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The Atomic Sublime

Presented by International House Philadelphia at The Ibrahim Theater at International House

August 6, 2011

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Jesse Lerner is a documentary film and video maker based in Los Angeles. His work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Sydney Biennale, and the Sundance Film Festival, Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, the Los Angeles International Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and other festivals and museums internationally. His films Natives (1991), Frontierland/Fronterilandia (1995), Ruins (1999) and The American Egypt (2001) have won numerous prizes at film festivals in the US, Latin America and Japan. The Atomic Sublime, dir. Jesse Lerner, US, 2010, digiBeta, 72 mins, b/w and color. This stimulating found footage essay shows how politics has guided the development of modern art in the US. Using found footage, The Atomic Sublime focuses on the intersections between Cold War politics and the rise of New York abstract expressionism. While the Soviet Union tolerated figurative painting, in opposition, the US started to promote abstraction as an emblem of capitalist democracy. “Threatening” abstract expressionism was assimilated by the government and used for propaganda, as the personification of the Western ideal of freedom. The debate rarely addressed the artworks themselves is it provided a new arena to cultivate ideological differences.