Gerard Malanga

Last updated
Gerard Malanga
Gerard Malanga & Archie (2005).jpg
Malanga in 2005
Born
Gerard Joseph Malanga

(1943-03-20) March 20, 1943 (age 81)
Education School of Industrial Art
Alma mater Wagner College
Occupations
  • Poet
  • photographer
  • filmmaker
  • actor
  • curator and archivist
Years active1962–present

Gerard Joseph Malanga (born March 20, 1943) is an American poet, photographer, filmmaker, actor, curator and archivist.

Contents

Early life and education

Malanga was born in the Bronx in 1943, the only child of Italian immigrant parents. In 1959, at the beginning of his senior year at the School of Industrial Art [1] in Manhattan, Malanga became a regular on Alan Freed's The Big Beat, televised on Channel 5 (WNEW) in New York City. He graduated from high school with a major in Advertising Design (1960).

He enrolled at the University of Cincinnati's College of Art & Design (1960), and dropped out at the end of the Spring semester.

In the fall of 1961, Malanga was admitted to Wagner College in Staten Island on a fellowship. At Wagner he befriended one of his English professors, Willard Maas, and his wife Marie Menken, who became his mentors. [2] In June 1963, he went to work for Andy Warhol and dropped out of Wagner College in 1964.

Career

Andy Warhol and The Factory

Malanga worked with Andy Warhol from 1963 to 1970. [3] A February 17, 1992 article in The New York Times referred to him as "Andy Warhol's most important associate." [4] [5] Malanga was introduced to Warhol through Charles Henri Ford. [6]

Malanga was involved in Warhol's silkscreen painting and filmmaking. He acted in the films, including Kiss in 1963, Harlot in 1964, Soap Opera in 1964, Couch in 1964, Vinyl in 1965, Camp in 1965, Chelsea Girls in 1966, and co-produced Bufferin in 1967, in which he reads his poetry, deemed to be the longest spoken-word movie on record at 33-minutes nonstop.

Malanga played a combination of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby in Warhol's film Since (1966). Also in 1966, he choreographed the music of the Velvet Underground for Warhol's multimedia presentation, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable . Malanga and Warhol collaborated on the nearly 500 individual 3-minute Screen Tests , which resulted in a selection for a book of the same name, published by Kulchur Press, in 1967. Neither Warhol or Malanga were photographers at the time. In 1969, Malanga was one of the founding editors, along with Warhol and John Wilcock, of Interview magazine. [7]

In December 1970, Malanga left Warhol's studio to pursue his work in photography. Malanga's photography spans over four decades and includes portraits, nudes and the urban documentation of "New York's Changing Scene." Three of his notable portraits are of Charles Olson for the interview he made with Olson for The Paris Review in 1969, Iggy Pop nude in the penthouse apartment they shared one summer weekend in 1971, and William Burroughs in front of the corporate headquarters that bears his family name in 1975. In total, Malanga has photographed hundreds of poets and artists over the years as well as Herbert Gericke, the last farmer in Staten Island, in 1981, [2] and Jack Kerouac's typewritten roll for On the Road in 1983.

In his introduction to Malanga's first monograph, Resistance to Memory (Arena Editions, 1998), Ben Maddow, a photo historian and poet, said, "Malanga has that great essential virtue of the photographer: humility before the complex splendor of the real thing...Malanga is the photo-historian of this culture." In reviewing Malanga's book two years later, Screen Tests Portraits Nudes 1964-1996 (Steidl), Fred McDarrah remarked that "Malanga is among the elite editors and photographers who have long dazzled and propelled the New York avant garde."[ citation needed ]

Malanga has shot and produced 12 films. In 2024, Gerard was named a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.

Works

Poetry

Editor

Photography

Photo and written biographies

Films

Music

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">César Vallejo</span> Peruvian writer

César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Although he published only two books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. Thomas Merton called him "the greatest universal poet since Dante". The late British poet, critic and biographer Martin Seymour-Smith, a leading authority on world literature, called Vallejo "the greatest twentieth-century poet in any language." He was a member of the intellectual community called North Group formed in the Peruvian north coastal city of Trujillo.

<i>Batman Dracula</i> 1964 film

Batman Dracula is a 1964 black and white American superhero fan film produced and directed by Andy Warhol without the permission of DC Comics, who owns the character Batman.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Ashbery</span> American poet (1927–2017)

John Lawrence Ashbery was an American poet and art critic.

Warhol superstars were a clique of New York City personalities promoted by the pop artist Andy Warhol during the 1960s and early 1970s. These personalities appeared in Warhol's artworks and accompanied him in his social life, epitomizing his dictum, "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes". Warhol would simply film them, and declare them "superstars".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Angus MacLise</span> American musician and poet

Angus William MacLise was an American percussionist, composer, poet, occultist and calligrapher, known as the first drummer for the Velvet Underground who abruptly quit due to disagreements with the band playing their first paid show.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Antin</span> American poet, critic and performance artist

David Abram Antin was an American poet, art critic, performance artist, and university professor.

Clayton Eshleman was an American poet, translator, and editor, noted in particular for his translations of César Vallejo and his studies of cave painting and the Paleolithic imagination. Eshleman's work has been awarded with the National Book Award for Translation, the Landon Translation prize from the Academy of American Poets (twice), a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Rockefeller Study Center residency in Bellagio, Italy, among other awards and honors.

