Michel Auder

With Willem de Kooning, Harry Smith, Niki de Saint Phalle, Martin Kippenberger, Gregory Corso, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Larry Rivers, Brigid Berlin, Bill T. Jones, Larry Bell, Taylor Mead, Jean Tinguely, Marcia Resnick, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Michael Buthe, John Ashbery, Cindy Sherman, Brice Marden, Viva, Jonas Mekas, Louis Waldon, Shirley Clarke, William S. Burroughs, Malcolm Morley, Charles James, John Chamberlain, Hannah Wilke, Bob Rauschenberg, Alice Neel, David Hammons, and others

For the past 50 years, Michel Auder has been recording his personal life, creating films and videos that document his own experience and social milieu. His new work, Fictional Art Film, is a composite portrait of Auder’s New York art world during the 70’s and 80’s. The filmmaker recorded his friends, the artists and writers he hung around and admired. These now-famous subjects (which include Alice Neel, Andy Warhol, John Ashbery, David Hammons, Hannah Wilke, Willem de Koonig, and Bill T. Jones, among many others) are shown here both as people and performers, with Auder’s footage often blurring the line between life and art.

The word “fictional,” appearing in the title, seems at first not to fit; so intimate is the artist’s access to his famous, storied subjects, that the film is sweetly demystifying, and thus might in fact feel especially nonfictional. But the passage of time transforms people, and indelibly alters the images retained of them. Fictional Art Film itself is notably dated 2019, although its constituent footage is anywhere from three to five decades old. Those bygone years, to Auder, are an impassible gulf between the events and personages themselves and his modern-day memories thereof.

Born in 1945 in Soissons, France, Michel Auder lives and works in Brooklyn. He has been a faculty member at Yale University School of Art since 2005, and was selected by the 2016 DAAD’s Berliner Künstlerprogramm’s jury for a one-year visual art residency.

He participated at Documenta 13 in 2012, and Documenta 14 in 2017, as well as the 2014 Whitney Solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Basel; Portikus, Frankfurt; Établissement d’en Face Projects, Brussels; Culturgest, Lisbon.