Michel Auder
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Video recording was invented in 1956 as an intermediary in live broadcast television. It was a cheap means to pre-record and edit regularly scheduled programs taped from live events. Roughly twelve years later, conceptual and minimalist artists would take an interest in the medium, making “artist videos” at a time when there was no such thing as a “video artist.” Michel Auder is an exception. He chose video as his primary means of expression well before video was accepted as a practice in its own right.
Born in Soisson France, in 1945, Auder began making films at the age of 18. As an aspiring young filmmaker, he fell under the influence of the French New Wave and experimental cinema, most notably Jean-Luc Godard and Andy Warhol. In 1969, Auder met and eventually married Viva, one of Warhol’s principal talents. A year later, they moved to New York City where Auder has since resided. That same year, he purchased a Sony Portapak, one of the first commercially available video cameras. Since then he has persistently documented the people, places and events that are his life.
Video allowed Auder to translate Warhol’s talent for making the banal glamorous and the glamorous banal into a diary practice which Auder himself did not consider fine art. His earliest works are travel logs and endearing portraits of friends including Hannah Wilke, Alice Neel, Annie Sprinkle, Eric Bogosian, Louis Waldon, and Larry Rivers. The label “video artist” was applied retroactively when Auder began exhibiting his work in 1980. At that time, he produced a series of works including scripted biographical material and video collages appropriating material from television. As the quality of video cameras improved and access to editing facilities increased, Auder’s skills as an auteur became more apparent. He is a consummate voyeur, one who literally reads scenes of intimacy, exchange and daily life as verses of poetry unto themselves.
Auder and Cindy Sherman were married From the early 1980s until the late 1990s. He has one daughter, Alexandra Auder He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
[edit] Selected Works
- Keeping Busy, 1969
- Cleopatra, 1970
- The Valerie Solanas Incident, 1971
- Chelsea Girls with Andy Warhol, 1971-1976
- Chronicles: Family Diaries, 1971-1973 (Excerpts)
- Made for Denise, 1978
- Seduction of Patrick, 1979
- Portrait of Alice Neel, 1976-1982
- Chasing the Dragon, 1982
- Flying, 1983
- The Games: Olympic Variations, 1984
- My Last Bag of Heroin (For Real), 1986
- Brooding Angels, Made for R.L., 1988
- Roman Variations, 1991
- Voyage to the Center of the Phone Lines, 1993
- Polariod Cocaine, 1993
- Louis Waldon, 1994
- The Vanuatu Chronicles, 1998
- T.W.U. Richard Serra, An Unsolicited Video by Michel Auder, 1980-82, re-edit 2002
- Louis Waldon in Chronicles: Los Angeles/Bel-Air (July 1999), 2002
- Chronicles: Columbian Wedding (April 1999), 2002
- Morocco 1972: The Real Chronicles with Viva, 2002
- Chronicles: Van's Last Performance, 1971, edited 2002
- The World Out of My Hands, 2006
- New Mexico Chronicles, 2006
- The Feature (with SeeThink Productions), 2007
