The Phyllis Kind Gallery in SOHO, April, 1999: Huge, ancient tree trunks suspended by meat hooks and chains stand just off the gallery floor. Mummified animals – deer, cats, horses, some with their fur intact – are caught in a labyrinth of wood and barbed wire.

These are the sculptures of Gillian Jagger. This film explores her work, the relationship of that work to her life, and the role of art in society. It is the private story of a woman’s struggle for meaning and her discovery of the work that defines her. It is also the very public story of the role of art in society.

I knew Jagger more than 40 years ago, when she was my first art teacher, at a special program at NYU for gifted New York City high-school kids, but I haven’t seen her since. Her work is startling, raising vital questions of the purpose of art, of its role in the boarder culture, of what is appropriate, what is taboo, and where is the line between private concerns of passionate intensity and social issues with public and ethical implications.

These are issues with which I have struggled all my adult life, as an artist and filmmaker. I have to reconnect with this woman.

The film takes us from an initial reunion through an ever more intimate exploration of the life and world of this prominent artist and teacher. We watch as she tends the animals – four horses, four dogs, including one crippled one, and three cats – on the upstate New York farm where she lives with her companion, Connie Mander. We walk with her through the woods on her property, where she finds both the mammoth trees and the dead animals, most of them victims of careless hunters, that become the material for her art. We see her work on them, discovering their hidden life, their internal structures uncannily like our own human form. We examine these strange, enormous structures that fill an empty barn, where they exist in a perpetual twilight.

And we listen as Jagger talks of what her work means to her. She tells us of her friend, dying of ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and how her friend visited her studio in the last days of her life in her wheel chair and literally entered into the sculptures. And Jagger explains how, at the height of her mature work, she learned to embrace it, not just as a professional accomplishment, but as a necessary act of living against the background of inevitable loss and decay.

We interview Donald Kuspit, who has followed her work since the sixties, and the cultural critic, Edward Gomez. We talk to Michael Brenson, who has defended her work and her controversial use of dead animals. We speak with Phyllis Kind, the gallery owner and Jagger’s dealer in New York and Chicago.

What ties it all together is the tremendously engaging personality of this artist. From the start, however, she rejected her own, almost frightening mimetic talent, in search of an art and a form that could go beyond the illustrative, beyond the aesthetically pleasing, to penetrate appearances and express her wonder at reality and our precarious, necessarily temporary hold on life. It is this perpetual quest, with its passionate engagement, rigorous intellectual dialectic and overwhelming physical dimensions, that compels attention. It is the portrait of a woman immersed in a very private struggle with enormous social implications; it is a study of an artist struggling to define her art and its relation to her life and to the life of the society she lives in.


Read an article by ELIZABETH S. LUDAS

Quotes:

This film reveals Gillian’s fearlessness and integrity, her imagination and deep feeling. She’s the real deal.
Paul Tucker, Prof., Art History, Univ. of Mass. Boston

Casting Faith, a film on the life and work of sculptor Gillian Jagger, is a splendid illumination of the protean Ms. Jagger’s remarkable achievements. The film evokes the creative process of a powerful artist with great intelligence and sympathy.
Frank Lind, Dean, School of Art & Design

Barbara A. Gordon is an award-winning cinematographer and editor. She has worked as an editor on documentaries with Bill Moyers, Walter Cronkite, and Mike Wallace, among others, which have been broadcast by CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, The Discovery Channel, and A&E. Her film about world hunger, Edge of Survival, received the first World Hunger Media Award at the United Nations and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. She shot and produced two PBS documentaries about Mother Teresa, Mother Teresa: Love as I Have Loved You, and Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Ms. Gordon is also a painter, and Gillian Jagger was her first art teacher.

Richard Schlesinger is a writer and filmmaker. He has taught writing and literature at the City College of CUNY and Touro College in New York. His work has been published in major periodicals, and he contributed sections on art and literature to reference works published by Doubleday and T.Y. Crowell. He was a writer for Neglect Not the Children, a one-hour PBS film documentary on the Manhattan Valley Project in New York City, hosted by Morgan Freeman and edited by his wife, Barbara Gordon.