm magazine and a contributing editor at Tin House.

Poets In Hollywood

Polito on his recent Hollywood & God, which stands astride American spirituality and celebrity culture, in conversation with Trinidad, who wrote The Late Show under the sway of movies, cosmetics, and the NY School.

This Monday, April 6th the film Picture Me: A Model’s Diary premieres at the GenArt Film Festival.  I sat down with directors Ole Schell and Sara Ziff to ask them about the process of making the film.  Picture Me started out with hundreds of hours of home movie-type footage the filmmakers took backstage, at home and in and around the world of high fashion.  Sara started working as a model as a teenager and the film is in part a way to reframe her experience and also to engage in a discussion about the industry that adds insights from the inside. The directors also gave cameras to other models to document their own experiences and intersperse the more intimate footage with interviews with fashion designers and photographers.

Check out the interview here!

When I first saw Sin Nombre it was premiering at the Sundance Film festival.  There was a palpable sense of expectation in the air, and the 1000+ seat theatre was packed.  I hadn’t read anything about the film but already I got the feeling that something special was about to happen.

The film follows the lives of Casper and Sayra, who meet on a train headed for the US/Mexico border.  Would-be immigrants crowd on top of a train as it rambles through the Mexican landscape–one image that stands out in particular is a moment when the sky darkens and cracks, everyone covers themselves with garbage bags or tarps from the rain. In a moment, their faces’ sorrows, their bodies, are hidden from view. As the train unfurls under the camera, the tarps vivid diffused rain-light, like pustules, or mushroom-caps, an image emerges that could be said to stand for the film as a whole:  that of individuals made suddenly invisible.

Fukunaga makes sure to show us that individuality, both at its best and its worst.  Casper has recently broken with his gang, the Marasalvatruchas, and even the beleaguered travelers around him want to push him off the train.  Sayra has been convinced to try to cross the border by her estranged father, who wants she and her brother to come live with his new family in New Jersey. 

The plot of the film is action-packed and yet the story has room to breathe.  There’s a spaciousness about this film that goes beyond the vast landscapes, and in those spaces the characters become real to us. In Sight spoke to writer/director Cary Fukunaga about his goals for this, his first feature film, which won the Best Director and Best Cinematography award at Sundance. Sin Nombre has recently been released and is running at select theatres in New York.

Check out the interview here!

We’re excited to present this live recording of My Brightest Diamond performing at Joe’s Pub on April 2, 2008. Special thanks to Michael Kaufman of Asthmatic Kitty Records and Amanda Stern of “The Happy Ending Music & Reading Series.” Read a web-exclusive interview with bandleader Shara Worden at bombsite.com.

Listen to My Brightest Diamond live at Joe’s Pub

In celebration of Small Press Month, BOMB Magazine presents a serialized audiobook of The Shanghai Gesture, a Village Voice “Spring Book Pick,” as read by the novel’s author, Gary Indiana, writer, actor, playwright, provocateur, and BOMB Editor-at-Large. Subscribe to our free podcast feed to get Chapter 1–3. Recorded by Art International Radio, and used with permission from the book’s publisher Two Dollar Radio.

Praise for The Shanghai Gesture, a Village Voice “Spring Book Pick”:

“An uproarious, confounding, turbocharged fantasia that manages, alongside all its imaginative bravura, to hold up to our globalized epoch the fun-house mirror it deserves.”
—BOOKFORUM

“The book is brilliant and hilarious and strange. It reads fast and understands, as only graphic novels seem to get things now, that the deficit attention span is insulted by anything that doesn’t surprise.”
—Michael Tolkin, author of The Player, The Return of the Player

Description
In the internationally acclaimed author’s first novel since Do Everything in the Dark, Gary Indiana applies his prickly wit, nihilistic vision, and utterly original voice to this side-splitting spin on Fu Manchu.

A mysterious bout of narcolepsy has overtaken the seaside hamlet of Land’s End, a funk endemic to the region since the wreckage a century earlier of the ship The Ardent Somdomite. Inspector Weymouth Smith and unconvinced cohort Dr. Obregon Petrie attempt to thwart Fu Manchu’s latest ploy for world domination while confronting South American piyas, matching wits with a clubfooted ex-STASI, as well as battling the latest technological crazes and their own drug dependencies.

The Shanghai Gesture is not a genre farce, but a compelling tale that merges the author’s trademark eye for social satire with the beautifully poetic sensibilities of his previous novels.

