| Summary: | With Golub: Late Works are the Catastrophes, Kartemquin Films (the production company behind Hoop Dreams and the PBS series The New Americans) complete their chronicle of the work and times of the American artist, Leon Golub. In the aftermath of September 11, the Iraq War, and the Abu Ghraib scandal, Golub's ferocious, monumental images of torture and interrogations from the 70's and 80's (still used by human rights groups such as Amnesty International) remain prophetic and essential. Golub's later paintings from the 90's and early 2000's continue to "report" on the world (his morbid look at Napoleon's "Mission Civilisatrice" in Egypt provides sarcastic commentary on Bush's adventure in Iraq), but now with the kind of dissonances and discontinuities that led Theodor Adorno in his essay on late Beethoven to proclaim, "In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes." Begun in 1985, and updated with new footage of Leon Golub shortly before his death in 2004, Golub: Late Works are the Catastrophes captures a remarkable and historic artistic journey, shared with his wife and studio partner of 50 years, the prominenteminist, anti-war artist, Nancy Spero. It is an investigation into the power of the artist to reflect our times -- and to change the way we think about our world.
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