The vanished prodigy: at 19, Barbara Rubin created "Christmas on Earth," an erotically charged classic of 1960s underground cinema. Here, the author recounts an all-too-brief career and life

Art in America, Dec, 2005 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 produced by 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 is 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introduces new biographical information from a variety of sources, including interviews by the author, as well as unpublished interviews, memoirs and other ephemera assembled by Mekas for his long-planned issue of Film Culture dedicated to Rubin, and Rubin's letters and scripts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 (the title is Hebrew for faith). The latter film reportedly combines Rubin's 1965 footage of Allen Ginsberg in London, file footage of concentration camps, and new color film shot by students at City College. Rubin crafted a separate reel-to-reel soundtrack of pop music and Ginsberg reading his poem "Kaddish." (6) Rubin's footage of famous mid-'60s visitors to the Factory, such as Donovan and Dylan, is incorporated in Gerard Malanga's Film Notebooks, a 27-minute piece that premiered at the Vienna International Film Festival this October (Malanga gives Rubin co-cinematographer credit). Other works 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 unrestored and in a cold storage facility, where no one can see them. (7) Additional works may exist but have not so far been located. (8) Rubin's reputation, such as it is, rests on the competing memory of her groundbreaking film and her eccentric persona as a wildly dressed visionary, agitator, organizer and groupie.

Born to a middle-class Jewish family in Queens in 1945, Rubin suffered from weight problems and turned to 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. (9) After a short stay, Rubin was released in the spring of 1963 and, through her uncle, a film exhibitor, went to work at the Film-Makers' Cooperative for Jonas Mekas, diaristic filmmaker and a key promoter of the so-called New American Cinema. Housed in Mekas's overcrowded apartment on Park Avenue South, the Co-op 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. (10)

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 in Europe. In a thwarted attempt to show Jack Smith's 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 out the greatest talents of her generation, befriending Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan. (11) 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 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' Cinematheque 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. (12) Rubin was one of the few people Warhol would listen to with rapt attention, according to Malanga, his former assistant and collaborator.