LUX-Screening at Tate Modern, Wednesday 24 June 6.30pm
An evening celebrating the creative collaboration between two key figures of the post-war New York arts scene, who together brilliantly captured the heady excitements of a golden period in the city’s artistic life. A artist of diverse talents and prodigious energy, Alfred Leslie (b. 1927) is internationally celebrated for both his abstract expressionist and realist paintings and his films which include the seminal beat document Pull My Daisy (1959, with Robert Frank). Frank O’Hara (1926–1966) was one of the most original and influential American poets of the twentieth century, the laureate of the New York scene who's position as curator at the Museum of Modern Art gave him unique sensitivity of the visual arts. Leslie and O'Hara met when Leslie had a solo show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Manhattan which was then a kind of home base for the 'New York School' poets such as O'Hara and John Ashbery. Leslie and O'Hara became close friends - collaborating with, talking to, promoting and adoring each other until O'Hara's untimely death in 1966.
PROGRAMME:
The Last Clean Shirt, Alfred Leslie & Frank O’Hara
1964, 42 minutes, 16mm
In a letter to his friend and collaborator, the poet Frank O'Hara, Leslie writes: "We will shoot for two SEPERATE LEVELS on the film. One is the VISUAL, the other the HEARD & the spectator will be in TWO places or more SIMULTANEOUSLY. NOT AS MEMORY BUT AT THE SAME MOMENT. PARALLELISM! MULTIPLE POINTS OF VIEW!" It is a blueprint for The Last Clean Shirt in which a man and a woman take a car ride through the streets of downtown Manhattan. A clock on the dashboard foregrounds the fact that the film is a single shot. The woman speaks in double-talk Finnish, interpreted by the beautiful and brilliant story told via O’Hara’s subtitles that run throughout.
USA Poetry: Frank O'Hara, Richard O. Moore/ WNET
1966, 15 minutes, video
Frank O'Hara discusses with Alfred Leslie, his work and the relationship between poets, playwrights, and artists. O'Hara also reads some of his poetry and talks about some of his friendships with other artists. Filmed on March 5, 1966 at the home of Frank O'Hara and the studio of Alfred Leslie in New York City.
Further Informationhttp://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/fil m/18200.htm
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