Ghosted (Joel DeMott 1947-2025)

“Culture is about the rules; Art is about breaking them.”
JLG by JLG

Filmmaker Joel DeMott died from C.O.P.D. in Montgomery on June 13th, watched over by her longtime partner, Jeff Kreines, who never left her side during her seven-week stay in the hospital. Jeff was the calmative One, holding her hand when her oxygen got low, willing her to breathe mindfully. My sister Megan and I were there too at the end. I cued up a few tunes from YouTube on the evening of the day but Jo wasn’t able to communicate by then so there was no way to know if she wanted songs or silence. Once “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” segued into “Have You Been Making Out Okay?” I quit playing DJ. The algorithm took over then—Al Green’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” came on unbidden and it broke Jeff down, not that he hadn’t been crying off and on all week. Still, as he mused later, the sequence was very verité…

Jo began making true-to-life art in the 70s. Jo and Jeff—her collaborator on most of their films—broke the rules of any institution or grandee[1] that would rein them in but they had a few verbotens of their own—”never interview, never ask anyone to do (or repeat) anything, never ask people what their plans are, never turn on the lights, never show up without your cameras.”[2] Their method was simple yet radical—”hang out and shoot and be yourself.” Jo and Jeff’s refusal of artifice meant these mavericks weren’t made for this art-world. But a report on museum screenings of Jo’s Demon Lover Diary (1980) confirms their films came through anywhere…

The Whitney audience was delighted. While there was a small “in” crowd of film students—you could hear people arguing about lens and f stops—most were ladies in fur hats, college students and other Sunday afternoon museum denizens. “And best of all,” I heard one older woman say, “it was real.”[3]

Jo was born with an instinct for the actual. She drove our mom mad because her dolly looked irreal when laid in her toy-pram. (Baby’s limbs didn’t hang right.) Jo was always precocious, always beautifully girlish.

School tended to be a drag—though Latin swung—and she got out quick since she skipped Junior High School. By age sixteen, she was off to Radcliffe for (what she termed) “an unspectacular academic career.” Though Cambridge in the 60s was a good trip. And she liked directing plays and writing film and theater reviews for the Crimson. You can read a few of her best bits in this review of Kael-inflected pop criticism. Lines from Jo’s review of an art-house sensation by a now forgotten Scandinavian auteur (one Vilgot Sioman) are still a hoot so at the risk of harping on juvenilia…

My Sister, My Love is a not entirely sunny picture of life in medieval Sweden…

Sioman cheats even in the love scenes that Playboy found so frank and the Boston police so objectionable. The scenes have superficial honesty because the bodies are naked. But that’s it…

The last straw is the cast. Bibi Anderson (the sister) and Per Oscarsson (the brother) tease you for 50-odd minutes. She’s so beautiful, he’s so wolfish, you expect that the wages of sin will be excitement. But Sjoman doesn’t keep them on screen long enough to produce a stir. At the end he removes them completely in favor of a screaming baby. Leave early.

Jo was never at the mercy of any crowd or bamboozled by the next big art-con. Thirty years on—after the lights came up at a family watch-party—her nose for the real nailed Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs: “Stagey piece of shit.”

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50501 Demos

Dennis Myers was First‘s eye on the street on April 5th. (More photos by him after the jump.)

This series of protest signs won Micah Sifry’s prize for best in show on April 19.

(Sifry regrets not getting a photo of “Have You No Beer?”/Brett Kavanaugh.)

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Anora’s Golden Ticket

The condom in Sean Baker’s Anora (2024) haunts me. Early in the Oscar-minted film, the titular adult entertainer presents a golden packet to Vanya, her callow yet absurdly wealthy young client, in advance of sexual intercourse. “You want to put this on? Or do you want me to put it on for you?” she coos, cleverly offering an illusion of choice while communicating that one way or the other, the condom is going on.

Only it doesn’t go on – ever. Not only because a shot of Mark Eydelshteyn’s genitals would bust through the film’s R rating – the MPA’s sexed bias is well documented – the application of the condom is neither mimed nor further referenced. The scene cuts jarringly to the couple mid-coitus, with Vanya on the brink of orgasm and Ani, of course, doing all the work. Then it cuts again to Ani dressing herself, Vanya’s lap coyly hidden beneath the sheets and the condom presumably discarded. That fleeting glimpse of its shimmery wrapper suggests an omnipresence that the film ultimately has no interest in depicting.

The condom is not only Ani’s golden ticket into Vanya’s lavish world, ushering Anora into an ongoing media trend that lampoons the ultra-wealthy’s heartlessness but too often hangs its critique on titillating wealth-porn. It’s also the means by which she protects herself, even as the thin latex sheath cannot shield her fully from the torrent of exploitation and abandonment to come. It’s a very real boundary she enforces in service of her own health and sexual privacy, a momentary inconvenience rupturing Vanya’s – and let’s be honest, the viewer’s – fantasy of unbarred access to the sex worker’s limitlessly porous body.

