Burlington Standard

University Of Vermont And State Agricultural College issued the following announcement.

Artist and filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax explores sex and death—and what happens “when you put them in the same place,” he says. “That raises the possibility for birth and reproduction in the same place as death. And that's an interesting conversation to me—and that's an idea that I put out into the world and let people think about.”

Minax—an associate professor of time-based media in UVM’s Department of Art and Art History—was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that will support the development of his work and extend its reach.

 “Getting this award is a huge honor, one of the best recognitions you can get as an artist or academic in the United States and I’m pretty stoked about it,” he says. “It will help move my work forward in the world.”

Minax was selected in April by the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from among a diverse group of 180 exceptional artists, scholars, scientists, writers, and other highly creative people—out of almost 2500 applicants.

“A faculty member receiving a fellowship as distinguished as a Guggenheim is a special point of pride for the university,” says UVM president Suresh Garimella. “Madsen is one of the shining lights in our institution’s remarkably talented arts faculty, and we are thrilled by this well-earned recognition for him.”

Ideas not stories

In Minax’s most recent film, North By Current, an 86-minute feature, he returns to his hometown in rural Michigan after the enigmatic death of his young niece. He was “preparing to make a film about a broken criminal justice system,” Minax notes, but instead he pivots to “excavate the depths of generational addiction, Christian fervor, and trans embodiment.”

The film had its world premiere at Berlinale, an international film festival in Germany, where it was nominated for both a Teddy Award and a Best Documentary Award. The film premiered in the United States at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film was acquired by POV and broadcast nationally on PBS in November of 2021.

“It’s a film about my family and the tenuous threads between birth and death and relationality in the world: basic human ideas,” Minax says. “I wouldn't bring Freud into the conversation, but putting sex and sexuality and death into public conversation is not new. It's been happening since long before AIDS. So I'm not doing something new as much as I am, like, bringing a perspective to it that is different.”

That perspective has taken Minax across territory that covers “queer and trans intimacies, chosen and biological structures of kinship, metaphysical and technological phenomena, archival documents, and speculative imagination,” he writes. And it has led to projects that span “documentary filmmaking, narrative cinema, essay film, media installation, sound and music, performance, text and collective practices,” he notes.

Madsen's works have shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Leslie Lohman Museum, Tom of Finland Institute, Anthology Film Archives, the British Film Institute, KurzFilm Hamburg, the European Media Art Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Berwick Media Arts Festival, Alchemy Festival of Moving Image, and dozens of LGBT film festivals around the world.

“I don’t tell stories,” Minax says. “I explore ideas and concepts. Stories imply narratives, and narratives imply frameworks, and it gets messy. So I try to think through how I can investigate ideas in ways that are meaningful to me—in ways that employ humor and strategy and technique, and also very complex thought systems.”

Fakir Musafar

Minax is currently at work on a new project about a performance artist, photographer, and cultural icon named Fakir Musafar. “Making films costs a lot more money than some other forms of art practice,” Minax says, so he’s planning on using his Guggenheim award—in addition to support from a grant from UVM’s College of Arts and Sciences—to work on this project about Musafar, who died in 2018 at age 87.

A self-portrait of Fakir Musafar, taken in 1959, wearing a corset, and titled "The Perfect Gentleman." (Photo: Fakir Musafar via Madsen Minax)  

“He's responsible for bringing body modification to queer subculture in colonial North America,” Minax says. “He opened one of the first body-piercing studios in the United States. He was a radical fairy.” Minax is exploring this history through Fakir’s archive, which he’s been given access to—and also through historic 16-milimeter static film portraits, “of the communities that engaged in these practices,” mixed with current footage of “those folks, who are now in their eighties and nineties, and most of them are in pretty poor health,” Minax says.

Fakir was born Roland Loomis in 1930 in South Dakota and collaged his new name and identity from various spiritual practices, Minax says: Indian, Arabic, Indonesian and Native American. “He co-opted rituals and applied sexual ideas and pleasure-based ideas to indigenous ritual—and how those indigenous rituals could be transformed into body rites and how those body rites could be used as rites of passage in queer communities,” Minax says. “He was a really complicated figure.”

Minax describes himself as an experimental filmmaker, but one who uses conventional cinematic gestures, creating work that is “full of feeling and heart, that hits people in an emotive way,” he says, “that anyone can resonate with or connect to in different ways.”

Madsen Minax is not sure that art has the power to change the world. “I think that’s a concept that’s up for grand debate. Depending on the time of day, I could change my mind and say, ‘yes, art has the power to change everything.’ This morning, I’m not really in that camp,” he says, laughing. “I do think I present ideas in ways that haven’t been presented before, and concepts that many people have never considered—and that’s meaningful to me.”

Original source can be found here.