TONO x MoMA Screening Program: Short Films of the New York Underground (1970s-80s) from the MoMA Collection

Organized in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art, New York film curator Sophie Cavoulacos, this program of short films from the MoMA collection traces the artist collectives and clubs that made New York vibrate at the turn of the 1980s. Super 8 films par excellence are among an amalgam of avant-garde arts and the neo-bohemian scene of a dilapidated city that would from then on evoke punk rock, No Wave and graffiti. This selection highlights various styles and genres that impose themselves within a radical artistic freedom that no discipline would escape. Portraits and collective paintings dominate, identity stagings rhyming with performance, sexuality, and fashion that are androgynous, burlesque (the iconic Klaus Nomi, the sparkling John Kelly twisting a tribute to Maria Callas), conceptual (Tina L’Hotsky, the so-called ” queen of the Mudd Club”), or stylized. The program will also feature several films from Mexican filmmaker Ricardo Nicolayevsky’s “lost portrait” series which he created in New York.

Participating artists & biographies (in order of screening):

Richard Kern is an American underground filmmaker, writer and photographer. He contributed a significant number of the most provocative films and videos from the 1980s underground scene. A hard-core social satirist, he makes work that is by turns perverse, sadistic, theatrically bizarre, and darkly humorous, pursuing his interest in lives at the extreme and a fascination with the “geography of faces and bodies.” His work featured artists such as Lydia Lunch, David Wojnarowicz, Sonic Youth, Kembra Pfahler, Karen Finley and Henry Rollins.

Anders Grafstrom was a filmmaker who, along with new wave performance icon Klaus Nomi, was among the New York downtown scene’s first casualties, from a road accident and AIDS, respectively. Grafstrom’s Super8 films bring Nomi back to the screen, including the work in the program, which features an out-of-character but wildly evocative screen test for Charles Ludlam. He also worked with Kristian Hoffman, Tina L’Hotsky, and others. He also made the accomplished feature The Long Island Four.

Michael Oblowitz is a filmmaker. He was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and went to the United States to study in the late 1970s. He made several independent movies, some of the first made in America. Working alongside artists such as Jim Jarmusch and Amos Poe, he made black and white 16-millimeter films in the late 70s and early 80s that became part of the new wave punk rock scene. Many ended up in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Lisa Baumgardner was an artist, filmmaker, and publisher of Bikini Girl magazine. She was also an organizing member of Club 57 (1978–83), a nightclub and alternative art space and one of the foundational sites in developing the much-mythologized early 1980s East Village art scene. 

Esther Regelson is a filmmaker and an active member of the New York East Village scene. She frequently visited Club 57 (1978–83), which was located in the basement of a Polish Church at 57 St. Marks Place. It began as a no-budget venue for music and film exhibitions and quickly took pride of place in a constellation of countercultural venues in downtown New York. A center of creative activity in the East Village, Club 57 is said to have influenced virtually every club that came in its wake.

Anney Bonney is a New York-based artist, filmmaker, teacher, writer, and curator of video and performance. In the late 1970s, she exhibited widely in lower Manhattan nightclubs (The Mudd Club, Club 57, Stilwend) and more formal institutions (The Ford Foundation and the Brooklyn Museum). In 1984, she began working at BOMB magazine, where she still contributes.

Ricardo Nicolayevsky was a Mexican filmmaker who moved to New York in the 1980s to study film, music, and creative writing. He was a fixture of the East Village scene in the 1980s and created hundreds of short films for which he also composed the music. 

John Kelly and Anthony Chase were frequent collaborators and part of New York’s East Village downtown scene. Chase was a filmmaker, and John Kelly was a performer and drag persona. During this era, they worked on projects at venues such as the iconic Pyramid Club.

Photo: John Kelly and Anthony Chase. The Dagmar Onassis Story. 1984 , Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York