For this reason, I do not think the condom could have ceased to be a point of contention between Ani and Vanya. The princeling is accustomed to owning, not renting. He has clearly never been denied his immediate wishes, never been asked to consider the feelings or material conditions of the workers his family employs. His artless fucking makes it clear that Ani is no exception. When he purchases her uninterrupted service for a full week, and especially when the unlikely couple weds in a slapdash Vegas ceremony, are we expected to believe the condom stays on? Why was it ever there in the first place, if the film cannot stand to unwrap it?

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Doing Our High School Teachers Proud? 

A surprise turn into rooms at MoMA PS1 presenting Sohrab Hura’s oeuvrefar from art-wankelectrified our old friends’ winter break reunion trip to the museum.

The day was too good: arepas in Jackson Heights, Central Park night walk, a warm, free crib at the apartment where Dash was dog-sitting.

Now, we’ve come back together to mull over how Sohrab Hura’s work affected us that day and how he might get you going too…

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Perception

The first-floor windows of the Life Sciences building sit one step above sidewalk level, flush to the floor. They are recessed far enough in from the outside edge of the building to allow an elderly woman in a heavy, hooded blue coat, a black “I (Heart) SF” sweatshirt, and a patterned dress over jeans to sleep there.

The woman sleeps surrounded by her possessions, which, so far as Goshkin can catalog from his seat in the café across the street, consist of a shopping cart, several stuffed large plastic bags, a yellow blanket, a rug depicting a horse on hind legs, an umbrella, two tubes of glittering steel pipe, and a crooked, leafless tree branch as tall as she is. Once she has awakened, the woman begins to move her belongings to the sidewalk.

She arranges them as if assembling a train. What connects the cars of the train is unclear. So is how it will move forward. She takes her time, sometimes removing an item from a shopping bag and adding it to the exterior, sometimes shifting items she has placed in one position to another.

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Burning for You

‘Kitchen Fire’, 2023, oil on linen, 24 x 18 inches.

I’ve had an ongoing series of paintings about lovemaking that pop up every now and then. Depicting intimacy in a way that is a tad voyeuristic yet never prurient is challenging, but I find that it works when the moment is somehow eclipsed by the periphery of life lived.

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In My End is My Beginning:  Seeing Double at “Philip Guston Now”  

Philip Guston, the influential North American painter who died in 1980, has been on my mind lately.  This essay is about why.  It is also a belated thank you note to him.  I say this because, half a lifetime ago, my awareness of this hero/bad boy of Twentieth Century art saved my hide.  Or, more realistically, to take my grandiose appreciation of his efforts down a few notches, a job talk I gave at Purdue about Guston in 1994 clinched my unlikely shot at a permanent academic career in the humanities.   (I am ashamed to admit that when I was thirty, landing safely on the tenure track felt like a life-or-death matter.) Can I recover what Guston’s art meant to me back then on a gut level? I can certainly remember the outlines of my precarious situation back then, and why Guston’s late trauma-filled work would have appealed to me on a deep personal level.

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L.A. Flashbacks

Persuaded by James to go downtown (from where we lived so close in Echo Park many years) first time in five years (shocked at new residential skyscrapers we were told are including formerly homeless), to The Broad’s superb “Keith Haring” exhibition which I had otherwise intended to avoid (given what I knew would be a kind of “euphoric fear flashback” to the even-pre-AIDS rough-around-town NYC 70-80 years before we moved to LA when we then really did swing into ACT UP action). Glad I went but no nostalgia.

Photos by James Rosen

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“New York: 1962-1964”

“New York: 1962-1964 explores a pivotal three-year period in the history of art and culture in New York City, examining how artists living and working in New York responded to their rapidly changing world, through more than 180 works of art—all made or seen in New York between 1962-1964.”

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Tactile Values

LAST DAY TO SEE LARRY MADRIGAL’S EXHIBIT IN NYC!!!

Nicodim Gallery is tucked behind a temporary girder due to road work on Greene Street. It’s a little odd to open the door and walk right in on intimate scenes from Larry Madrigal’s marriage. Per the exhibition’s press release:

Over the course of creating Work / Life, the artist and his wife conceived their second child. He watched his wife’s body change while his pretty-much stayed the same. She is a mother, he is still Larry…

He’s out to make himself useful. Madrigal confessed somewhere — maybe on his instagram — that he wasn’t sure his massage below was doing any good, until his wife put her book down…

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