An Evening with Bill Brand at Maysles Documentary Center
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OFFICIAL POSTER FOR “AN EVENING WITH BILL BRAND.” SOURCE: MAYSLES DOCUMENTARY CENTER.
This past Saturday, September 22nd, 2023, experimental film and video artist, educator, activist, and film preservationist Bill Brand screened four of his films and gave a presentation connecting his moving image works to his paintings and drawings at the Maysles Documentary Center. The centerpiece of the evening was Brand’s 1984, 38-minute long COALFIELDS — a documentary-meets-”visual poem” about “black lung disease, landscape, and a struggle for worker’s rights in West Virginia.” COALFIELDS was followed by the more recent 16mm shorts SUSIE’S GHOST (2011) and AUGUST GARDEN (2019), plus a digital short film from two years ago titled ORNITHOLOGY 6 (2021).
As noted on Maysles’ website, Brand is a multi-disciplinary artist “whose films, public artwork, installations, painting and works-on-paper have exhibited worldwide in museums, galleries, micro-cinemas, and on television.” Famously, Brand’s “Masstransiscope,” an animated mural installed in the New York City subway, was made in 1980 and is now part of the MTA Arts and Design permanent collection. His work has been featured at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Anthology Film Archives, and Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art.
Brand is a longtime friend and colleague of Gartenberg Media Enterprises. In the late 1990s, GME President Jon Gartenberg worked as the program director for the Film Preservation Program of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS. As part of that role, Gartenberg enlisted BB Optics — Brand’s preservation laboratory — to work on the Project’s preservation of work by multimedia artists David Wojnarowicz, Curt McDowell, and Jack Waters. As Gartenberg noted in his 2002 article “The Fragile Emulsion” for The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists:
BB Optics had already made super 8mm to 16mm optical preservations of work for a variety of experimental filmmakers as well as for museums and other cultural institutions, and was already experienced in the challenges of this process. Moreover, the operator of the laboratory, Brand, is an experimental filmmaker in his own right and thus is acutely aware of the subtle sensitivities required to approach the preservation of every frame of each experimental film… The first time we met together, Waters, Brand, and I engaged in a lengthy discussion that lasted several hours. We shared our respective backgrounds, reestablished connections in our histories, and arrived at a consensus for our approach to the preservation of Waters's work. Our mutual understanding was important, even before we handled any of the physical elements.
A year following the publication of Gartenberg’s “The Fragile Emulsion,” Brand reflected on their working relationship in an interview with Brian Frye for Film History:
When Jon Gartenberg asked me to work on the Estate Project [for Artists with AIDS] films… for the first time I had someone who was taking responsibility to be an archivist or conservator. We established a very collaborative working process and he has written about this in his article… It was here that I began to realize that all along I have been doing preservation and that the funny feelings that I've had all these years about the kinds of decisions I was making were justified. Before working with Jon, no one had taken on these issues point blank. No one had looked at them directly. A lot of the things that I've done, or that we've done together, are perhaps setting the standard for how togo about this kind of work.
Part of GME’s collection of experimental and avant-garde artists’ work is this unique, one-of-a-kind analog clock by Brand, which features a cubist collage of Jon Gartenberg and David Deitch’s kitchen.
Visit the Maysles Documentary Center’s website to learn more about last weekend’s event and Brand’s prolific career.