You probably haven’t heard of painter Edward Brezinski, a fixture in the New York art scene in the storied ‘80s. More than one of the interview subjects in the documentary Make Me Famous calls Brezinski a boob—and these were his friends and contemporaries. In fact the most notable detail in Brezinski’s obituary—he died in 2007—was that he ate a resin-covered sculptural donut at an exhibit of work by Robert Gober. Director Brian Vincent, inspired by the DIY spirit of the times, pays homage to the scene, but his film isn’t a rediscovery of a long-lost genius. Because even if the artist’s work is fairly middle-of-the-road in a milieu that broke out artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the story of how Brezinski didn’t make it in an explosive art world is at least as fascinating as the story of those who did make it.
Brezinski ran the Magic Gallery out of his sixth-floor walkup on E. 3rd Street, right across the street from a men’s shelter, and that environment comes up time and again. This was the pioneering ‘80s, with creative young people gathering in then-rough neighborhoods to party and make art. Brezinski hob-nobbed with future East Village darlings like Basquiat and Haring, and artists like Kenny Scharf (himself the subject of a less-successful documentary) and David McDermott, as well as gallery owners Patti Astor and Annina Nosei and actor Eric Bogosian, tell vivid stories about those heady times. Make Me Famous—the title comes from McDermott’s impersonation of Brezinski’s desperate attempts to gain purchase in this scene—plays like a scene reunion, and is entertaining on that level alone.
The sense of time passing is what makes Make Me Famous so sobering, for survivors as well as for those like David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar who succumbed to AIDS. Commercial-grade video footage from the ‘80s (the typical look of docs that cover this period) are a hazy lens on a decadent time, but even more startling is the aging process on these people who once looked so young. It’s kind of the effect many of us went through when returning to work after pandemic shutdowns to find that co-workers you hadn’t seen in a year had aged drastically. Here, you see ‘80s footage and photos of a boyish McDermott in contrast with the current sight of the artist, now splitting his time between Ireland and New York, as an elderly dandy.
This scene and its denizens may be more interesting than Brezinski’s art, and Vincent has no illusions about this. Even Brezinski’s obituarist admits that he doesn’t remember what the paintings looked like. But the art is finally beside the point, and for Vincent, so is his subject’s life. The artist’s timeline runs out with some 40 minutes left in Make Me Famous, ending at Brezinski’s death in Cannes in 2007. The conventional yet engaging film then shifts gears: is he really dead? The answer isn’t revelatory, but the quest lends another curious angle to a figure whose story may well have been more enduring than his art.
Photo courtesy of Red Splat Productions
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