Hundreds of people packed the galleries last Friday to get a look at our three new exhibitions: Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond, Jane Hammond: Fallen, and Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone. If you were there, tell us what you thought in the comments section. Keep watching this space for a photo gallery from the evening.

Click here to listen to the muxtape!

In 1955 when Bill Haley & His Comet’s “Rock Around the Clock” played over the static opening credits  of Blackboard Jungle, it became the first major studio film to use rock & roll on the soundtrack. Eighteen years later, the way movies use rock music was transformed again when Martin Scorsese synched Harvey Keitel’s head hitting a pillow just as the drums kick start The Ronette’s “Be My Baby” during the opening sequence of Mean Streets. The shift between the two different ways that filmmakers used a film’s images and visual rhythms to viscerally match the accompanying rock music can be heavily attributed to the radical ways that some experimental filmmakers started using rock songs in their work in the early 1960s.

Kenneth Anger’s 1963 film Scorpio Rising (which Anger described as “Thanatos in chrome and black leather and bursting jeans”, and was set to music by Ricky Nelson, Bobby Vinton, Elvis Presley, and others) is often credited – by Scorsese and others – as being the progenitor of this potent fusion of sight & sound; however, San Francisco filmmaker Bruce Conner’s comparatively lesser-known 1961 film Cosmic Ray (set to Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say?”) preceded Scorpio Rising and remains an equally revolutionary work.

Scorpio Rising will be just one of the works screened at the Wexner Center during The Rock & Roll Picture Show this Thursday. Since the early 1980s, music videos have dominated the public imagination for the parameters of pairing music with imagery. While entire strains of music videos have unapologetically co-opted the radical ideas and meanings from early experimental pioneers such as Anger and Conner and turned them into mere technique and offal, the films and videos in The Rock & Roll Picture Show act as an underground or alternative history of the ways that moving images have been and can be fused with rock music of all vintages and styles. The films in the program range from the kinetic to the placid, from the feverish to the cool, from the sacred to the profane. But they all offer up the energizing possibilities of two disciplines – rock and avant garde media - that should always exist on the outskirts of society and respectability coming together to create personal visions and new forms.

Below are some recommended online videos that augment the works and themes of The Rock & Roll Picture Show. These are all great films that didn’t fit into the program in one way or another. (This should be obvious but bears mentioning: Most of the videos below were created to be show as films and shown as projected light, so these digitized copies of a copy of a copy often merely give an idea of what the work is like but don’t capture its true aura.) (more…)

Jellyfish (above) and Sangre de mi Sangre (below)

2008 has been a great at the Wexner Center with number of great filmmakers visiting to introduce and discuss their work including Bonni Cohen with Rape of Europa in January, Spike Lee receiving the Wexner Prize in February, Tom Kalin introducing Savage Grace in March, and Milos Forman introducing Taking Off in April to name just three.

We are bringing in two young and already accomplished filmmakers this month with Israeli writer/director Etgar Keret and Christopher Zalla. Keret will be here on Tuesday, May 6 to introduce his film Jellyfish which captured the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Keret is primarily known as one of the great young authors in Israel and he will do a reading at the Wex at 5pm before the screening of Jellyfish.

Christopher Zalla will be here Tuesday, May 13 to introduce Sangre de mi Sangre, a film that won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. (The film was originally titled Padre Nuestro.)

We’re excited to be presenting the area premieres of both of these award-winning films. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear two up-and-coming filmmakers discuss their work. — Dave Filipi, Wexner Center Film/Video Curator

The National Volunteer Week blog-a-thon continues today with comments from members of our inimitable docent team. Thanks to Tracie McCambridge, Educator for Docent and Teacher Programs, for compiling the comments.
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Our series of National Volunteer Week blogs continues with a volunteering primer (and some heartfelt thanks) from the House Management team. Read on:

Our ushers take an active role in supporting the Wexner Center by answering questions about our facilities and programs, as well as helping direct our guests to their proper seats. We see a little bit of everything and everybody here, and if you volunteer you’ll get to see it all too. From getting the first look at new exhibits during our gallery openings to laughing and learning from a wide array of children’s programming and educational lectures to viewing rare films as well as area premieres to enjoying theater and music from all over the U.S. and abroad at our performing arts shows, ushering with us allows volunteers the opportunity to keep their finger on the pulse of the art world for free.
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Click here to see the entire gallery.

Our celebration of National Volunteer Week continues today with an interview between usher Ryan Pavolvicz and Patron Services Coordinator Helyn Dell.
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We’ve assembled a great video about Jeff Smith, Bone, and the upcoming exhibition Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond. Click here to see the video.

Also just added to our store is the accompanying catalog to the exhibition, Bone and Beyond. Published in conjunction with the Wexner Center and Cartoon Research Library’s 2008 exhibition, this hardcover catalogue presents work featured in the show, including examples of Smith’s original drawings for Bone, plus the more recent Shazam and Rasl. There’s also essays by Neil Gaiman and Scott McCloud. Click here to order.

We continue to celebrate National Volunteer Week with this story about the volunteer experience by Wexner Center usher and community docent Dolores Blankenship:

I retired as a Columbus Middle School Principal on July 1, 1994, after 40 years in education as a classroom music teacher and administrator. I wanted to remain active–participating, contributing, involved, and serving others–to support the arts, and to be a lifelong learner.

I immediately contacted the Wexner Center and, by September 1994, was busy as a docent and as a volunteer usher. I have continued these activities to the present, including leading tours of the reopening exhibition, Part Object Part Sculpture, and ushering at various performing arts events.
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This week on the blog (in honor of National Volunteer Week): Find out what motivates Wexner Center volunteers in a weeklong series of stories. You might just want to join in the camaraderie, and you can find out how on the volunteer page of wexarts.org. Please also join us in thanking all the Wexner Center’s volunteer ushers, community docents, and other volunteers for sharing their time and talents with us, during National Volunteer Week, April 27–May 3, 2008 and all year long.

The first story comes from docent Jean Mervis:
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