Michel Auder

1967 (made in 2015) presents newly found and digitized silent 16mm films from the 1960s in the form of a four-part composition portraying a cast of artists, writers, musicians and actors who made up the bohemian underground of that time. The film recasts the essence of a scene whose participants have since been idealized as celebrities or else forgotten.

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HD video by Michel Auder.

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Michel Auder dedicated himself to capturing the views from his apartment over the course of a year. This three-channel video installation from 2014 is based on that footage.

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Narcolepsy includes footage shot with a small hand-held digital video camera, mobile phones and underwater devices. The videos appear on one monitor at a time, as the rest remain blank. A transparent rabbit in bed is superimposed on a dog in the snow; hands being washed under a faucet are juxtaposed with an outdoor flood; little girls play with dolls and mothers tend real babies; a spider web holds a captive fly.

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Phone video by Michel Auder.

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16mm film transferred to SD video, recorded 1970, edited 2009. An excerpt from Michel Auder's film Cleopatra (1970).

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Reel-to-reel video by Michel Auder, recorded 1971, edited 2009. Features Auder's former wife Viva.

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Video recorded in NYC by Michel Auder in 1983, edited in 2009.

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Hi8 video by Michel Auder, recorded 1990, edited 2009.

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Auder observes his friend Alice Neel as she paints and talks her way through her portrait of Margaret Evans Pregnant

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The Feature does not reconcile fact and fiction; instead, it blurs the definitions seemingly represented by the film’s two clearly demarcated registers: that of the archival footage and that of the new, theatrical material. In his guise as “Michel Auder,” living a fulsome and extravagant life, replete with beautiful women and a rock-cut pool overlooking Los Angeles, the art world is revealed as a sham, and his character exhibits a repulsive narcissism. And yet, when caught in quiet moments, something poignant emerges—a glimmer of truth that rebels against the entire endeavour. Or maybe, that’s what makes The Feature.

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Hi8 video by Michel Auder recorded in 1989, edited in 2008.

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Video interviews of passerby at the World Trade Center by artist Marcia Resnick. Recorded 1976, edited 2007.

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Video by Michel Auder.

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Video by Michel Auder.

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The thrill of cocaine becomes a metaphor for the consumption of images in this short montage. The title and lyrics come from Auder´s friend and 2001 Prix Goncourt winner Jean-Jacques Shuhl. The piece is composed entirely of still photographs from a variety of books and magazines that simultaneously reveal and feed an addiction to spectacle. With a source that is once removed, Auder's scopophilia is symptomatic of society at large. The song is performed by legendary chanteuse Ingrid Caven. Suffused with a bittersweet melancholy, Canven's seasoned voice compliments Auder's selection of images which dwell on the themes of death, destruction and desire. The melody is classic cabaret performed by a piano/violin duo who dramatically heighten the works already dark eroticism.

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Voyage's structure is simple. Coastal landscape footage and spectacular sunsets are combined with phone conversations recorded from a scanner that picks up cordless phone frequencies.

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Video recorded in 1986, edited 1993. ”You know you're addicted to heroin when you begin proclaiming every bag to be your last.” Auder says this from experience. Throughout the early and mid 1980s he was an addict. In this candid piece of disclosure he demonstrates a method of smoking heroin referred to as Chasing the Dragon. Drumming his fingers on the table-top while waiting for the high to take effect, heroin use is depicted as a boredom far from bliss. The work ends with Auder in a druginduced stupor, delivering a rambling proclamation about kicking the habit, ”good-bye dope, good bye monkey.”

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A portrait of Rome that would have made Plutarch proud, Roman Variations was made during a residency at a studio provided by the gallerist Barbara Gladstone.

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From its fiery outset, Brooding Angles is decidedly gothic and the mood anxious. It is a dark rumination on the specter of authority, resistance and paranoia marking the close of Reagan's second term in office. Born in 1945, Auder came of age during the 1960s, a decade as tumultuous in France as it was in the United States. The decade culminated in the student/worker strikes of May 1968 that shut down the city of Paris. Auder's value system was in many respects shaped by this anti-authoritarian milieu. Its remnants are to be found in his preponderance with issues violence and conflict as they serve to question moral progress. The soundtrack's ominous melody is recycled from footage of cellist David Soyer that can be seen in A Portrait of Alice Neel.

