Barbara Rubin: The Vanished Prodigy

By Daniel Belasco

Barbara Rubin’s 29-minute Christmas on Earth is the filmic record of an orgy staged in a New York City apartment in 1963. This double projection of overlapping images of nude men and women clowning around and making love is one of the first sexually explicit works in the American postwar avant-garde. Today Christmas on Earth generates a small but passionate discourse in avant-garde film circles (1). Many consider it to be an essential document of queer and feminist cinema (2), though others dismiss it as the worthless effort of a naive amateur (3). It is still largely unknown to art history. Christmas on Earth in fact deserves to be located within a larger esthetic discourse on contemporary art forms such as Happenings, expanded cinema, and installation. Rubin “was one of the first people to get multimedia interest going around New York,” Andy Warhol said (4). Further, Rubin’s filmmaking practices were a type of performance and sexual agitprop that foreshadowed the emergence of critical body art at the end of the 1960s. An investigation into the little-known history of Barbara Rubin and her singular work Christmas on Earth deepens our understanding of a period when artists pushed self-determined and guiltless sexuality into the public sphere to catalyze social revolution.

Until now, little has been published about her life and work (5) Her whirlwind of activity in the United States and Europe between 1963 and 1968 is scantily documented and leavened with well-varnished adoration, myth, secrecy and antipathy. Much of what is known about Rubin derives from publications by and about her friends and collaborators Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground. This article introduces new biographical information from a variety of sources, including interviews by the author, as well as unpublished interviews, memoirs and other ephemera assembled by Mekas for his long-planned issue of Film Culture dedicated to Rubin, and Rubin’s letters and scripts located in the Allen Ginsberg Papers at Stanford University. Rubin’s oeuvre is tiny: her collection at Anthology Film Archives includes only Christmas on Earth, two 3-minute untitled rolls, and the rarely seen final 18-minute work, Emouna (6). Rubin’s film footage of famous visitors to the Factory like Donovon and Dylan, circa 1965 and early 1966, are incorporated in Gerard Malanga’s Film Notebooks, a 27-minute film that premieres at the Vienna International Film Festival, October 2005 (7). Other films that Rubin shot while in Warhol’s circle, called the “Up-Tight” series, are in the Museum of Modern Art’s Warhol film collection, but are unpreserved and in a cold storage facility, where no one can see them (8). Additional works may exist, but have not so far been located (9). Rubin’s reputation, such as it is, rests on the competing memory of her singular, groundbreaking film and her eccentric persona as wildly dressed visionary, agitator, organizer and groupie.

Born to a middle class Jewish family in Queens in 1945, Rubin suffered from weight problems and discovered self-medication with diet pills at an early age. Her parents, not knowing what to do with their daughter’s potentially self-destructive energy, sent her to a mental hospital, where she was evaluated for amphetamine addiction and emotional problems (10). After a short stay, Rubin was released in the spring of 1963 and, through her uncle, a film exhibitor, went to work for filmmaker and impresario Jonas Mekas, a key promoter of the so-called New American Cinema. Housed in Mekas’s overcrowded apartment on Park Avenue South, the Coop attracted Salvador Dali and Robert Frank as well as teenagers who wanted to pick up a camera and make raw, personal movies. Several weeks after her arrival, Rubin broke her self-imposed silence and announced to those around her the advent of the new generation. “She immediately became a part of everything,” Mekas said (11).

Rubin’s creativity and aggression brought her in contact with many of the key counter-cultural figures of the 1960s. She became an indispensable right hand to Mekas, helping to set up screenings around the country and Europe. In a thwarted attempt to show the banned Flaming Creatures at the Third International Experimental Film Exposition in Knokke-Le-Zoute, Belgium, in December 1963, Mekas, Rubin and film critic P. Adams Sitney occupied the projection booth. She sought the greatest talents of her generation, befriending Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan (12). She traveled to London in June 1965 to help organize the landmark International Poetry Reading with Ginsberg at the Royal Albert Hall. In the art world, Rubin is perhaps best known for first bringing Warhol to hear the Velvet Underground at the Cafe Bizarre in Greenwich Village in December 1965. A few months later Rubin helped organize “Up-Tight,” the first Warhol and Velvet Underground evenings of abrasive music, strobe lights, lewd dancing and film projections (including Rubin’s own), at the Film-makers’ Cinemathèque in February 1966. The ensemble was later dubbed the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and Rubin and her camera joined them on a legendary road trip in March. Because of the omnipresence of photographers, reporters and hangers-on, Rubin’s role at Warhol’s first Factory was her most documented period (13). Rubin was one of the few people Warhol would listen to with rapt attention, according to his former assistant and collaborator Gerard Malanga.

