From: Thomas Beard (email suppressed)
Date: Sat Aug 23 2008 - 19:16:20 PDT
Light Industry
http://www.lightindustry.org
Two Films by Fred Halsted
Presented by William E. Jones
Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 8pm
55 33rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, New York
Born in Long Beach in 1941 and raised all over the state of California, Fred
Halsted rarely left his adopted city of Los Angeles. Capturing the city as
few other films could, L.A. Plays Itself (1972), Halsted¹s first film, has
come to be regarded as a classic within the genre of gay porn. Its images of
beautiful young men in sylvan Malibu Canyon and boy hustlers on the mean
streets of Hollywood gained for Halsted the kind of celebrity than simply
isn¹t possible today. Fred Halsted never held a regular job; he didn¹t
teach; he had no gallery representation; he had no agent; he didn¹t shoot
commercials or advertising campaigns; he didn¹t even have a social security
number. He made films and performed in them, published a magazine (Package),
ran a sex club (Halsted¹s), and became a legendary sex radical and
provocateur.
Before the theatrical release of L.A. Plays Itself, Halsted made a short
film to accompany it, Sex Garage. Most of the film was shot in a garage in
the Hollywood Hills in a mere six hours. In black and white and at a running
time of 38 minutes, Sex Garage defies genre conventions‹as embryonic as they
were in the gay porn of 1972‹and begins by introducing bisexuality into a
gay porn film long before the bisexual genre became fashionable. What
follows is half an hour of exuberant filth, including (most famously) an
intimate moment between a biker and an exhaust pipe.
Jones will show a reconstructed version of L.A. Plays Itself, formerly
available only in a censored form, preceded by Sex Garage. He is currently
working on a book about Halsted, to be published by Semiotext(e) in Fall
2009.
William E. Jones grew up in Ohio and now lives and works in Los Angeles. He
has made two feature length experimental films, Massillon (1991) and
Finished (1997), several short videos, and the feature length documentary Is
It Really So Strange? (2004). His work has been shown at the Cinémathèque
française and Musée du Louvre, Paris; International Film Festival Rotterdam;
Oberhausen Short Film Festival; Sundance Film Festival; and the Museum of
Modern Art, New York. His films and videos were the subject of a
retrospective at Tate Modern, London, in 2005. He was included in the 1993
and 2008 Biennial Exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has
published two books: Is It Really So Strange? (2006) and Tearoom (2008). He
works in the adult video industry under the name Hudson Wilcox and teaches
film history at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena under his own name.
Tickets - $6, available at door.
About Light Industry
Light Industry is a new venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New
York. Developed and overseen by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, the project has
begun as a series of weekly events at Industry City in Sunset Park, each
organized by a different artist, critic, or curator. Conceptually, Light
Industry draws equal inspiration from the long history of alternative art
spaces in New York as well its storied tradition of cinematheques and other
intrepid film exhibitors. Through a regular program of screenings,
performances, and lectures, its goal is to explore new models for the
presentation of time-based media and foster an ongoing dialogue amongst a
wide range of artists and audiences within the city.
About Industry City
Industry City, an industrial complex in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is home to a
cross-section of manufacturing, warehousing and light industry. As part of a
regeneration program intended to diversify the use of its 6 million square
feet of space to better reflect 21st century production, Industry City now
includes workspace for artists. In addition to offering studios at
competitive rates, Industry City also provides a limited number of
rent-stabilized studios for artists in need of low-cost rental space. This
program was conceived in response to the lack of affordable workspace for
artists in New York City and aims to establish a new paradigm for industrial
redevelopment--one that does not displace artists, workers, local residents
or industry but instead builds a sustainable community in a context that
integrates cultural and industrial production.
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.