From a 2017 portrait in Interview
Michel Auder has seen the world. Raised in the north of France (like in Coal Miner’s Daughter, as he once described his solitary childhood), the 73-year-old artist began his career as a commercial fashion photographer in Paris. He spent a brief time as a combat photographer in Algeria before garnering support as a filmmaker from the leftist film collective Zanzibar Group in the late 1960s. But it was at a screening of Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls in 1968 where a meeting with the pop artist emboldened his own self-taught approach to multimedia art—and indirectly introduced him to the Warhol superstar Viva, whom he married in Las Vegas soon after.
Some of Auder’s early works have been lost forever; many, however, have survived. In his experimental 1970 film Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen’s zoo has been transposed into a pet enthusiast’s room at New York’s Chelsea Hotel; the desert is made of Manhattan snow; and characters speed by on snowmobiles. Filmed on 16mm and operatic in scale, Auder’s version of the Cleopatra story foreshadowed his decades of making art out of his own lived experience. Another of Auder’s early films, Keeping Busy (1969), responded to Warhol’s blank, impassive filmmaking style with a celebratory “home movie” of superstars on holiday. The title suggests one of the artist’s manic talents; together, his works create a cohesive structure out of a flurry of uncomposed moments, out of the disorder of time, out of all of the things that dissolve when you’re living your life. Auder’s works are records of doing just that.
| Credit Type | Production | Season |
|---|---|---|
| Actor | The Connection | 1980-81 Season |