Rubin’s involvement with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable was short-lived, however. There is no record of her participation in the group after its April 1966 run at the Dom nightclub on St. Mark’s Place. Her next few years were consumed with new projects infused with Sixties utopianism. She was most obsessed with her far-fetched script Christmas on Earth Continued, which she wrote in 1965 and called for the participation of all her heroes, including Walt Disney, the Beatles and Jean Genet, in the construction of a Fairy City set in Ireland She photocopied scores of the 41-page scripts and distributed them to anyone who took interest (14). Another unproduced script, the four-page Sidney Arthur, A Musical Comedy, can be found in the Allen Ginsberg Papers. Written in 1967, it was to be a collaboration with poet Lionel Ziprin and filmmaker Shirley Clarke. Rubin played other roles, as well. She cared for Ginsberg’s drug-addled lover Peter Orlovsky and Peter’s brother Julius, and looked after the children of Ziprin and music producer Al Aronowitz. She opened a bohemian clothing shop in the East Village with Clarke’s daughter. Enraged at the Vietnam war, Rubin became a political activist, getting arrested with Clarke at the Pentagon “siege” in October 1967. Writing to Ginsberg soon after, Rubin noted the beauty and courage she found at the march (15).

When the optimism of the early and mid ‘60s turned cynical and violent, Rubin left New York City, as did many artists. In 1968, she helped the Committee on Poetry, Allen Ginsberg’s nonprofit organization, to purchase land and establish a 90-acre farm in upstate New York (16). Rubin hoped that she might marry Ginsberg and settle there. Instead, Rubin, a spiritual seeker already turned on to Kabbalah, discovered the nearby Hasidic community in Sharon Springs. Her visits introduced her to the baal tsuvah movement, a new brand of countercultural orthodoxy. Rubin returned to New York and first shared an apartment with her friend Rosebud Pettet, who had to conform to Rubin’s new regime of observing shabbat and keeping kosher. For Rubin, memories of her past transgressive activity became untenable. In an April 1969 letter to then Film-makers’ Cooperative director Leslie Trumbull, she stated her plan to burn Christmas on Earth, signing the missive with her new Yiddish name, Bashe Bruche (17).

By the early 1970s, Rubin was twice married. The first, to Mordechai Levy, was an arranged marriage and ended in divorce. The second, to Yitzchak Besancon, a French painter and follower of the mystical teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, was “an amazing relationship,” a friend from the time said (18). Rubin and Besancon first lived in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in a small community of newly observant artists that included filmmaker and collagist Jerry Jofen and his wife Ellen Gordon. Before having a chance to complete Emouna, Rubin moved with her husband to a religious community in the south of France in 1973. Rubin’s collaborator in the film, performer Pamela Mayo, edited the final version of Emouna, which is filed under her name at Anthology Film Archives. Rubin ceased almost all communication with her New York friends, including Mekas. Little is known about her life in France, where she gained a great deal of weight, had four or five children, and died of postnatal infection in 1980 at age 35. Rubin’s children are reportedly living in Israel and seeking to learn more about their mysterious mother who was friends with so many celebrities.

Christmas on Earth, like Kafka’s novels, was never destroyed according to its author’s one-time wishes. Before leaving for France, Rubin deposited the film with Jonas Mekas. “She put Christmas on Earth in my lap and said, ‘do whatever you want with it, it’s up to you” (19). Mekas removed the film from distribution. It went unseen for 15 years until 1983, when he screened it at Anthology Film Archives in tribute to Rubin’s memory. Film critic J. Hoberman’s enticing preview in the Village Voice attracted many people too young to have known Rubin but eager to encounter her work. “The silence surrounding Christmas on Earth is at once appropriate and appalling, for the film more than delivers on the promise (and, for a Jewish sister, the poignant yearning) of its wonderful title,” Hoberman wrote (20). Following this screening, Christmas on Earth has been presented at cinema festivals and universities around the world, as well as the Whitney Museum of American Art (21). Surprisingly, for the great interest of artists today in film, video installation, and the Sixties in general, few are aware of the achievements of Barbara Rubin.

