Ezra Maas: An Oral History
Part Four
Artists, writers, journalists, photographers, critics, friends, and others, who were around Maas during the years 1956 to 1996, give their impressions of the artist. Interviews by Daniel James.
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Frederick Lavery, owner of the Four Square gallery in Bruges, Belgium, where Maas painted and exhibited in the late 1970s.
FL: Even when he was a young man, there was something ancient in his eyes, as if he had lived a lifetime in his youth.
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Terence Jones, award-winning cinematographer, producer, and filmmaker, who worked on films including Apocalypse Now, Mrs and Mrs McCabe, The French Connection, and The Conversation.
TJ: Film? I don’t know, man. You’ll have to be more specific. Maas made a lot of films, video installations, experimental pieces, that kind of thing. He had them playing on a loop at his exhibitions. Later, he moved into longer, more ambitious pieces. He liked to cast actors as real people and then he’d swap their roles around, so the scenes had an unreal, disjointed feel. A character would walk into a scene as one person and would leave as another. Nothing was permanent. Everything was interchangeable. Everyone was playing a role. “We’re all somebody else”. That was something he used to say. His films were more visual art than narrative-based, very experimental, but people went nuts for them, obsessing over each frame and the possible hidden meanings. You know, now you mention it, there was a story going around about one of his films. Apparently, whoever watched it was left so traumatised and disturbed they were physically sick – seizures, vomiting, insomnia, even bleeding through the skin. Other people supposedly suffered long-term, post-traumatic effects. Who knows how much of it was real? It was great PR. The Maas Foundation started to say that the film was just one of a series and that watching it would “change your reality”. The official line was that the film was destroyed when they found out it was making people ill, but I heard that bootleg copies were made and exchanged by hardcore fans, who would watch it in groups as some sort of sick initiation ritual. I never saw the film myself. It was probably just an urban myth, but it’s creepy, right? Is that the kind of thing you were after?
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Robert Mina, a West Coast music promoter who was based in LA in the 1970s.
RM: I heard he met with Kenneth Anger, the filmmaker and friend of Church of Satan Anton LeVey, and that he visited Charles Manson in prison. There was a lot of talk of black magic and occult practices at the time.
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Philip Macdonald, an LA-based photographer who encountered Maas in 1973.
PM: When I met him, his skin was grey and stretched over his face like a mask. He looked like a lifeless wraith. I heard he was living on a diet of heroin and milk.
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Lucy Lehane, a filmmaker who first met Maas in 1969.
LL: Maas had a certain style about him, like a 1950s heart-throb. His hair was dark and wavy, and he liked to wear white, muscle-fit t-shirts, and dark-denim, often paint splattered, when he was working in his studio. There was definitely a touch of Marlon Brando or James Dean about him. In later years, he grew a beard and let his hair grow fashionably long, making him look more like a woodsman than an artist.
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Rick Connelly, a painter from New York who was on the scene in 1966.
RC: Not everyone on the Greenwich Village scene was convinced by Maas at first. I heard quite a few people say things like, “who the hell does this kid think he is?” He was barely seventeen and there he was holding court, telling us what the future of art was going to be. Some people thought he was a cocky little upstart. They accused him of being a pathological liar because of the wild stories he would tell about his past, but for every person who felt this way, there were twenty more who adored him.
END OF PART FOUR