“Everybody form of began out on the road, after which sure folks turned very profitable and really hierarchical, and Edward simply wasn’t having it,” painter Frank Holliday tells filmmaker Brian Vincent within the documentary Make Me Well-known. The story Holliday sketches in that one sentence portrays Nineteen Eighties East Village neo-expressionist Edward Brezinski as a quintessential ravenous artist—a painter of integrity whose refusal to promote out precluded his personal stardom.
Vincent doesn’t argue with Holliday, and his movie not less than entertains this mythic model of Brezinski, who’s in contrast in passing to Van Gogh. Because the title Make Me Well-known signifies, the documentary additionally acknowledges Brezinski’s ambition and his goals of getting off the road and greedy a few of that success for himself. In the long run, the story Vincent tells just isn’t actually about an missed genius. As an alternative, it’s about how our insistence on framing genius as a sure or no query reliably and effectively destroys the human beings who make artwork.
Brezinski (born Brzezinski in 1954) grew up in Michigan. His father was most likely an alcoholic, his mom was distant and help for homosexual youngsters in that point and place was minimal. He studied on the San Francisco Institute of Artwork after which moved to Manhattan’s Decrease East Facet, the place he lived throughout from a males’s homeless shelter and have become a part of the rising arts scene.
Brezinski’s second of biggest notoriety got here in 1989, when he attended a solo exhibit for Robert Gober at Paula Cooper Gallery. One of many items on show was a precise reproduction of a bag of donuts; Brezinski reached inside and ate one. Gober had handled the donuts with a poisonous preservative, and Brezinski needed to be rushed to the hospital. Afterward, he contacted the press, and the story turned an artwork world legend.
The incident, within the context of the documentary, neatly encapsulates the mix of fierce dedication, shallow envy, failure and substance abuse that characterised Brezinski’s profession. A passionate painter in surprisingly conventional modes (he’s maybe finest recognized for his portraits and his crucifixion scenes), he was enraged to see the success of Gober’s pop artwork/Dada-inspired work. In all probability drunk, he ate the donut as a form of protest; he claimed, tongue-in-cheek, that he couldn’t inform them from the refreshments. Successfully, Brezinski participated in Gober’s business pop artwork spectacle; the one method he might turn out to be recognized was to acceptable another person’s idea, turning his again on his personal expertise and work in an alcohol-fueled fugue of arch disavowal and despair.
Brezinski was very disillusioned by the top of the ‘80s. However even earlier within the decade, the documentary chronicles the push/pull between his hatred of sellouts and his need to turn out to be one. Quite a few acquaintances discuss his incessant, pushy, gauche self-promotion; at openings, he would move out self-made invitations to his personal gallery reveals, and he requested just about anybody who visited his house/studio to purchase his work. On the identical time, he was a perfectionist who would typically destroy his personal work if he thought it didn’t measure up. Since he was a portrait painter, this typically meant asking different artists and artwork world folks—colleagues and potential connections—to take a seat for him for hours earlier than trashing the work with out even letting them see them.
Nobody within the documentary is precisely prepared to say that the artwork Brezinski did end was groundbreaking or Vital with a capital I. But a lot of his efforts are eye-catching and spectacular. An expressionist portray of Nancy Reagan, for instance, has a putting, Warhol-esque high quality with a mocking, evocative edge—Brezinski appears to be celebrating Nancy as a form of homosexual icon at the same time as he sneers at her for her and her husband’s callous indifference to homosexual folks and the AIDS disaster. The Nancy portray isn’t remembered as a defining picture of the period, nevertheless it might have been. “What’s the nice distinction between a Kenny Scharf portray and an Ed Brezinski portray?” curator Annina Nosei asks.
Perhaps the distinction is that Brezinski as soon as tossed a glass of wine on Nosei in revenge after she failed to point out up for a gallery appointment. Being an asshole can lose you gigs, although Brezinski was hardly the one asshole, or the one drunk, within the East Village. So possibly the distinction is simply luck and being in the precise place on the proper time. Fame and fortune are a roll of the cube; get the precise quantity and also you’re all people’s darling. Get the unsuitable one and also you’re no one.
The movie itself chronicles this calculus and infrequently questions it. “These folks [with money] went out and exploited these folks [artists], and if they may make them repay, then advantageous, and in the event that they couldn’t repay, then they dumped them,” actor and curator Patti Astor feedback with cheerful bitterness. When the filmmaker asks her why nobody needed to use Brezinski, she laughs.
Maybe the snicker is as a result of Astor thinks Brezinski wasn’t price exploiting. Or possibly she laughs as a result of she is conscious that Brezinski was, the truth is, exploited. An artwork scene, in spite of everything, requires sub-superstars: individuals who contribute concepts, ardour and venues; individuals who present your work and lend you their work to point out; individuals who argue about what’s good and what isn’t; individuals who function muses and take you in your muse; individuals who create a neighborhood round artwork and goals, hope and imaginative and prescient.
Brezinski participated enthusiastically within the scene that launched Keith Haring and Basquiat and his buddy David Wojnarowicz to fame. And for his pains, he obtained little respect, little love and a pauper’s grave in France, the place he died penniless and alone in 2007 on the age of 52. The Reagan administration’s callous disregard of AIDS was merely an extension of the administration’s, and the tradition’s, indifference to the lives of creators and homosexual folks. We study late within the movie that Brezinski’s cash troubles may need been solved by an inheritance had he not been estranged from his household. However after all, queer individuals are typically estranged from their households, which is why queer individuals are disproportionately poor.
If the U.S., or New York State, or New York Metropolis, had an actual arts coverage and valued all artists slightly than the choose few who might be become funding alternatives, possibly Brezinski would nonetheless be alive. As an alternative, the U.S. has elected a president who hates the humanities and LGBT folks much more than Reagan did. Relatively than cultivating and celebrating creators with expertise, drive and goals, we appear decided to create an infinite carousel of Brezinskis, every of whom we’re decided to strangle with the entrails of their very own goals.
Make Me Well-known is a tragic movie as a result of Brezinski needed to be well-known and was not. It’s an enraging movie as a result of it reveals the extent to which we devalue and despise the humanities and all of the non-famous individuals who create them.
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