Occupying an art gallery with photographs, scrapbooks, letters and memorabilia is a feat capable by only those of a certain gravity, to be sure. And they don’t come with much more weight than Kenneth Wilbur Anglemeyer, aka Kenneth Anger, aka experimental filmmaker extraordinaire; pioneer of underground movies that forced the world of surrealism upon the world of Hollywood, unrepentant, prolific, radically influential. Icon.
Erotica, the occult, homosexuality, hero worship, mythology; Anger’s avant-garde works have always been unafraid to shock and to provoke, equally so in his controversial Hollywood Babylon books which expose much of tinsel-town’s salacious underbelly. Anger by name, anger by nature. Inevitably, many counterculture figures have been touched by the surreal filmmaker, from Scorsese to Jagger, David Lynch to Tennessee Williams; celebrated shorts like Lucifer Rising and Invocation of My Demon Brother an inspiration to countless impressionable provocateurs.
It’s Angers infatuation with the Golden Age of Hollywood that dominates Icons, that closes 20th April at Sprüth Magers London, figures like Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino cropping up on magazine covers and posters collected by the experimental trailblazer over many decades. Taken out of the context of Anger’s Los Angeles home, from which the dominant red and blue hues are derived, the collection takes on a fascinating life of its own, a lost world, romantic, melancholic. I wonder if the pages of tabloids recounting the breakdowns of Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears will look this good in almost a century’s time?
Courtesy of the artist and Sprueth Magers Berlin London
Photography: Stephen White