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Auder's reminiscences from 1986 - 87.

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a fictional autobiography in which a day from the artist’s life—filtered, edited, mediated, and performed by another actor—becomes the “ghost” of the person, a doubled identity that can never fully capture its subject. The work also conjures the spectral presence of a long-gone New York City, an uncanny body-double on the verge of austerity and collapse.

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In Michel Auder's short video Talking Head, a young girl (presumably his daughter) is occupied with a plastic toy-package of some sort. She talks incessantly about 'a nothing-nothing'; 'a thing that never came back again…. everyone was mad about it and sad about it…but nothing ever happened'. Michel Auder, hiding behind a Yucca (or some such exotic plant), films the girl telling this story. She develops her 'story' circumventing and encompassing this nothing-thing, and she does it in a hypnotizing and repetitive way, like a mantra, using all the permutations possible with a minimum amount of words or facts.

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“SEDUCTION OF PATRICK is a satire about unrequited love. A flirting Patrick becomes the object of Gary’s desire. Later rejected and rebuffed by Patrick, Gary talks with friends who help him attempt to figure out where Patrick’s sexuality lies.” –“Michel Auder: Selected Video Works 1970-1991” (Anthology Film Archives)

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Michel Auder’s Jesus – in which underground NY artists and Warhol superstars openly discuss their beliefs. Jesus – which premiered as a screening at The Kitchen in 1980 – mixes documentary elements such as footage of evangelical TV programs, books, cartoons, paintings, and other Jesus related imagery – with performances including Taylor Mead as a priest in the West Village and Florence Lambert playing a crucified Jesus. Also, intercut throughout are surprisingly candid interviews with Auder’s friends, family, and people he approaches on New York City streets about their faith and relationship to the world’s most famous person. Among those interviewed are Diego Cortez, Jackie Curtis, Gerard Malanga, Alice Neel (Andrew Neel’s grandmother), Larry Rivers, and Viva.

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Super 8 film transferred to SD video.

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Michel reads a book about love, with pictures of naked ladies flashing by and a song by Laurie Anderson playing in the background.

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Through the use of original and appropriated video footage, Auder translates a religious sermon into an expression of love for this strikingly beautiful woman. This lovers tale opens with a photograph of Denise that is alternately caressed and crushed in the palm of her lover's hand; a gesture oscillating between affection and an obsessive and irrational desire for possession. Auder builds on the increasing grandeur of the sermon's metaphors, extending them into the realm of destruction. The mood undergoes a violent shift as what was once fruit and flowers abruptly gives way to catastrophe. Featuring the music of Philip Glass, whose acquaintance Auder made in the early 1970s while producing work for The Kitchen.

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In 1969 Michel Auder began a series of video diaries that chronicled the art scene in downtown New York. In Chelsea Girls with Andy Warhol, Auder captures revealing moments in Warhol's public and private life: the opening of the 1970 Whitney Museum retrospective, a party held at John Lennon and Yoko Ono's home, a heated telephone conversation between Warhol, Viva and Brigid Berlin, and an illuminating interview conducted with Larry Rivers, the grandfather of Pop Art, following the publication of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol in 1975. The issue of money is a consistent topic of conversation with Viva, who after departing the Factory in 1969 sent Warhol a series of threatening letters demanding money.

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The Chronicles capture the natural and cultural beauty of Morocco from its ancient walled villages to its nomadic caravans. Music comes from everywhere. Edited almost thirty years apart, the two Chronicles together are a study in Auder's approach to his memories. The footage is all from the same trip that was a family vacation. Considering Chronicles/Morocco, 1971 a construct of emotional convenience unfaithful to memory, Auder decided to supplement the first version with a fuller account. The two works feature almost entirely different footage. There are, however, sections where one can see where Auder has omitted Viva. The star of the 1971 version is a young Moroccan Adonis who appoints himself tour-guide for a group of Europeans including Michel. The camera follows his charming antics as he flaunts his nubile body and rather blunt but effective skills as a hunter.

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