Loading titles…
No cast information available.
The documentary follows Nicolas Vlavianos (1929-2022), a renowned sculptor, in the final years of his life. It captures the moment — when he is around 90 years old — that he returns to an old drawer, tries to pick up his tools, and realizes he no longer has the strength to hold them. That simple gesture becomes the symbolic trigger: the end of his long creative cycle and the beginning of a farewell to his art. From there, the film documents the dismantling of Vlavianos’s studio and workspace, and the gradual process of his withdrawal from physical creation. It’s not just a retrospective of works: it’s a portrait of decline, memory, mortality, and legacy.
“In this legendary sculpture/performance Acconci lay beneath a ramp built in the Sonnabend Gallery. Over the course of three weeks, he masturbated eight hours a day while murmuring things like, "You're pushing your cunt down on my mouth" or "You're ramming your cock down into my ass." Not only does the architectural intervention presage much of his subsequent work, but all of Acconci's fixations converge in this, the spiritual sphincter of his art. In Seedbed Acconci is the producer and the receiver of the work's pleasure. He is simultaneously public and private, making marks yet leaving little behind, and demonstrating ultra-awareness of his viewer while being in a semi-trance state.” – Jerry Saltz (via: http://www.ubu.com/film/acconci_seedbed.html)
The sculptor and painter Agueda Lozano narrates the first contacts with plastic art that she had in her native Ciudad Cuauhtémoc, Chihuahua; her stay in France and how was her arrival in Europe; her return to Mexico, and her participation in important exhibitions and sculpture projects, among which the definitive insertion sculpture that she inaugurated in the Plaza de México in Paris stands out. Likewise, she talks about her works in the Payment in Kind Collection, about the characters that promoted and inspired her in her career, and about her aesthetic proposals and creation techniques.
The Arts Council commissioned this film to coincide with their major retrospective of Giacometti's work at the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) in the summer of 1965. A similar exhibition was held concurrently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, sealing the artist's reputation as a modern master.
The people of Antiquity had little problem with nudity and would not find graphic depictions of sexual acts as morally suspect or obscene. But Christianity changed perspectives, bringing in notions of shame and the negation of the body. This documentary looks at the erotic in art over the last two thousand years.
