Michel Auder

In 1969 Michel Auder began a series of video diaries that chronicled the art scene in downtown New York. In Chelsea Girls with Andy Warhol, Auder captures revealing moments in Warhol's public and private life: the opening of the 1970 Whitney Museum retrospective, a party held at John Lennon and Yoko Ono's home, a heated telephone conversation between Warhol, Viva and Brigid Berlin, and an illuminating interview conducted with Larry Rivers, the grandfather of Pop Art, following the publication of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol in 1975. The issue of money is a consistent topic of conversation with Viva, who after departing the Factory in 1969 sent Warhol a series of threatening letters demanding money.

“FUN AND GAMES (FOR EVERYONE): a pitch black and milky white film shot during one of Olivier Mosset's exhibition openings. A psychedelic game of improvisation joins the Zanzibar group with Salvador Dalí, Barbet Schroeder and Jean Mascolo... the solarized image reminiscent of thick strokes of a paintbrush.” - Philippe Azoury

Cleopatra situates itself in the same relationship to Hollywood as the Warhol/Morrisey films of the period. It corresponds to Joseph Mankiewicz's 1963 Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton which Auder's cast watched and used as the starting point for scene by scene improvisation Auder drew his cast from Warhol's ensemble – including not only Viva and Louis Waldon, but also Taylor Mead, Ondine, Andrea Feldman, Gerard Melanga and others.

A portrait of Rome that would have made Plutarch proud, Roman Variations was made during a residency at a studio provided by the gallerist Barbara Gladstone.

Michel reads a book about love, with pictures of naked ladies flashing by and a song by Laurie Anderson playing in the background.

"The question is, it is either going to be a stoned age or a new Stone Age" - Louis Brigante

In Michel Auder's short video Talking Head, a young girl (presumably his daughter) is occupied with a plastic toy-package of some sort. She talks incessantly about 'a nothing-nothing'; 'a thing that never came back again…. everyone was mad about it and sad about it…but nothing ever happened'. Michel Auder, hiding behind a Yucca (or some such exotic plant), films the girl telling this story. She develops her 'story' circumventing and encompassing this nothing-thing, and she does it in a hypnotizing and repetitive way, like a mantra, using all the permutations possible with a minimum amount of words or facts.


Warhol Superstars Viva and Louis Waldon are the main subjects of Auder’s first film with synched sound, Keeping Busy (1969), which was billed as “a film novel about what they did to keep busy.”

The film begins with shots in Venice, passers-by seized from a hotel room, with Tina Aumont. It continues in Morocco during the filming of Bed of the Virgin, in a hotel room, people chat, play the guitar, smoke.

The Feature does not reconcile fact and fiction; instead, it blurs the definitions seemingly represented by the film’s two clearly demarcated registers: that of the archival footage and that of the new, theatrical material. In his guise as “Michel Auder,” living a fulsome and extravagant life, replete with beautiful women and a rock-cut pool overlooking Los Angeles, the art world is revealed as a sham, and his character exhibits a repulsive narcissism. And yet, when caught in quiet moments, something poignant emerges—a glimmer of truth that rebels against the entire endeavour. Or maybe, that’s what makes The Feature.

Auder's reminiscences from 1986 - 87.

Michel Auder’s Jesus – in which underground NY artists and Warhol superstars openly discuss their beliefs. Jesus – which premiered as a screening at The Kitchen in 1980 – mixes documentary elements such as footage of evangelical TV programs, books, cartoons, paintings, and other Jesus related imagery – with performances including Taylor Mead as a priest in the West Village and Florence Lambert playing a crucified Jesus. Also, intercut throughout are surprisingly candid interviews with Auder’s friends, family, and people he approaches on New York City streets about their faith and relationship to the world’s most famous person. Among those interviewed are Diego Cortez, Jackie Curtis, Gerard Malanga, Alice Neel (Andrew Neel’s grandmother), Larry Rivers, and Viva.

The thrill of cocaine becomes a metaphor for the consumption of images in this short montage. The title and lyrics come from Auder´s friend and 2001 Prix Goncourt winner Jean-Jacques Shuhl. The piece is composed entirely of still photographs from a variety of books and magazines that simultaneously reveal and feed an addiction to spectacle. With a source that is once removed, Auder's scopophilia is symptomatic of society at large. The song is performed by legendary chanteuse Ingrid Caven. Suffused with a bittersweet melancholy, Canven's seasoned voice compliments Auder's selection of images which dwell on the themes of death, destruction and desire. The melody is classic cabaret performed by a piano/violin duo who dramatically heighten the works already dark eroticism.

Narcolepsy includes footage shot with a small hand-held digital video camera, mobile phones and underwater devices. The videos appear on one monitor at a time, as the rest remain blank. A transparent rabbit in bed is superimposed on a dog in the snow; hands being washed under a faucet are juxtaposed with an outdoor flood; little girls play with dolls and mothers tend real babies; a spider web holds a captive fly.

Auder observes his friend Alice Neel as she paints and talks her way through her portrait of Margaret Evans Pregnant

From its fiery outset, Brooding Angles is decidedly gothic and the mood anxious. It is a dark rumination on the specter of authority, resistance and paranoia marking the close of Reagan's second term in office. Born in 1945, Auder came of age during the 1960s, a decade as tumultuous in France as it was in the United States. The decade culminated in the student/worker strikes of May 1968 that shut down the city of Paris. Auder's value system was in many respects shaped by this anti-authoritarian milieu. Its remnants are to be found in his preponderance with issues violence and conflict as they serve to question moral progress. The soundtrack's ominous melody is recycled from footage of cellist David Soyer that can be seen in A Portrait of Alice Neel.

1967 (made in 2015) presents newly found and digitized silent 16mm films from the 1960s in the form of a four-part composition portraying a cast of artists, writers, musicians and actors who made up the bohemian underground of that time. The film recasts the essence of a scene whose participants have since been idealized as celebrities or else forgotten.

Michel Auder dedicated himself to capturing the views from his apartment over the course of a year. This three-channel video installation from 2014 is based on that footage.

For the past 50 years, Michel Auder has been recording his personal life, creating films and videos that document his own experience and social milieu. His new work, Fictional Art Film, is a composite portrait of Auder’s New York art world during the 70’s and 80’s. The filmmaker recorded his friends, the artists and writers he hung around and admired. These now-famous subjects (which include Alice Neel, Andy Warhol, John Ashbery, David Hammons, Hannah Wilke, Willem de Koonig, and Bill T. Jones, among many others) are shown here both as people and performers, with Auder’s footage often blurring the line between life and art.

In 1970 Valerie Solanas was released from a mental institution, two 
years after shooting Andy Warhol. Still unstable, she moved into the 
Chelsea Hotel where she penned a death threat to Michel Auder and his
wife Viva. Using a soundtrack by Wagner, Auder surveys the handwritten
 evidence of Solanas's threat, before reciting its threatening prose
 melodramatically.

Through the use of original and appropriated video footage, Auder translates a religious sermon into an expression of love for this strikingly beautiful woman. This lovers tale opens with a photograph of Denise that is alternately caressed and crushed in the palm of her lover's hand; a gesture oscillating between affection and an obsessive and irrational desire for possession. Auder builds on the increasing grandeur of the sermon's metaphors, extending them into the realm of destruction. The mood undergoes a violent shift as what was once fruit and flowers abruptly gives way to catastrophe. Featuring the music of Philip Glass, whose acquaintance Auder made in the early 1970s while producing work for The Kitchen.

Voyage's structure is simple. Coastal landscape footage and spectacular sunsets are combined with phone conversations recorded from a scanner that picks up cordless phone frequencies.