Last week I popped in at the opening of the NLE Curatorial Lab show “Gathering Place” on West 8th Street. It was packed so unfortunately I didn’t get a great look at the work. But there was one room with a video screen that wasn’t too crowded. On the screen Ira Sachs’s Last Address was playing. This is an elegant short film which you can also see at lastaddress.org.
The film consists of a collection of shots of buildings taken from dawn to evening. Each building was the last address of a NYC artist who died of AIDS. Contained in the simplicity of the shots is a poetry of presence, loss, and enduring. Despite the static set-ups the buildings are animated by ambient sounds and movement. Reflections of clouds move over the windows. Birds alight and land on windowsills. People come and go through the lobby doors. Life goes on all around. The film suggests that what we have lost — like the work of these artists and the lives that they lived — is not gone completely. Rather it’s incorporated into the living present of the city. The quiet beauty of this film brought to mind lines of a poem I came across recently.
That it be gentle saying the simplest and least intended thing
That it be ardent like a tearless sob
That it have the beauty of almost scentless flowers.
-from Last Poem by Manuel Banderia