GARY INDIANA is the author of several previous novels: Horse Crazy, Gone Tomorrow, Rent Boy, Resentment, Depraved Indifference, and Do Everything in the Dark, as well as nonfiction works: Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, The 120 Days of Salo, Let It Bleed: Essays 1985–1995, Schwarzenegger Syndrome, and Utopia’s Debris.

I saw Alicia Conway’s short film “Rite” at Sundance in a little curtained booth all by myself next to a row of other little booths.  I could be watching porn in here, I thought, and no one would know.  Fortunately the screening booth host was nearby to deter any would-be pervs.  “Rite” is a beautiful and twisted film about a terrifying coming of age ceremony.  Reading the program I thought at first it would be some kind of doc. about FGM, but it ended up being a glimmering fairy-tale of a film but with a sinister ending.  The main character is a young girl who is being dressed up as if for communion, or a wedding, or some kind of ritual.  Sure enough, when she comes downstairs her whole family is waiting to cheer her on in her big day.  But instead of some wine & wafers or high-pitched reading of the haftorah things take a very dark turn…

Check out the podcast of our exclusive interview with Conway here!

Stormy skies descend on Busy and Melissa of Telepathe. All photos by Elise Oleksiak.

There was no PBR at the 92Y Tribeca on Saturday night. This was strange because it was a Todd P show, and there is a fair amount of overlap between attendees of Todd P shows and PBR consumers. For those not in the know, Todd P is a party promoter responsible for the popularity of many indie rock bands around NYC. I pondered this mystery as I slurpped down a $5 Miller Lite, the second most proletarian (and least expensive) option on the menu and watched the first band of the evening, Silk Flowers, set up. True to their name, they had fake flowers attached to their equipment. Despite their decorative efforts, their sound was unremarkable, vacillating between bland keyboard-driven background music blaring over Cramps-esque vocals and generic noise rock instrumental pieces.

Aviram Cohen, Ethan Swan and Peter Schuette of Silk Flowers make their noise.

Oaklander Hawnay Troof’s music, out of context, is basically sub-par Cypress Hill. So I was surprised when he burst  out onto the stage and began literally bouncing around in a white suit with a ripped crotch and a bright red shirt that matched his mic cover, goading the crowd with “Come on New York, VASSAR was louder than that!” Well, that made us all scream (not that we had a problem with Vassar, we just wanted to be louder than them). Anyway, Hawnay had what it took to make the shoegazey head nodding crowd get down, literally, as he jumped into the crowd and told us all to “get down.” At one point, he kicked off his shoes to reveal his filthy, holey socks and begged us to buy his album so that he could afford a new pair (prompting a few sock throws from the audience). He also changed suits on stage, and told possibly the best mid-set anecdote I’ve heard about the tragedies of touring (which involved a toxic Australian lake, a split open head, and multiple trips to the hospital), and, basically, woke everyone up.

Hawnay Troof's recession-era wardrobe, rips and all.

The adorable Oberlin duo Teengirl Fantasy sweated over their switches and dials, making synthy up-beat dancey sounding stuff. But I mostly just ogled them, hoping they saw me in the crowd of swooning indie chicks! Then Logan took off his sweater. OMG! “Take off your sweater!” Came a meek cry from the back of the crowd. Their cover of “Throw Some D’s” was pure bliss, and, for as young as they are (they had to fly back to Oberlin for class on Monday) seem to be off to a promising start.

Logan Takahashi and Nick Weiss of Teengirl Fantasy.

Telepathe (pronounced “Telepathy,” DUH) played against a projected sky of storm clouds, belting out soulful harmonies with their trademark spoken word (not the annoying kind) styling backed by thumping down-tempo beats.  Preferring the privacy of the studio where the tracks were conceived, they seemed to care less about performance and more about just playing the songs. They loosened up a bit with “Lights Go Down,” a catchy chant-like number. A few albums down the line and maybe some back-up dancers (like in this video of theirs) and they’ll have mastered the art of the live show.

“Chrome’s On” It by Telepathe from their upcoming album Dance Mother.

Simon's portrait. Courtesy www.myandywarhol.com.

First broadcast in 2003 as part of the BBC “Imagine” Series, the MUSE Film Festival presentation of Warhol: Denied seemed particularly relevant in a time when artists are using their art as collateral for their country houses.

