If you
ever find yourself having coffee with Bill Rabinovitch, be sure to ask him
about his days flying fighter jets. It’ll take him a moment to conjure his
previous incarnation and he’ll probably iterate that he never did any fighting,
having left the Air Force before he could be ordered to do so. When I asked he
opened his portfolio, turned past four decades of his art to the last page and
pulled out a color 8 x 11 photograph of a Bill Rabinovitch, four decades
younger, hair shorter, cleanly shaved, dressed in uniform and sitting in the
cockpit of a Cessna T-37A.
By the
mid-sixties, not long after the picture was taken, Bill had entered and exited
another incarnation–this one as a space engineer living in Cambridge. "I
used to do drawings and I just had this inner need to express myself," he
explains. "And I thought, spiritually for me there’d somehow be some kind
of a line-up with painting which would get at some of the deeper things."
So he sold
his Porsche, moved to San Francisco and found a place in Haight Ashbury six
months before it exploded. Spent countless hours visiting museums and reading
books giving himself a second education in art history and criticism. He
painted endlessly. He was an expressionist. Every contest Bill entered, he won.
He moved to Monterey, married a musician and the couple survived on her piano
lessons and his art sales. He’d set up shop in a studio on Cannery Row; most of
his clientele were travelers along the Pacific Coast. After a particularly good
year, he and his wife went to Europe where they camped for several months. Upon
their return to Monterey they found that the studio on Cannery Row had burned
to the ground. If you ask him more about it, he’ll silently decline.
It was
during his "second education" Bill found the icon whose life and own
transformation would be the subject of his first full-length feature. Pollock
Squared is
Rabinovitch’s sprawling and curious digital video epic. It’s part history, it’s
part myth and it’s five years into production. The first scene is the most
telling: Pollock, dead, lies sprawled on the ground after his drunken crash,
but is brought back to life by The Muse.
"Pollock
was always an important figure to me because he actually changed the way art
was seen in America. He was an instrumental force for all the artists who came
after him. He was a trail-blazer in what he did, in his painting style and
breaking through barriers."
It’s not
surprising Bill would respond so strongly to an artist who was not only a
"trail-blazer" but also a highly contentious figure as well. When
Bill decided to leave the corporate world and devote his life to painting, it
was out of a need for self-expression. As the years went and he completed
painting after painting he found that his need for self-expression could not be
confined just to his canvases. When he moved to New York, the need grew and
would eventually culminate into what would be called The Whitney Counter
Weight in 1977.
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> It was counter-programming to the
Whitney Biennial. He found the programming predictable, safe and unacceptable,
no matter that he was member of the Whitney’s Independent Study program. "I
was attacking what I perceived to be the bureaucracy of the corporate structure
which was really starting to sway the way the art world works—it wasn’t so much
the artists anymore selecting the artists," he says. "Of course that
had a special reverberation with me because I’d experience this with big
corporations when I worked in industry." The Whitney Counter Weight
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>might have seemed like a joke at
first, but only at first. It struck a chord with artists from all over the
country who submitted works. "Newspapers from across the countries
featured the show. Every single critic in attendance said we had done something
really important."
While Pollock
Squared is Bill’s
first feature, he’s had extensive experience with video production. In 1993 he
took the reigns of a television show covering the New York art world aptly
titled Art Scene.
He’d gather footage from various art shows, gallery openings and edited
segments together using two decks in his loft on Mercer Street. But it wasn’t
creative enough for him, so he started shooting off-beat plays he’d written,
plays about imagined scenarios between important artists and intellectuals of
the 20th century, including Einstein and Picasso, Schiele and
Matisse, and Kahlo. There was no crew (save for Bill and his 8mm camera), the
actors were artist friends of his, and the main location was Bill’s loft. It
was quick and spontaneous; sometimes he’d complete two projects inside of a
week. "It turned out the audience wasn’t so much interested in these other
shows," he laughs, "but this
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>they looked up, especially when I
had naked models, stuff like that." The shows gained Bill some notoriety
and soon he set his sites on something larger.
"I
decided maybe I could make a real film about Pollock." Bill had been friends
with Barnaby Ruhe, an artist who according to Bill’s website "looks more
like Pollock than Pollock." Not only that, but Barnaby had a theatrical
background, was a powerful intellectual and also a lot of fun (he is a world
boomerang champion). Bill had found his Pollock, although "at first he
didn’t get it," Bill recalls, "but then I told him ‘no man, you’re a
miracle, you’re good man, we could do something serious.’ "
The next
and obvious question became "who will play Lee Krasner?" Enter Lisa
Renko, another artist with whom Bill was acquainted with. He ran into her at a
Deitch Projects opening in 1998, and as he tells it: "It was as if I had
an epiphany as I suddenly realized she was perfect. Her presence suggested she
had the brains, beauty & balls to do it." Lisa eagerly agreed to be
Bill’s "Lee."
The more
Bill ruminated on the project the larger and more expansive he came to see it.
He cast more modern day artists to play the artists of Pollock’s time,
including Adrien Meyer as DeKooning, Lee Klein as Clem Greenberg and Willoughby
Sharp as Sidney Janis to name a few. He was even able to garner support from
the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. Artist Ruth Kligman, Pollock’s
girlfriend and the only one who survived the crash, gave him feedback on one of
the edits.
Bill soon
had the idea of counter-pointing Pollock’s life with the current art world,
which posed an interesting and obvious dilemma. "I suddenly saw I was up
against a wall, because Pollock died in a car crash, so wherever I could take
this thing he was going to die in the car crash and be the end of the
story," Bill recalls. "Suddenly this one night I had this brainstorm
and thought, he’s not going to die in the car crash; he’s going to survive the car crash,
therefore I can take the whole story forward past 1956. Then I could have this
background story of Pollock’s take on the art world."
Pollock
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> is alive and still a work in
progress. When we sat down for coffee I was lucky enough to see fifteen minutes
of the one hundred and twenty hours of footage Bill has collected over the
years. If those fifteen minutes are any indication, then Bill Rabinovitch’s Pollock
Squared will prove
to be something quite exceptional. Pollock fighting with Picasso, Pollock
loving and fighting with Krasner, Pollock painting, Flash animation Pollock
crashing and of course Pollock brought back to life by The Muse. Find out more
at (www.pollocksquared.com).
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