Jonas Mekas  and

Jonas Mekas will be present.

Jonas Mekas
Museum Ludwig will be presenting the first solo exhibition in Germany by the film maker, poet and film critic Jonas Mekas (*1922 in Lithuania). After an odyssey lasting almost five years as a forced labourer in Germany, and as a displaced person after the war, Jonas Mekas arrived in 1949 in New York. Here he dedicated himself in a whole host of ways to film, not least as an event manager who opened up an increasing number of possibilities for screening the Ne w American Cinema – before the Anthology Film Archive, which he co-founded, could at last provide a home for the avant-garde film – from Sergei Eisenstein to Carl Theodor Dreyer – as well as for the underground film and other currents from 1970 on.

The main emphasis of the exhibition will be on Joan Mekas’s artistic and cinematic output, which will be shown in a dedicated film programme and a number of installations in the various exhibition spaces.

The exhibition, which has been curated together with Jonas Mekas, has received the kind support of the Roswitha Haftmann Stiftung as well as the Maya Stendhal Gallery, New York. It has been made possible by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes.

Looking for mushrooms
Beat Poets, Hippies, Funk and Minimal Art:
Art and Counterculture in San Francisco 1955 – 1968

Forty years on from 1968, the year that spelt radical change for society, it is ti me to turn our minds back to the art scene in a city that was regarded in the 1960s and 1970s as the Mecca of experimental culture and lifestyles (beat poets, hippie movement, counterculture).

Not New York, but “at the end of the world” – the area around San Francisco on the West coast of the USA – saw the taboos of a work-oriented post-war modernism being broken in a way that opened up an intense exchange between all of the arts. Looking for Mushrooms is the name of a film made in 1959-1967 by Bruce Connor, which has been taken for the exhibition title. Here tiny film particles melt together to form a virtuoso abstract play of light and colour. The title not only awakens associations with “magic mushrooms” and sixties drug culture. Bruce Connor is a person who draws together all the threads linking art, film, dance, beat and pop culture. This is not typical of him alone, but for the whole of the fifties and sixties in San Francisco and the Bay Area. The boundari es between the arts were broken down, leading not only to a politicised counterculture, but also the mingling of theatre, dance, the visual arts, literature and film.

For this reason the exhibition – which will feature a synchronous crosssection of some 200 works and documents that highlight the interweaving of the arts and artists and bring them to life – is planned to be accompanied be a densely-packed film programme and a richly documented reference book. The exhibition is curated by Barbara Engelbach (Museum Ludwig) together with Friederike Wappler (University of Bochum) and Hans Winkler (freelance artist and curator).

The exhibition is backed by the Kunststiftung NRW.

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