Presenter Alan Yentrob follows Joe Simon, a film producer, in his attempts to get his Andy Warhol self-portrait authenticated by the ludicrous Andy Warhol Authentication Board, an extremely controversial group responsible for authenticating Warhol’s art. Simon, whose Warhol—which he bought in 1988 for $195,000 and had previously been authenticated by Fred Hughes, the executor of Warhol’s estate—is shocked when his painting is returned to him with a dramatic “denied” stamp on the back of it. It hangs next to a wilting house plant in the office of his lawyer, who declares that it now has only “decorative value.”

Yentrob meets with a number of former Factory members who express similar distaste for the board and some of whom are rather ambivalent toward Warhol himself. Yentrob also meets with Ron Spencer, the board’s lawyer, who refuses to explain the reason for denying the prints but hints that it has to do with how they were made: Warhol had to be supervising an assistant for it to count as authentic; it had to have been created in the Factory, etc. The doc then spirals into a more radical direction, portraying Warhol as a slave driver character who, toward the end of his life, had illegal printing “sweat shops” and outsourced all of his work, reserving all of his time for public appearances. We learn that Warhol rarely even signed his paintings, sometimes even having other Factory members sign them for him. The painting in question, Simon discovers, was made specifically for a party. According to Richard Ekstract, one of Warhol’s cohorts, Andy provided him with the acetates and he and Paul Morrisey ran off the prints. The film poses the same questions Warhol’s work poses: questions of authorship, authenticity of multiples, and almost beats you over the head with “What is Art?” It ends with Yentrob posing the immortal college paper prompt: “Discuss.”

The DENIED stamp on the back of Simon's portrait. (AP Photo/Van Prooyen Greenfield)

While the documentary is a cookie-cutter tale of little guy vs. bureaucracy, the more pressing issue is that of art as currency. Warhol used his art to pay his assistants, his maids, and to finance his films. The Authentication Board is not responsible for determining what is and isn’t art, but which works have value, therefore the underlying question of Simon’s plight is “Must it have a cash value to be considered a work of art?” Simon wouldn’t have even encountered this issue had he not decided to sell the portrait. Ivan Karp, an art dealer, is the most forthcoming about this issue, explaining that he could have used the sale of one of his denied Warhols to get his gallery out of a financial rut. Ekstrackt, who owns a facsimile of Simon’s portrait (which he “made”), has no plans to send his to the Authentication Board.

Though Simon’s run-in with the AWAB is unfortunate, when one considers that his battle is centered around the $2 million that his painting is purportedly worth (or was in 2001), it seems to cheapen his plight. The portrait loses its “sentimental value” and becomes simply an “investment.” If Simon never decided to sell the painting and kept it hanging in his London flat or his charming New York apartment wouldn’t it still only have “decorative value”? Perhaps if one of Warhol’s maids was cashing in her Marilyn, I’d be a bit more sympathetic. I don’t know. “Discuss.”

Read BOMBlog contributor Kelly Devine Thomas’s comprehensive and informative exposé on the Andy Warhol Authentication Board HERE.

Listen to Lloyd Cole’s take on Warhol’s definitive legacy HERE.

One of my favorite short films at Sundance was Little Canyon by Olivia Silver.  In brief, the story follows a young girl named Greta on a cross-country drive from New York to California with her father and two siblings. Packed into her dad’s station wagon, the family is forced into uncomfortable confrontations. Greta soon discovers that her father has been lying to all of them–her mother is not going to meet them in California, her parents are getting a divorce.  What could have been a simple set piece infused with family drama, becomes, under Silver’s direction, a subtle coming-of-age story.  Throughout the film we see the father struggling to maintain his children’s suspension of disbelief, yet in the end he is as ineffectual as a conductor trying to point out the scenery in the face of an oncoming train.  If the crisis exposes the father’s inability to “be the adult,” it also magnifies the almost molecular shift that occurs when Greta realizes her father needs her.   In a few well-placed scenes of Greta by herself you can almost see her bidding goodbye to her kid-self.

I was particularly taken with the way Silver uses intimate details as storytelling tools and of the quite literally silvered light that gives the film the subtle cast of memory.

I chatted with Silver via Skype, me in my messy Bklyn living-room and she in her LA-apt.

BOMBlog interview with Olivia Silver

Check out the full interview to hear Silver discuss the process of making the film: including friendly barflies, chasing fugitive shots and and driving-cross country hauling a whole film crew along with her.  (It’s my first podcast and think I sound ridiculous but Olivia is articulate as all hell.)

In BOMB’s first ever podcast, author Jesmyn Ward reads from her novel “Where the Line Bleeds”.

Click here to subscribe to BOMB’s podcasts.

Use the player below to listen to this podcast now.