A sculptor dabbles in the wetness of his craft while the skies threaten a soaking to the winterized wonderland of a western shoreline.
Words of wisdom issue from the mind of a maligned artist as his calendar of kitsch and comfort flap their pages amid a tempest of sea foam and pigeon wings.
Shrimp is gnawed upon in dwellings of nutritional notoriety while the hunger of more carnal need feeds the mind with fantasies best left as fodder for a more potent farter.
George Kuchar ranks as one of the most exciting and prolific American independent film and videomakers. With his homemade Super 8 and 16mm potboilers and melodramas of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, he became legendary as a distinctive and outrageous underground filmmaker whose work influenced many other artists, including Andy Warhol, John Waters, and David Lynch. After his 1980s transition to video, he remained a master of genre manipulation and subversion, creating hundreds of brilliantly edited, hilarious, observant, often diaristic videos with an 8mm camcorder, dime-store props, not-so-special effects, using friends as actors, and the “pageant that is life” as his studio.
In 1984 Kuchar received the Los Angeles Film Critics Award in the Experimental/Independent category. In 1992, he received the prestigious Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists from the American Film Institute. In 1996 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Chicago Underground Film Festival. He taught at the San Francisco Art Institute for forty years, where he made many videos in collaboration with his students.
"...The best for last, though: the filmmaker George Kuchar... When the day arrives — and it will — to appoint an official United States cultural ambassador to Outer Space, Mr. Kuchar is the obvious choice. I will say no more. See his films. He is beyond enigmatic. He is it. I salute him."
— Holland Cotter, Review of the Good Morning Midnight exhibition at Casey Kaplan Gallery, The New York Times, July 27th, 2007
All title descriptions by George Kuchar unless otherwise noted.
Also see:
The World of George Kuchar, DVD Box Set available for Institutional and Individual Purchase