Day Eight - Friday (March 14)

Keith Sonnier—In the Cosmos of Colours

Director: Marco Wilms

Germany/2007/26 min/English

Keith Sonnier lives in New York, but is a Cajun raised in a small town in Louisiana, and he tells it, the garish colours of the Creole bars of his youth are the starting point for his light sculpture and installations, always in red, blue, and yellow. Starting with the Lichtweg, a kilometer-long lighted path in the Munich Airport, he started getting serious notice as a large installation artist. Other installations in Germany (an underground passage in the Munich Re complex, and the Berlin Nation Library), and private commissions have followed, and Sonnier is interviewed both in Germany moving through some of his installations, and at home, contemplating the rich light field of New York City.


The Universe of Keith Haring

Director: Christina Clausen

Italy, France/2007/92 min/French, English, German with English subtitles

Haring’s distinctive minimalist lines remain in the international publics’ mind even though he died in 1991 of AIDS at 31. Fusing high art with low, comic book simplicity with graffiti-like subversive presentation, he also used his art to political ends, helping with the fight for government acknowledgment and funding for the AIDS crisis in the early 1980’s, and in the fight against racism and apartheid. Haring’s dictated audio history to his biographer John Gruen and lots of contemporary interviews with his family, friends, and fellow artists is the narrative of Keith’s almost magical rise to fame from his very un-urban upbringing in the small Pennsylvanian town of Kurtztown. There's a good quantity of video clips of him hanging out with friend and mentor Andy Warhol, Grace Jones, and many other Soho artists of the 70’s and 80’s. An interesting historical moment is some footage of Madonna, almost completely unknown, performing at one of the club nights Keith helped arrange.The documentary never feels padded, since Keith lived so large.