Michel Auder
Screenings
The Games: Olympic Variations

Originally from France, I’ve lived in New York since 1969. I work in a variety of formats that explore the range between video diary, documentary, feature film, and appropriation from commercial TV broadcasts, as well as other recent works which reanimate a massive archive of still images I have recorded using my iPhone. I have always taken up a diverse set of roles as cameraman, director, editor, and producer of my own film and video works since the late 1960s until today.

Born in 1944 in Soissons, I quit school at the age of seventeen and decided to come to the USA. I made my very first trip in 1962, taking passage on a container ship, but returned to France 12 months later as I was drafted in the French army. I lived between Paris and Rome. I began exploring and working with the medium of film from a very early stage. Influenced by French Nouvelle Vague cinema, with its zealous ambition to create a new form of film, implement new ideas and promote new filmmakers, I decided in my work against a conventional visual language and against established, narrative structures that I considered meaningless. Alain Robbe-Grillet and Le Nouveau Roman method of writing had an impact on me too, with their raw approach to image and setting being influential in my work and I became involved with Zanzibar group that formed in France by 1965.

I settled permanently in New York, where I still live and work today. In New York, I moved into the then-famous Chelsea Hotel, which was a meeting point for everyone on the art and theater scene, and was well known for its extravagant parties and improvised happenings. There I met new friends —the filmmakers Shirley Clark, Harry Smith, Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas and the poet Gregory Corso, among many others who are included as protagonists in some of my video works.

My films and videos are recordings of my surroundings, my private life and the people around me. In a sense I see myself as a kind of untrained anthropologist, showing in my films both the beautiful and the terrifying sides of daily life, and looking at people coming together in situations ranging from the banal to the extreme, as painful and real as our own lives. Both myself and the spectator join in the act of looking, negotiating what is there to be seen and how to look at it. It is above all when looking, and specifically when looking at other people and through someone else’s eyes, that we suddenly realize the extent to which—in the familiar world that we know so well and look at every day—we have all become estranged.

My films fall into a number of categories whose approaches, while needing to be distinguished, have obvious overlaps:

Diaristic films—such as Keeping Busy (1969); Chronicles: Family Diaries (1971-73); Chronicles Morocco (1972); Narcolepsy (2010). Focusing on the daily lives of me or my family, these works are mirrors held up to myself, but reflect a naturalism in the vein of Zola or Flaubert that maintains an ongoing engagement with scrutinizing what it means to grow up and get older.

Artist Portraits—notably David Hammons, Taylor Mead, Hannah Wilke, Larry Bell, or my Portrait of Alice Neel, which is, naturally, a filmic portrait of Neel as she paints, lounges at home, and generally lives. These portraits are usually made up of intimate sessions of getting to know and spending time with these people. Increasingly important, both to me and to the world, these socio-cultural documents record various points in time with artists who engaged in avant-garde production. My camera is at the center of these artistic watershed moments, making films about my friends who ended up being some of their generation’s most important figures. As of yet I’ve only had time to edit a small percentage of the portraits I’ve recorded into realized films.

Observational Portraits, and Anthropological Films—Roman Variations (1991), Chelsea Girls with Andy Warhol (1971-76); and the film that I showed at 2014 Whitney Biennial, I Was Looking Back at You to See if You Were Looking Back at Me to See Me Looking Back at You (2012).

Works about media/technology—films such as Journey to the Center of the Phone Lines (1993), Endless Column (2014); and Mixing Up the Medicine (2015). These works all foreground technological developments, and deal with the camera’s inevitably voyeuristic properties.

Short Narratives—The Valerie Solanas Incident (1971); Harry Smith Call the Dalai Lama-Chelsea Hotel (1972/2009). These works are often humorous slice of life vignettes that function as interventions into a kind of shared cultural memory.

Meditations on politics and appropriation—1981 Regan (1981); The Games: Olympic Variations (1984); The Course of Empire (2017); and Trumped (2018). I’ve always been extremely interested the role that media plays in our lives and I’ve returned to appropriating major news and broadcast TV footage, displays of political theater, the fissures of doubt within propaganda, and the crossing of more recent reflection on our political moment with historical writings about the progression and decline of empire.

Collaborations—The Feature (2008); The Magic Flute with Vaginal Davis (2016); On the Royal Road: The Burgher King with Elfriede Jelinek (2018). The spirit of collaboration is important to my work as well. My most recent collaboration was making all the visuals for Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek’s theatrical piece On the Royal Road: The Burgher King at the Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, where I worked closely with director Falk Richter to produce the visual elements for the play. I also collaborated with the filmmaker Andrew Neel, the grandson of my close colleague the painter, Alice Neel, on a feature length movie titled The Feature (2008) that was loosely based on my life and used much of my archived footage, and which won the CPH:DOX New Vision Award.

My films are made in my immediate environment, collaging sequences I have shot myself, excerpts appropriated from TV, and basic quotations from life using an attuned ear and specific sensibility. The works often include elaborate soundtracks that I compose, using found material and mixing classical and popular music with sound recorded on location. I chronicle what I want to chronicle, and thereby juxtapose things that occupy me, without educating, informing, banging any political drums or passing any specific social comment. Simply put I am someone who loves to watch, and to keep a record of what I have seen. It is impossible not to speak of an element of voyeurism in some of my pieces. But it is also important to clearly define where the boundary lies between voyeurism and unbiased observation of our surroundings, both things and people. I also want to make sure not to violate the trust of the people who I turn my camera upon, because this trust yields footage that is more honest. I look, and those viewing my films are compelled to look with me, fixing their gaze on the object of this interest and taking it as their own, becoming implicated. Between documenting reality and storytelling, I set off to search for new narrative modes.

When approaching a new film project, I often take the unorthodox route of mining my past footage of over 20,000 hours of film and video tape. Since around 1969 These recordings can be as trivial as someone sitting in a chair reading a book; as raw and troubling as observational chronicles of addiction; and as culturally relevant as seminal figures such as John Ashbury, William de Kooning or Lee Strasberg working, going about their lives or intimately discussing their outlook on the world. I turn to this database of footage in order to produce discreet pieces.

Being fully aware of the normative order of existing genres and narrative strategies of film, I follow none of the sets of regulations that are firmly imposed on the visual field generated by the film industry, television and commerce — or at least, I do not follow them slavishly, but rather assert my freedom to remain idiosyncratic as I battle through streams of images. My decisions with regard to the treatment of the visual material are taken within a framework discreetly colored by my personal experience while making the film.

In the last three years I’ve made at least eight new films and mounted numerous exhibitions, some including installations and photography as well. In terms of recent institutional projects, I was included in documenta14 (2017). I was awarded the prestigious DAAD Fellowship in Berlin (2016). I was the subject of a major film retrospective at the Anthology Film Archive in New York and also participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. I also mounted large scale solo exhibitions at both the Kunsthalle Basel and at the Portikus in Frankfurt am Main (2013), with the Basel show resulting in a monographic catalog of my work Stories, Myths, Ironies and Other Songs: Conceived, Directed, Edited and Produced by M. Auder published by Sternberg Press. I was also included in documenta13 (2008). In addition to all of this I have shown my work in galleries across the world as an artist and filmmaker. Furthermore, my work has been recognized through acquisitions into the following public collections: the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Brandhorst Museum in Munich, the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris, the Hessel Museum in Annandale-on-Hudson, the Muhka in Antwerp, and the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. And lastly, this year I was honored with a lifetime achievement award by Festival International du Livre d’Art, Perpignan, France.