Christmas on Earth was inspired by and surpassed the romantic ethos, campy production and sexy look of the early work of Jack Smith and Ron Rice. In June 1963, Barbara Rubin borrowed a 16mm Bolex from Mekas. She first planned to make a film about hysteria, which she had witnessed in her stay at the hospital, but instead recorded communal love and sex (22). One weekend, she corralled five friends into the Ludlow Street crash pad rented by musicians John Cale and Tony Conrad and instigated a night of playful debauchery. “Barbara held us hostage for 24 hours, from early evening to the next day. It was very Cocteau-ish. We were locked in and hermeticized in this apartment, it was a very freewheeling situation,” recalled Gerard Malanga, one of the performers in the film (23). A novice with a camera, Rubin filmed the quivering couplings and posturing bodies. As Rubin poetically wrote of her making of Christmas on Earth:

so i shoot & shoot & shoot & shreak
up over slow & fast down & often all the way around & rewound many times
the subject, what else could it be, was all about cocks & cunts & fantasies
that freely expressed our sexual needs & dreaming beliefs
painted on their nude bodies (24)

Rubin’s editing followed the avant-garde tradition of chance, which indulges in the unpredictable and frees the eye from the order of daily life. According to Rubin, from the same text:

so i spent 3 months chopping the hours of film up
into a basket
and then toss and toss
flip and toss
and one by one
Absently enchantedly Destined to splice it together
and separate on to two different reels
and then project one reel half the size
inside the other reel full screen size
and then i showed it
and someone tells me, ‘my what a good editing job that is indeed!’ (25)

Christmas on Earth’s randomness and pleasure is not as jarring as you would expect from her description, however. She must have snipped the original film at fairly long intervals because sequences progress without being cut off abruptly. Nevertheless, Rubin’s own flippancy was part of the esthetic strategy of this film. Pettet recalled, “sometimes Barbara referred to it as a fucking joke.” (26). Originally titling her film Cocks and Cunts(27), Rubin opted for a more literary pedigree. Christmas on Earth quotes a phrase from the penultimate poem, “Morning,” of Rimbaud’s 1873 sensory epic A Season in Hell (28).

The key formal innovation of Christmas on Earth is its superimposed projection in unequal sizes, a format that she originated (29). Like Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square series, Christmas on Earth sets one field within another. As the optical effects of the inset squares in Albers’ paintings alter experiences of perception, so the two projections in Christmas on Earth produce a kinesthetic frisson. For the 1983 screening, Mekas provided a useful diagram showing how Rubin projected one reel normally and projected the second reel over it, about one third smaller, using a longer focal length lens (30). Magazine articles from the period and Rubin’s own writing confirm that she had determined this format of Christmas on Earth as early as 1966, and it remains the standard screening style today (31). According to Mekas, Rubin sometimes projected Christmas on Earth with one reel upside down, with the reels in succession without superimposing them, or projected on top of another person’s film. Rubin projected reels from Christmas on Earth on the silver ceiling and walls of Warhol’s Factory and during performances of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

Rubin’s splicing created startling juxtapositions between the images in the overlapping reels, setting them in erotic dialogue. The imagery in smaller center reel (Reel A, or “Figures”) tends to attract the eye more than the larger outer reel (Reel B, or “Images”). While Reel A records the specific real time sexual encounters of a woman and four men, Reel B is more abstract, composed of two or more sets of superimposed images. Rubin called for her black and white films to be colorized by filters, randomly operated by the projectionists. Depending on the continually shifting colors, this effect frequently allows the viewer to differentiate the imagery in the two reels. At other times, the multiple images meld and contrast in a polysexual stew that blurs interpersonal boundaries. Bodies lose their individual integrity and become shapes, movements, and areas of color within the larger spatial field of Rubin’s vision.

Christmas on Earth begins with a woman, painted black, only her naked breasts and belly exposed. She languidly moves about an interior space draped with tapestries and gauze. At times, we see her veiled, evoking the Orientalist look of a harem. The most surrealistic moments are several close-ups of the woman’s gyrating torso, so it appears like a mask, especially when color filters tint her white skin. Other times her isolated face and body seem to float in front of the superimposed second reel like a primitive mask or phantom. The visual beauty of these scenes is striking.

