The Serpentine Gallery is holding a retrospective exhibition for Jonas Mekas, founder of Anthology Film Archives in New York with his brother and other agitators of the 1950s and the decades that followed. The exhibition was conceived by the artist as a way to revisit his archives, which contain endless hours of film and countless rolls of video and photographs. Whether he’s shooting or editing, Mekas has a good time and the viewer does, too. And he does it every day. He came up with the challenge 40 First Days to film the forty last days of the year and its visual experiences before editing them together. In Lavender Piece, the videos playing on 16 screens show him dancing in the offices at Anthology Film Archives, engaged in a multigenerational snowball fight, or dressed up like a Gaul. He linked the images together to give them a comic or poetic meaning. He achieves a certain exhaustivity of representation through quantity, repetition and non-hierarchical irregularity.

Mekas has worked almost daily for the past forty years, always with an eye toward dreams of images and love. Outtakes from the Life of a Happy Man is the most gentle illustration of this passion. It is a tribute from Mekas to his environment, New York in particular. He presents a compilation of views of the World Trade Center, gleaned from his archives as an ode to the city. Photographs of children he filmed in Brooklyn cover the walls.

One of the most remarkable things about the exhibition is that it features essentially video—a difficult medium in a museum context—with a transdisciplinary setting. Numerous films are presented as prints, corresponding to the photographic period of Mekas' youth spent in refugee camps in Germany. Other images are combined with the poems of this mischievous optimist. Mekas was friends with the artists of his time, from Warhol to Dali, all of whom he documented. He constantly reinvents this world by sharing the experience of it. It’s no coincidence that his manifesto for the community of filmmakers is entitled Birth of a Nation.

Laurence Cornet

Exhibition ends January 27, 2013
Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
London W2 3XA
United Kingdom
T : 020 7402 6075