Alfred Leslie: Cool Man in a Golden Age

February 9, 2010 - February 16, 2010

Pull My Daisy, February 9

An intensely creative painter, performance artist, filmmaker, and videomaker, Alfred Leslie was a key figure in the New York art and poetry scene of the fifties and sixties, and his work and influence have continued into the present. In a two-program series highlighting his long career, we feature his collaboration with Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac on the legendary Pull My Daisy, and with poet Frank O’Hara on a number of films. Leslie lost most of his early work in a fire that consumed his studio in 1966, the year of O’Hara’s death. Much of his vibrant new work draws on salvaged fragments, including a reconstruction of his multimedia performance at the Guggenheim in 1965, assisted by recent PFA guests Ken and Flo Jacobs. Leslie has also returned to O’Hara’s poems, using them as text-titles in two new videos, one a found-footage collage, the other including images from Leslie’s graphic novella Attached by the Heart. Two fascinating documents reveal Leslie’s creative process: his new A Stranger Calls at Midnight, “a self-interview of sorts,” and the 1966 USA: Poetry, Frank O’Hara, in which Leslie discusses his paintings and O’Hara his poetry. Artist and curator Ian White wrote: “Radically intelligent, not least for their irreverence, his works define and continue to extend an extraordinary line between personal expression, hysterical mundanity, the allure of Hollywood, anecdotal incisiveness, formal experiment, abstraction and figuration, that is as much the description of one of the most important periods in twentieth-century creative practice as it is of twenty-first-century aplomb.”

Kathy Geritz
Film Curator

Tuesday, February 9, 2010
7:30 p.m. A Cool Man: Short Films by Alfred Leslie
Alfred Leslie (U.S., 1959–2008). Alfred Leslie regrets that he cannot travel to the Bay Area at this time, as previously planned. Three films by this important New York artist, including his legendary collaboration with Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac, Pull My Daisy. (100 mins)

Tuesday, February 16, 2010
7:30 p.m. A Golden Age: Short Films by Alfred Leslie
Alfred Leslie (U.S., 1965–2008). Introduction and reading of Frank O’Hara poems by Bill Berkson. Richard O. Moore in person. The poetry of Frank O’Hara runs through Leslie’s recent works. Plus Richard O. Moore’s 1966 doc on O’Hara and a reconstruction of Leslie’s 1965 performance in collaboration with Ken and Flo Jacobs. (c. 120 mins)

PFA wishes to thank Alfred Leslie; Andrew Lampert, Anthology Film Archives; and Benjamin Cook, LUX, for their generous assistance with this series.