Naked Close Up
Composer, visual artist, author, Ramón Sender Barayón was an active, lively, and important figure in the avant garde of the San Francisco art scene in the 1960s. It was a wonderful time for new ideas in music and the arts. A wonderful base for his imagination. And a wonderful place for him to work with friends. He wrote: “I’d also like to thank my friend Marc Battier, composer, historian, who recognized this book as an important portrayal of the zany creativity of the music world in San Francisco in the 1960s and insisted that I finish it.”
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The opening words of the book, in a letter from Walter Diverge, filmmaker, to his wife Sarah, set the tone: “Forget the rules of vision that we have learned, the theories, the prejudices we were taught, and return to seeing nakedly without labels or preconceptions, confronting each new image as a fresh encounter. For the number of colors are infinite, even in a cubic inch of empty space.”
San Francisco in the 1960s was an incubator for new ways of thinking about film making, music, art, and indeed, life. It was a revolution in the arts and a revolution in the way we thought about our lives. That’s the idea behind this book. It’s about new realities, naked, without the clothing of conventional preconceptions, and close up.
Ramón Sender Barayón puts us in the middle of the revolution. He invents the Multi-Media Space-Time Lab as a center in which a filmmaker and a group of musicians explore new freedoms in film and music. Their manifesto started with: “The San Francisco Multi-Media Space-Time Lab was founded in 1962 by Albert Sprigg and Perennia Applegarden to fill the need for a center where artists and composers could gain access to the equipment necessary to experiment with new techniques in the audio-visual realms …”
The group of artists who inhabit the Lab are imaginary amalgams of the San Francisco art scene at the time. They do interesting things. Sometimes enjoyably zany, they are always serious about their work, and they create new artworks and models that, from today’s perspective, opened up new ways to think about film, art and music.
As Walt Diverge says towards the end of the book, “I don’t think any of us yet realize what a special thing the Lab has been.”
That’s the reality in the book. As Ramón Sender Barayón points out, “That’s what this book is about. It’s about a special thing.”