About five minutes into the film, the scene on Reel A changes to an ensemble of the woman and men dancing, posing and caressing each other. Props such as a top hat, long tube and masks add a carnivalesque character. Here, the woman seems to preside over the group as a sort of goddess figure. Several men, their bodies painted white and adorned with baroque curlicues and vegetative designs, recalling Nijinsky, cluster around her, fondling her as she gestures seductively toward the camera. There is a casualness to the interactions, a soft-core pleasure of friendly petting that positions the female body and female desire at the center of activity. Malanga recalled that he “was trying to put the make on her.” (32). The sexual interest was authentic, not pornographic, the vernal mood assures us.

About halfway though the film, the subject of Reel A jumps abruptly to the tender lovemaking of a male couple. From a vantage alternatively intimate and removed, the camera follows them as they get into a number of different positions. These are by far the most explicit scenes on the reel. The realization that these hard core views of gay sex were shot by an 18-year-old woman remains startling. Nevertheless, the overall sexual activity in Christmas on Earth favors desire neither male nor female, neither gay nor straight. The imagery and erotic objects are episodic, in tune with Freud’s definition of polymorphous perversity. Christmas on Earth is “pure experience in every way. The people in it were beautiful. Nobody censored what they themselves did or anybody else was doing,” Rubin said several years after shooting the film (33). At the end of Reel A, after several more reversals, the scene returns to the heterosexual ensemble. The painted and masked performers wave, assuring the viewer that, despite their carnal activities, they never lost their innocence.

Rubin’s sensual camerawork ritualizes pleasure, yet her close scrutiny of anatomy sometimes also verges on the clinical. According to one report, the Kinsey Institute was interested in her film (34). The outer Reel B is primarily composed of extreme close-ups of genitals. Dangling, shaking penises, emerging from the top and bottom of the frame, interact, often humorously, with the figures of Reel A. In one instance, a long strand of semen drips from one, perhaps the first “money shot” in avant-garde film. More frequent, however, are the visages of an open vagina, its surfaces seeming to frame or engulf the figures. These artsy crotch-shots, recalling Courbet’s erotic painting Origin of the World (1866), were more candid than even those in Flaming Creatures. The initial reception of Christmas on Earth was largely conditioned by its graphic depiction of female genitalia. Jonas Mekas emphasized the imagery in a much-quoted description of Christmas on Earth:

“A woman; a man; the black of the pubic hair; the cunt’s moon mountains and canyons. As the film goes, image after image, the most private territories of the body are laid open for us. The first shock changes into silence then is transposed into amazement. We have seldom seen such down-to-body beauty, so real as only beauty (man) can be: terrible beauty that man, that woman is, are, that Love is”. (35)

Critic John Gruen later compared Rubin’s images to Georgia O’Keeffe’s “flowers” and Edward Weston’s “closeup photographs of fruit and vegetables.” (36)

Screenings of Christmas on Earth, like concurrent works by Robert Whitman and Stan Vanderbeek, extended film into multimedia theater. Rubin’s instructions for presentation, now typed and taped inside the metal canisters holding rental prints of Christmas on Earth, request that her silent film be scored to loud, live radio, tuned to a rock station. Emotion is enhanced or deflated depending on what happens to be on the air, whether it’s the sexy beat of the Rolling Stones or the stentorian drone of an announcer. Even the advertisements are absorbed into the events on screen. At a screening I attended in an NYU undergraduate cinema studies class in October 2003, the students erupted in howls of laughter when the announcer for a local classic rock station described a Long Island oyster shucking contest as an image of a hand pulling at the head of a penis filled the screen. The audience is continually kept in an agitated and titillated state of self-awareness.

As a work of filmic alchemy, Christmas on Earth cannot be copied mechanically, run through an editing deck, or captured as a still. The only way to record it is at a live screening, thus producing a record of a single event, not a copy of the work itself. The originality of each performance is a longstanding concern in dance and theater, but a problem new to the performative cinema of the 1960s. Along with many artists, filmmakers, and performers of her generation, like the Living Theater, Carolee Schneemann, and Robert Morris, Rubin wished to restore the real to the experience of art.

The saturated visual field of overlapping moving images in Christmas on Earth is related to Rubin’s other experiments with superimposition. Rubin twice exposed the negative of one undated three minute film, Untitled or 5347. After the first go through, Rubin fed the film back into her camera and shot again, “from the end back to the beginning,” Mekas noted, after first developing the roll when Rubin left it with him in 1971 (37). The roll presents a jumble of visual data, including the backseat of a car, streets, water, a tree, an urban park, and the close view of a small boy’s head, with a youthful Mekas lingering in the background. Rubin squeezed her vision onto every frame, requiring each to contain images beyond the limits of human perception.

