Gerard Malanga

Gerard Malanga in 2007. Photo by Eddie Janssens. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Gerard Malanga
File:Gerard Malanga & Archie (2005).jpg Gerard Malanga & Archie (2005). Photo by Asako Kitaori
Born	Gerard Joseph Malanga 20, 1943 (1943-03-20) The Bronx, New York, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	School of Industrial Art
Alma mater	Wagner College
Occupation	Poet, photographer, filmmaker, curator and archivist

Gerard Joseph Malanga (born March 20, 1943) is an American poet, photographer, filmmaker, curator and archivist.

Life

Youth and education

Malanga was born in the Bronx, New York City, in 1943, the only child of Italian immigrant parents.

In 1959, at the beginning of his senior year at the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan, Malanga became a regular on Alan Freed's show The Big Beat, televised on Channel 5 in New York City.

He graduated from high school with a major in Advertising Design in 1960. He was introduced to poetry by his senior class English teacher, poet Daisy Aldan, who had a profound influence on his life and work from then on.

He enrolled at the University of Cincinnati's College of Art & Design (1960), and was mentored by Richard Eberhart who was the university's resident poet for 1961. He dropped out at the end of the Spring semester.

In the fall of 1961, Malanga was admitted to Wagner College in Staten Island on a fellowship anonymously donated for the express purpose of advancing his creative abilities as a poet and artist. At Wagner he befriended an English professor, Willard Maas, and his wife Marie Menken, who became his mentors.

In June 1963, Malanga went to work for Andy Warhol as "a summer job that lasted seven years," as he likes to put it. Malanga dropped out of Wagner College in 1964, freeing him up to work for Warhol full-time.

Andy Warhol and The Factory

Gerard Malanga *

Gerard Malanga worked closely with Warhol during that artist's most creative period, from 1963 to 1970. A February 17, 1992 article in The New York Times referred to him as "Andy Warhol's most important associate."

Malanga was involved in all phases of Warhol's creative output in silkscreen painting and filmmaking. He acted in many of the early Warhol films, including Vinyl, Chelsea Girls, and Kiss; and co-produced Bufferin (1967) in which he reads his poetry, deemed to be the longest spoken word movie on record at 33-minutes nonstop.

Malanga and Warhol collaborated on the nearly 500 individual 3-minute "Screen Tests," which resulted in a selection for a book of the same name, published by Kulchur Press, in 1967. It should be noted that neither Warhol or Malanga were photographers at the time. Thus, by virtue of their collaboration with the motion picture medium, creating in what amounted to post-photographs, they became professional photographers.

In 1966, he choreographed the music of the Velvet Underground for Warhol's multimedia presentation, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. In 1969, Malanga was one of the founding editors, along with Warhol and John Wilcock, of Interview magazine. In December 1970, Malanga left Warhol's studio to pursue his work in photography.

Creative practice

Malanga's photography spans over four decades and encompasses portraits, nudes and the urban documentation of "New York's Changing Scene," a phrase which he adapted from Margot Gayle, an architectural historian and advocate, whose Sunday News column of the same name had a direct bearing on the development of his photographic eye.

Malanga has always sought someone who was rarely photographed or placed in situations and surroundings unique to the pictures he was shooting. Within the first six years of taking pictures he managed to create three of the most prominent portraits of post-modern photography: Charles Olson for the interview he made with Olson for The Paris Review (1969); Iggy Pop nude in the penthouse apartment they shared one summer weekend (1971); and William Burroughs in front of the corporate headquarters that bears his family name (1975). All in all, he has photographed and archived hundreds of poets and artists over the years. He is also a photographer of a number of 1sts, including Herbert Gericke, the last farmer of Staten Island (1981); and Jack Kerouac's typewritten roll for On the Road (1983).

In his introduction to Malanga's 1st monograph, Resistance to Memory (Arena Editions, 1998), Photo historian and poet Ben Maddow said: "Malanga has that great essential virtue of the photographer: humility before the complex splendor of the real thing… Malanga is the photo-historian of this culture."

In reviewing Malanga's groundbreaking book 2 years later, Screen Tests Portraits Nudes, 1964-1996 (Steidl), Fred McDarrah remarked that "Malanga is among the elite editors and photographers who have long dazzled and propelled the New York avant garde."

During the course of his years working with Warhol and after, Malanga shot and produced 12 films of his own. His personal archive contains still and motion-picture records of life at The Factory.

