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Opening reception: Friday, March
5, 6 - 11 pm
Vox Populi and PARTICIPANT INC are pleased to present Dead
Flowers, a group exhibition based on the work of actor/director
Timothy Carey. Carey became known as a pioneer of underground
film due to his rarely seen 1962 film, The World's Greatest Sinner.
Screenings of this and other unreleased films by Carey, as well
as a presentation of his ephemera and artifacts, will be organized
in cooperation with Romeo Carey, the artist's son and Executor
of the Timothy Carey Estate. The exhibition draws themes from
Carey's unique correlation between his life and work, which sought
to define what it means to be an artist through an uncompromising
understanding of the meaning of success. Carey stated his rationale
for declining his potentially lucrative mainstream break in order
to preserve his integrity as an artist as follows:
"We slip. We bleed. Cassavetes taught me that. The truth
is, I never really cared about conventional success. [...] I
was offered a spot in both The Godfather and The
Godfather Part II. [...] But I didn't do either show, because
if I had, I woulda been just like any other actor-out for the
money."
For both Carey and his longtime collaborator John Cassavetes,
working the mainstream, mostly as secondary character actors,
was just a means to their optimistic ends. All proceeds gathered
on the inside served to fuel their independent projects-projects
they resolutely considered art. Despite their inherent critique
of middle-class America and society in general, neither figured
themselves as part of an underground. They expressed ambivalence
toward the distinctions of art that would necessarily alienate
them from their desired audience, and seemed to imply no doubt
that the public would comprehend their innovative approach as
driven by economic necessities-not underground "style."
"The underground," whose definition, although generously
borrowed by all manner of artistic practitioners, has been historically
located in a cinematic field in which dominant factors of fundability
and mainstream acceptability are more clearly understood. Underground
actors and filmmakers serve as illuminating, persistent models
of alternativity, as their gauge, or the object of their resistance,
has remained somewhat transparent despite social, political, and
economic shifts in the cultural terrain - meaning, underground
film can remain underground, even if shown in museums. While some
of us continue (perhaps out of respect) to use terms like "alternative
space" or "underground film festival," it's not
entirely clear anymore what, exactly, we mean. Since the variable
meanings of "alternative," like its illusive companion
"the underground," cannot be indisputably defined without
temporal reference to a changing dominant culture, or located
autonomously on their own terms, perhaps we can believe they may
not cease to exist.
Dead Flowers brings together an intergenerational group
of artists to address such shifting methodologies, ideals, aesthetics,
and working models, as expressed by works from the late 60s and
70s (by Alvin Baltrop, Paul Thek, and Cynthia Plaster Caster),
and contemporary works by subsequent generations of artists (including
Kembra Pfahler, Scott Ewalt, Marti Domination, Georg Gatsas, and
Johanna Constantine) and of course, both, as many of the artists'
work spans this entire period. The exhibition aims to address
the relationship between alternative and mass culture by bringing
together a small group of artists who have consistently aligned
themselves with communities outside the mainstream, and entered
the dominant fields of art and film, sporadically and to critical
effect, as uncompromising proof that other ways of working are
possible - inside and outside traditional expectations of the
artist - to rewrite rules of artistic production through conscious
economic and critical efficiency.
The exhibition will be accompanied by screenings of Timothy Carey's
films; a film program curated by Ed Halter of Light Industry;
readings and performances by participating artists, and a publication.
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