Barbara Rubin was as much a provocateur with a camera as a filmmaker. During the early performances of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Rubin was a leader of the group who recorded the mayhem on film, and even contributed to it themselves. In March 1966, she traveled with Warhol, the Velvet Underground, and others, to help stir up students during performances of the E.P.I. at Rutgers University and the University of Michigan, creating the chaotic situation that Warhol enjoyed. According to John Wilcock,

“For some months now Warhol has been accompanied almost everywhere by a frenetic team of film-makers led by 20-year-old Barbara Rubin whose major technique is to jump up and down with her camera more or less in rhythm with the moving objects she happens to be photographing; if her subjects tend to be motionless when she arrives, her provocative gestures and questions soon get them, if not hopping mad, at least hopping.” (38)

Rubin’s filmic records of these assaults in places like the annual banquet of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry (39), the Rutgers cafeteria and David Susskind’s television show are known as the “Up-Tight” series. Several survive in the Warhol film collection, but are unavailable for viewing. Based on the fragmentary accounts of Rubin’s activity with the E.P.I., it’s tempting to conclude that, for Rubin, filmmaking was equivalent to direct action. With a camera in hand, she was free to ask the impertinent questions that would emancipate society from its sexual repression. Under the aegis of Warhol’s celebrity, Rubin seems to have expressed a sharper, angrier attitude in her engagement with audiences than she did in the dreamy Christmas on Earth.

Although Christmas on Earth seems antithetical to the “boring” film technique of Warhol, it is useful to compare their two styles. The extreme activity of Rubin’s camera and the extreme passivity of Warhol’s camera emanate from their shared conviction that experimental film could be used to enter and transform American life, and not be limited to art houses and film societies. Rubin greatly admired the powerful directness of Warhol’s films. “I think Empire is my favorite…the most beautiful movie I have ever seen, even though I know exactly what [Warhol] was doing…. I’m waiting till we project it in the sky,” she said (40). However, while Warhol forced the quick eye of modern life to look long and hard at mundane objects and events, like his marathon eight-hour portrait of the Empire State Building, Rubin deployed the Brechtian strategy of dialectics to jar staid or involuntary responses, forcing the audience to see things anew. Her fullest attempt at this was her two-week multimedia festival “Caterpiller Changes” at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque in February and March 1967, one of the earliest showings of films in a fragmenting installation setting. It was her last production in underground cinema until she began Emouna five years later.

At first Rubin rarely showed Christmas on Earth to the general public. Routine enforcement of obscenity laws and censorship constrained the milieu of Christmas on Earth. In the run-up to the World’s Fair of 1963-64, even pornographers could not easily exhibit erotic films and used more discreet peep show booths. Film programmers had to constantly placate wary theater owners and contend with threat of police raids. According to Pamela Mayo, Rubin, when she was in London in 1965, worried that she would get busted. So Rubin carried her one copy of Christmas on Earth around with her wherever she went, “like her knitting.” (41). Later that year, with the rapidly relaxing enforcement of obscenity laws in New York, Christmas on Earth was being distributed through the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. Records indicate that in 1968, it was shown at Florida State University and the University of Iowa, among other venues (42).

As the culture caught up to Rubin, she garnered a surprising amount of attention. Warhol’s success with Chelsea Girls —which in November 1966 moved from the grungy Film-makers’ Cinemathèque on 41st Street to the uptown Theater Rendezvous on 57th Street to accommodate the crowds—brought mainstream media coverage to underground cinema. Rubin and Christmas on Earth were discussed in long articles published in Newsweek, Time, Mademoiselle and Playboy. In each instance, the authors found a filmmaker and a film that represented the puzzling if not frightening new youth culture. Christmas on Earth “pretends to consider sex as a cosmic metaphor and looks as if it had been shot through a proctoscope,” a skeptical reporter wrote in a four-page article in Time on February 17, 1967 (43). Journalists readily admitted their inability to comprehend Rubin, and were rarely sympathetic to her attitudes, statements and films. She did not fit into their conventional male-dominated narratives of underground cinema.

