A NEW BOOK TOUTS THE ASTONISHING HISTORY OF AVANT-GARDE CULTURE IN WESTERN NEW YORK IN THE LAST CENTURY
Our experimental past
It’s an old story by the shores of Lake Erie. Certain bits of information are all-too-universal in Western New York’s consciousness –everything from the savors of the chicken wing to the theme from Channel 7’s “Eyewitness News,” “wide right” and the hangover from four lost Super Bowls.
All-too-recondite in that same Western New York consciousness is the astonishing prominence of Buffalo in the avant-garde culture of the last century and the virulent avantgarde activity in its present one.
A massive book, “Buffalo Heads: Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers 1973-1990” (MIT Press), celebrates one of the more amazing developments in the recent wildly active avantgarde Buffalo past: A remarkable 2007 museum exhibition in Karlsruhe, Germany, devoted to the history of Gerald O’Grady’s Center for Media Study at UB and that institution’s unaffiliated kissing cousin –Media Study/Buffalo, a public foundation supporting the arts, also founded by O’Grady.
To understand immediately, take the book –if you can lift it
–and start with Page 19.
Fewer have described the era more fully and more succinctly than John Minkowsky:
“Buffalo was a hotbed of experimental art of all sorts throughout the 1970s and well into the 1980s. Some examples: [the University at Buffalo’s] English
Department was ranked as one of the best in the United States and included among its faculty John Barth, Robert Creeley and Leslie Fiedler; and the Department of Music had such major figures as composers Morton Feldman and Lejaren Hiller. The Creative Associates, also associated with SUNY at Buffalo, was an internationally recognized center for new [sic] the exploration of avant-garde music in all its forms, as was Petr Kotik’s independent S. E. M. Ensemble. The electronic musicmakers Robert Moog and Harold Bode resided there. … Media Study, a regional media center, also founded by [Gerald O’- Grady] but entirely separate from [UB’s] Center for Media Study, provided access to and training in the use of equipment to the general New York population, as well as extensive exhibition programs … The rise of alternative art spaces, among them Hallwalls founded by Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and others, which became one of the most notable exhibition sites in the country, complemented the Albright-Knox Gallery to cement Buffalo’s reputation as a showcase for Modern and Contemporary Art.”
You’ll find that in a footnote to the piece “Framing the Mind in the Museum” by Minkowsky, who was educated at UB’s Department of Media Study. A few pages earlier in the preface, co-editor Peter Weibel describes Buffalo as a “ ‘deficit city’ of the debt industry … Buffalo’s response to the economic crisis was culture … Because of its art institutions, especially the Albright-Knox Gallery and its collection of modern art. Today Buffalo is one of the USA’s most important arts centers.”
Hallwalls director Ed Cardoni describes “Buffalo Heads” with some understatement as “a pictorial and archival treasure worth its price for that alone.” (With complete justification, though, he notes “it’s unforgivable that it has no index.”)
In 1976, this writer once described O’Grady, the inventor of that “video-cinema conglomerate” as “something of a combination of film archivist Henri Langlois and poet Ezra Pound, i. e., he has been simultaneously preserver and film custodian [like Langlois] and propagandist, agitator and cinematic power broker [as Pound had been for modern literature in the early decades of the 20th century].”
In the very first piece to extol the advent of O’Grady as a force to be reckoned with in Buffalo, former Buffalo News Art Critic (and current director of Rochester’s George Eastman House) Anthony Bannon noted “with O’Grady’s coordination, UB has developed an impressive schedule of film screenings and visiting filmmakers the equal of any in the country.”
Bannon would later go on to get a master’s degree from UB’s Center for Media Study. And O’- Grady’s singular institutions would become the kind of things that museum exhibits were made of decades down the road and many thousands of miles away.
Among those visiting Buffalo whom Bannon had announced in a 1972 news story just a few weeks before his O’Grady profile were everyone from the great film director Milos Forman (who hadn’t yet directed “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Ragtime”), Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek, Japanese film scholar Donald Richie, Ed Emshwiller and Richard Leacock (famous for, among other films, “Monterey Pop” and, Norman Mailer’s film “Maidstone”).
By the time O’Grady’s two-headed dragon ceased operations 18 years later, he had been instrumental in presenting Buffalo with everything from UB visits by Hollywood’s venerable Frank Capra and then up-and-coming Jonathan Demme to a near-singular screening of Hans Jurgen Syberberg’s nine-hour “Our Hitler” in the Shea’s Buffalo Theater downtown.
It goes without saying that one doesn’t exactly read “Buffalo Heads” cover to cover, any more than one sequentially reads the encyclopedia. Taken individually, the pieces can range from the fanciful to the theoretical to the revealing to the altogether impenetrable.
Nevertheless, it is a gigantic, bursting warehouse of contributions by those who were so prominent in the historic collective that lived and worked in the near mirage that was Media Study. Including:
O’ Grady himself.
Woody and Steina Vasulka –Woody Vasulka is the co-compiler of “Buffalo Heads.” With his wife Steina, the Czech video artist, they were prominent residents of the Media Study community from 1974 to 1979.
Peter Weibel –The other cocompiler of “Buffalo Heads” was an omni-media artist born in Odessa in 1944 and was a Media Study fixture at the end of its life as a professor here from 1984-89.
Hollis Frampton –Born in 1936, he died in Buffalo in 1984, where he’d been a Media Study professor from 1973 until his death.
Paul Sharits –“One of the main protagonists of structuralist film” and well-remembered in Buffalo for his tempestuousness and frequently violent obsessions, Sharits was born in Denver in 1943 and died in Buffalo in 1993. He too was a UB professor from 1973 to 1992.
Tony Conrad –The multimedia
artist was born in 1940, came to Media Study as a visiting instructor in 1976 and has continued his association with the university to this day.
James Blue – The documentarist who was born in 1930 was a Media Study professor from 1977-1980 and executive producer of the PBS series on Channel 17 “The Frontier” in 1980. His interviews with filmmakers Shriley Clarke, Jean-Luc Godard and Roberto Rossellini are probably the most immediately accessible pieces in the entire book. He died in 1980.
The relatively short lives of Blue, Sharits and Frampton (all were in the neighborhood of 50 at their deaths) lends even more poignancy to their comet paths through the most avant-garde districts of art, cinema and media in Buffalo.
But the book accompanying that German celebration of Media Study commemorates the energizing, often outrageous and even more often boring and bewildering lives and creations of some extraordinary figures inside the city’s borders.
|
Buffalo Heads: Media Study, Media Practice and Media Pioneers 1973-1990 A massive, 838-page book celebrating the exhibition “Mindframes, Media Study at Buffalo 1973-1990” which was held in ZKM, The Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Published by MIT Press, $60.
Log into MyBuffalo to post a comment
MyBuffalo is the new social network from Buffalo.com. Your MyBuffalo account lets you comment on and rate stories at buffalonews.com. You can also head over to mybuffalo.com to share your blog posts, stories, photos, and videos with the community. Join now or learn more.
Reader comments