Jonas Mekas at the Serpentine Gallery

5 December 2012 - 27 January 2013

Serpentine Gallery
www.serpentinegallery.org

The Serpentine Gallery

There’s something about coming to the exhibition of a 90-year-old (and still living) artist that makes you approach what you’re seeing with reverence, or at least with all of your senses attuned, trying to absorb as much as you can from this life lived, trying to divine its secrets, and feel the reality of the artist’s mortality. For this exhibition really is about life, lived and felt, looked and celebrated.

The exhibition is comprised of films, poetry, installations, objects and re-mixes of the artist’s work. Almost all of the pieces shown are given the date 2012, which seems rather unexpected and unusual, but makes everything feel especially present and addressed to the present audience.

There is a certain modesty to the show. Poetry and images are plainly printed on A3 paper and attached to the wall with clear tape, or small grey nails. Nothing feels commercial, or forced, or glamourous for that matter. It is clear that the substance of the work is the content of the work, we are not intended to question the art object or ascertain sarcasm or irony, and as a result I feel I can relax while looking at the work because the terms of engagement are so clear and understandable. 

Poetry and images from films

I also came away from the exhibition feeling as if I had spent time with the artist. It was not just his personalised, heartfelt introduction to the show (“I was blessed by angels to live a happy life”) and often disarming and frank statements about each work, but the way his image and voice kept showing up amidst the footage.

Segment from opening wall text

I especially liked this explanation for an installation of sixteen monitors called Lavender Piece (2012), where the machines are stacked four-by-four, all showing different films: “No special meaning is intended outside of the immediate experience produced by the simultaneity of sixteen moving images and sixteen soundtracks”. How refreshing!

And of course that’s all it is - but that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily simple. The images careen, the sound buzzes, gallops, there is a breath, a cycle to the images, a rhythm, a hustle, a whir, then a rallentando that almost misses, then hits the next beat. This grouping together of monitors feels like it’s saying something about the sequencing of time. Perhaps what we call our life is merely another name for a unity with many strands and rhythms running simultaneously.

Next, I come to WTC Haikus (2010), a film that commemorates the ‘presence’ of the World Trade Centres in New York, where the skyscrapers appear and reappear, often as two blue-grey shadows in the horizon of the people living their lives before them. There is always the  tremor of life in these films. Everything passes, everything moves, everything changes, but no less sweet does it make the feeling. On the soundtrack, piano chords slowly progress.This is a love letter, an acknowledgement of a profound presence that made the city a beautiful place.

I move from work to work and the images continue to sprawl out before me - the modest, the stunningly beautiful and quotidian, all of them streaming through his (and now my) imagination. I find myself wondering if these moments that Mekas captured were particularly special, or did they become special just because he captured them? 

There really are so many flows of images that make up the exhibition, that it’s inevitable not to start looking at it as a whole and asking, What does it all mean? The simple answer that pops into my head feels like something the filmmaker might say: ‘Well, it means that it was there and he saw it, and he filmed it’. I’m secretly quite excited with this answer, and the promise that art could be a metaphor for living, and a way to actually register what it feels like to be alive and present and aware.

Indeed, there is something essentially spiritual about this work: a belief in the meaningfulness of life. In a life absolutely uncommercial, unfaddish and unintellectualised. Instead, life as simply a series of modest experiences in a variety of places, sometimes with other people. I hear the voice of the artist over the projection in the large central room: “it’s just images passing by”, “just images for me and for a few friends”, and then, “my world is not so different from anybody elses”.

As I head to leave I have the idea that there is also something inherently elegiac about this exhibition. While I feel I know some about the kind of life Mekas shows in his work, I also sense that there is something deeply past about all of this. This world of sensations and people and feet on green grass and smiling at friends from across the garden on sunny afternoons. This analogue life where time progressed, swinging and swaying in a manageable way counting out the beats of life. It’s going, maybe it’s already gone. I mean look at those Bolex cameras under the glass display case, they look like dead corpses.

This fear rises in me...will I be able to feel like that? Is it still possible? And as I head back out into the now dark day, I think I know the answer.