Publications

Poetry

• Three Poems for Benedetta Barzini. New York: Angel Hair Books, 1967.
• The Last Benedetta Poems. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1969.
• 10 Poems for 10 Poets. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1970.
• chic death. Cambridge, MA: Pym-Randall, 1971.
• Wheels of Light: Poems. Upper Dharmala, India: White Light, 1972.
• Nine Poems for César Vallejo: The poetry of night, dawn and dream. New York: Vanishing Rotating Triangle, 1972.
• Licht / Light (bilingual). Gottingen, Germany: Expanded Media Editions, 1973.
• 22. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1974.
• Incarnations: Poems, 1965-1971. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1974.
• Rosebud: Poems. Lincoln, MA: Pensman Press, 1975.
• Devotion. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1976.
• Leaping Over Gravestones. Hardwicke, MA: Four Zoas Press, [1976?]
• Ten Years After: The selected Benedetta poems. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1977.
• 100 Years Have Passed: Prose poems. Los Angeles: Little Cesar Press, 1978.
• This Will Kill That. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1983.
• Three Diamonds. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1991.
• Mythologies of the Heart. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1996.
• No Respect: New and selected poems, 1964-2000. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 2001.
• AM: Archives Malanga. (4 volumes), Dagon James / Key Press, 2011.

Photography

• Screen Tests: A diary (with Andy Warhol). New York: Kulchur, 1967.
• Poetry on Film. New York: Telegraph Books, 1972.
• Photo-Portraits. Houston, TX: Institute for the Arts, Rice University, 1972.
• Six Portraits. New York: Nadada Editions, 1975.
• Scopophilia: The love of looking. New York: Alfred van der Marck Editions, 1985.
• Good Girls. Tokyo : Kawade Shoboshinsha, 1994.
• Seizing the Moment: Photographs. Tokyo : Kawade Shoboshinsha, 1996.
• Resistance to Memory. Santa Fe, NM: Arena Editions, 1998.
• Screen Tests, Portraits, Nudes, 1964-1996. Gottingen, Germany: Steidl, 2000.
• Archiving Warhol: An illustrated edition. London & New York: Creation, 2002.
• Someone's Life. London: Morel Books, 2008.
• Long Day's Journey into the Past (with Gunnar B. Kvaran). Milan, Italy: Skira, 2008.
• Souls: Photographs. Cambridge, MA: Pierre Menard Gallery, 2010.
• Thermofax. New York: Feather Press, 2013.
• Photobooths. New York: Waverley Press, 2013.

Translated

• Cesar Vallejo, Malanga Chasing Vallejo: New translations and notes. New York: Three Rooms Press, 2014.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Audio / video

Gerard Malanga - THIS NEVER HAPPENS - 1995 - video Patrick Baele

GERARD MALANGA POEMS VIDEO WILLIAM PARKER

Gerard Malanga reading his poetry

Films

• Academy Leader (1964)
• Andy Warhol: Portraits of the artist as a young man (1965)
• Prelude to International Velvet Debutante (1966)
• Portrait of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (1966). World premiere: Vienna International Film Festival, 2005.
• In Search of the Miraculous (1967)
• The Recording Zone Operator (1968, incomplete)
• The filmmaker records a portion of his life in the month of August (1968)
• Preraphaelite Dream (with music by Angus MacLise, 1968)
• The Children (AFI grant with music by Angus MacLise, 1969)
• April Diary (1970)
• Vision (incorporating Bufferin, 1976)
• Gerard Malanga's Film Notebooks, with music by Angus MacLise (2005). World premiere: Vienna International Film Festival, 2005.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• Gerard Malanga b. 1943 at the Poetry Foundation
• Gerard Malanga at PoemHunter (4 poems)

Books

• Gerard Malanga at Amazon.com

About

• Gerard Malanga Official website.
• Gerard Malanga at the Internet Movie Database
• 2002 Interview, 3:AM Magazine
• 2004 Interview, Rain Taxi Review of Books
• 2009 Interview, Smithsonian Magazine
• I'll Be Your Mirror,interview at the Poetry Foundation], 2011
• 2011 Gerard Malanga interview at The Paris Review, 2011.

Etc.

• Guide to the Gerard Malanga Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
• A Purchase in the White Botanica: The Collected Poetry of Piero Heliczer, (2001), Granary Books.