Online symposium: “Jonas Mekas and the New York Avant-Garde”

In conjunction with the exhibition Jonas Mekas and the New York Avant-Garde (up through February 20) at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, Lithuania, the museum will host a one day online symposium on Saturday, February 12, 2022, 5–8pm (EET) / 10am–1pm (EST).

With presentations by Johanna Gosse, Chrissie Iles, Ara Osterweil, and Jonathan Walley.

The symposium is dedicated to the multifaceted activities of the Lithuanian emigré filmmaker, poet, critic, and institution builder Jonas Mekas. Taking Mekas’ work and life as a starting point, the speakers will interrogate his role in the history of art and avant-garde film as well as the relevance of his legacy for contemporary times. 

The exhibition Jonas Mekas and the New York Avant-Garde presents Jonas Mekas’ work covering his filmic practice as well as his intellectual, organizational, and often bluntly administrative approach to the labor of building and running multiple institutions and fostering new habits of looking at film as an art form. The exhibition focuses on the first three decades of Mekas’ activities, starting with his coming to New York as a displaced person in 1949, through to him becoming a central figure in advocating, producing, distributing, promoting, and preserving the filmic avant-garde. 

Before premiering his first film, Mekas together with his brother Adolfas Mekas began publishing Film Culture magazine in 1955 and soon joined the Village Voice as a film critic. These became the main outlets through which Mekas channeled his ideas about film as an art form of personal expression and called for a new kind of cinema free from censorship and existing production and distribution systems. In what followed, by the mid-1960s, Mekas’ loft at 414 Park Avenue South became a headquarters for the fermenting avant-garde film culture; a sleepless hub frequented by filmmakers and artists alike. This decade marked Mekas’ embrace of the avant-garde spirit, as he took part in the formation of the New American Cinema Group, and the establishment of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, and Anthology Film Archives. These time-consuming activities occasionally seeped into his filmic diaries and even, as Mekas suggested, to some degree determined his films’ fragmentary structure. 

The exhibition pays tribute to this era of the burgeoning American avant-garde film scene and contextualizes Mekas’ output by presenting a selection of works by filmmakers who shared his aesthetic sensibility, whom he championed, and with whom he worked.

Symposium and exhibition curated by Inesa Brašiškė and Lukas Brasiskis.

About participants of the symposium:
Johanna Gosse is Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Culture at the University of Idaho.
Chrissie Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Ara Osterweil is ​​Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the English Department, and the Director of the World Cinemas program at McGill University.
Jonathan Walley is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema at Denison University.
Inesa Brašiškė, MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies (MODA), Columbia University, is an art historian and curator based in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Lukas Brasiskis is associate curator of video and film for e-flux, a PhD candidate and an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Cinema Studies, New York University.

For more information and a schedule, see here.

Register in advance for this webinar here.

Webstream without registration available here.

Contact: symposium [​at​] ndg.lt

This program is made possible by the Baltic-American Freedom Foundation (BAFF), Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania, Lithuanian Council for Culture.