<i>Chelsea Girls</i> 1966 film by Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol

Chelsea Girls is a 1966 American experimental underground film directed by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. The film was Warhol's first major commercial success after a long line of avant-garde art films. It was shot at the Hotel Chelsea and other locations in New York City, and follows the lives of several of the young women living there, and stars many of Warhol's superstars. The film is presented in a split screen, accompanied by alternating soundtracks attached to each scene and an alternation between black-and-white and color photography. The original cut runs at just over three hours long.

<i>Screen Tests</i>

The Screen Tests are a series of short, silent, black-and-white film portraits by Andy Warhol, made between 1964 and 1966, generally showing their subjects from the neck up against plain backdrops. The Screen Tests, of which 472 survive, depict a wide range of figures, many of them part of the mid-1960s downtown New York cultural scene. Under Warhol's direction, subjects of the Screen Tests attempted to sit motionless for around three minutes while being filmed, with the resulting movies projected in slow motion. The films represent a new kind of portraiture—a slowly moving, nearly still image of a person. Warhol's Screen Tests connect on one hand with the artist's other work in film, which emphasized stillness and duration (for example, Sleep and Empire, and on the other hand with his focus after the mid-1960s on documenting his celebrity milieu in paintings and other works.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Exploding Plastic Inevitable</span> Series of multimedia events by Andy Warhol

The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, sometimes simply called Plastic Inevitable or EPI, was a series of multimedia gesamtkunstwerk events organized by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey in 1966 and 1967, featuring musical performances by The Velvet Underground and Nico, screenings of Warhol's films, such as Eat, and dancing and mime performance art by regulars of Warhol's Factory, especially Mary Woronov and Gerard Malanga. In December 1966 Warhol included a one-off magazine called The Plastic Exploding Inevitable as part of the Aspen No. 3 package.

Since is a 1966 film directed by Andy Warhol about the assassination of the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy. The film reconstructs the assassination with both Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson present, both before and after the event. The roles in Since are performed by Warhol's "superstars" from The Factory.

Kitchen is a 1966 feature-length underground film directed by Andy Warhol and Ronald Tavel starring Edie Sedgwick and Roger Trudeau with appearances by Rene Ricard, Ronald Tavel, David McCabe, Donald Lyons, and Elektrah Lobel. The entire film takes place in the New York City apartment kitchen of Bud Wirtschafter, the sound man. The film was made in late May 1965 and premiered March 3, 1966 at the Film-makers' Cooperative in New York City.

Harlot is a 1964 American underground film directed by Andy Warhol, written by Ronald Tavel, and featuring Mario Montez lounging on a sofa, eating bananas, with Gerard Malanga in a tuxedo, and with Tavel, Billy Name, and Harry Fainlight having an off-screen discussion. This was Warhol's first sync-sound movie, filmed in December 1964 with his new Auricon camera.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara Rubin</span> American filmmaker

Barbara Rubin (1945–1980) was an American filmmaker and performance artist. She is best known for her landmark 1963 underground film Christmas on Earth.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jerry Jofen</span> American painter (1925–1993)

Jerry Jofen (1925–1993) was an American painter, collagist, and experimental filmmaker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Piero Heliczer</span> Italian-American poet, publisher, actor and filmmaker

Piero Heliczer was an Italian-American poet, publisher, actor and filmmaker associated with the New American Cinema.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Garrick Cinema</span> Former theater in Manhattan, New York

The Garrick Cinema was a 199-seat movie house at 152 Bleecker Street in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Andy Warhol debuted many of his notable films in this building in the late 1960s. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention played here nightly for 6 months in 1967.

<i>Marilyn Monroe portfolio</i> 1967 print by Andy Warhol

The Marilyn Monroe portfolio is a portfolio or series of ten 36×36 inch silkscreened prints on paper by the pop artist Andy Warhol, first made in 1967, all showing the same image of the 1950s film star Marilyn Monroe but all in different, mostly very bright, colors. They were made five years after her death in 1962. The original image was taken by Warhol from a promotional still by Gene Kornman for Monroe's film Niagara (1953).

Donald Roger Snyder was an American photographer and multimedia artist. Immersed in the social upheaval of the 1960s, he is best known for his iconic photographs of the counterculture, collected in his 1979 book Aquarian Odyssey: A Photographic Trip into the Sixties.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ivy Nicholson</span> American model and actress (1933–2021)

Ivy Nicholson was an American model and actress.

References

  1. "Gerard Malanga - David R. Godine, Publisher"
  2. 1 2 "History of Art: History of Photography".
  3. "Gerard Malanga's Journey From Andy Warhol's Stage Dancer To Factory Poet". The Huffington Post. 4 August 2010.
  4. "Gerard Malanga". All Tomorrow's Parties.
  5. "History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places - Smithsonian". Archived from the original on 2013-05-12. Retrieved 2012-05-27.
  6. Watson, Steven (1988). Introduction to "The Young and Evil" by Ford, Charles Henri and Tyler, Parker. New York: Sea Horse Press: Gay Presses of New York. pp. xxviii. ISBN   0-914017-15-2.
  7. "Andy Warhol's Interview magazine with Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey, John Wilcock and Andy Warhol".
  8. 1 2 3 "Gerard Malanga | Poetry Foundation". 3 June 2023.
  9. Vallejo, César (2014). Malanga Chasing Vallejo: Selected Poems: César Vallejo: New Translations and Notes: Gerard Malanga: César Vallejo, Gerard Malanga: 9780989512572: Amazon.com: Books. Three Rooms Press. ISBN   978-0989512572.
  10. "Gerard Malanga".