If All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the recent documentary featuring photographer Nan Goldin, has whetted your appetite for the scuzzy glory days of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1970s and 80s, then this documentary about Edward Brezinski, another artist kicking around the Bowery at the time, will quench that thirst. Interestingly, Goldin is never mentioned in this film, but a few art-world figures such as actor-critic Cookie Mueller and artist David Wojnarowicz overlap both films. No doubt there must have gallery openings or parties where Brezinski and Goldin were in the same room or even met one another, and this work clearly demonstrates that the NYC art scene was a small, almost incestuous circle where nearly everyone slept with everyone, especially before Aids arrived, and they all bitched about each other constantly.
There is indeed a lot of bitching in the early part of Make Me Famous from those who remember Brezinski, a talented, ambitious painter from Michigan who rocked up to the East Village in the late 70s, yet never achieved the fame of contemporaries such as Jean-Michel Basquiat or Keith Haring. Not for lack of trying, it seems. One interviewee here cattily recalls how Brezinski, who ran a tiny gallery out of his own apartment on the sixth floor of a dilapidated building on East 3rd Street opposite a homeless shelter for men, would hand out cards advertising his shows at other people’s openings – a grave violation of the codes of cool.