In Newsweek, art critic Jack Kroll portrayed Rubin as the extremist among the new generation of filmmakers. “Barbara Rubin is already beyond cinema –her spiky hair and dry-cell eyes would scare Marshall McLuhan himself. In Barbara, movies and life seem to have changed places. ‘It’s backward living,’ she says. ‘We watch it rather than live it. When I shoot I’m just emanating feeling all over – it’s like it’s someone else shooting, not me.’ ” (44). Rubin’s curious quotation expresses the experience of dislocation, where sensation and technology work together to reverse the flow of meaning. Kroll described one of Rubin’s films as “the sheer galloping metabolism of her energy turned into an electrifyingly eloquent salvo of images which her camera has pulled from the street like a jet-propelled vacuum cleaner.” (45).

In the upbeat tone of Mademoiselle, Rubin stood for liberalized standards of equality replacing elite values of quality. “Is Barbara Rubin a real film-maker?” journalist Joan Alleman Rubin (no relation) asks, in an article advising eager young women on how they can work in the movies, despite the few opportunities open to them (46). “The college girls whom MLLE interviewed nearly all say they want to make movies and there are just enough success stories to goad any aspirant.” (47). After describing Christmas on Earth (“it can hardly be considered a technical tour de force”) Joan Rubin tries hard not to foreclose the dreams of readers and validates Barbara Rubin, despite acknowledging that her work would be repudiated by the men of Hollywood. She suggests that the revolution in taste brought on by Pop art justifies a fair valuation of Rubin’s extravagances: “if what’s important is what we ourselves think we are – by this criterion, Barbara is emphatically a filmmaker.”

Rubin’s longest and staunchest supporter has been Jonas Mekas. His writing was first to legitimate her work and locate it within the American avant-garde. Describing the filming of Christmas on Earth in a July 25, 1963 Village Voice column, Mekas presents an image of Rubin as a sort of saint touched by grace, enacting a miracle of sexual healing: “bursting and burning with hallucinations, shooting her first movie, with the excitement of a holy nun, feverishly engaged to rip fragments of veiled revelations from her subconscious and the world, the sensory experiences and visions of the sad loveless century, pouring her heart out.” (48). Mekas identified her as part of a new generation of women filmmakers. “You’ll soon see how little we have seen of the world on screen; that the cinema is endless, beginningless, continuous; that there will be a new beauty coming…” (49). For Mekas, films by young women like Rubin, Storm de Hirsch (a pioneer in feminist cinema) and Naomi Levine (one of the first Warhol superstars turned filmmaker), released beauty from its static remove in idealized images and set it in active, interpersonal motion.

Rubin worked to find commonality between competing factions and to counter historical attitudes limiting the spiritual and sensual potential of beauty. Christmas on Earth’s themes of pleasure and utopia resonated in later feminist theory and art, like the photographs and performances of Hannah Wilke, Adrian Piper, and Eleanor Antin. Along with sharp political critique, their sexy work frequently leaves the viewer with the awareness that liberation must not substitute one beauty for another. In 1970, Shulamith Firestone acknowledged the value of an inclusive vision of beauty, which even incorporates mass culture. “Sex objects are beautiful. An attack on them can be confused with an attack on beauty itself. Feminists need not get so pious in their efforts that they feel they must flatly deny the beauty of the face on the cover of Vogue.” (50).

In Christmas on Earth and her other activities, Barbara Rubin developed a flexible film language and exhibition practice that celebrated the most banal, disparate, even jarring sensations along with the most hopeful and erotic. By embracing the unpredictable and atmospheric, Christmas on Earth borrows the energy around it. Rubin in effect continues to collaborate with unknown exhibitors who tune the radio and projectionists who switch the color filters. While other performances and expanded cinema events of 40 years ago are only recorded in memory, scripts and photographs, Christmas on Earth remains permanently in the present. It is a happening that keeps on happening

Acknowledgements

This article was first published in Art in America, December 2005. The author is grateful to Jonas Mekas, Gerard Malanga, Pamela Mayo, Rosebud Pettet, Brett Aronowitz, Gordon Ball, Ellen Gordon, Amy Taubin, Tom Chomont, and Tom Nozkowski for sharing their memories of Rubin. Additionally, Mekas, M.M. Serra, Andrew Lampert, John Mhiripiri, Steven Watson, Bob Rosenthal, Callie Angell, and Federico Windhausen provided documentation, information and helpful leads. Raphael Rubenstein’s editing greatly enhanced this article. A much abbreviated version was presented at the NYU Cinema Studies Conference, February 2004. Thanks are due to Linda Nochlin, Robert Storr and Natasha Staller for insightful comments on previous versions of this text.

Daniel Belasco is a critic and art historian who researches women artists of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. He lives in Brooklyn.