SHUSTAK: STUART PAGE, 2008
11 JULY – 15 AUGUST / Gallery 2, 3 2008
Shustak is a feature documentary of artist on artist. Stuart Page has mounted an extensive meta-narrative and a sustained conversation in pieces, part wild homage and part quiet ode to the life and work of Larence Shustak. Shustak, an American, the son of Jewish immigrants, discovered photography while in the military and gave up a career in the States to come and teach at the edge of the world. This left his friends asking ‘Why?’ as he bucked the usual trend in artistic migration and performed a true counter culture move. From the New York of William Klein and Eugene Smith and the jazz haunts of Manhattan to the suburbs of the South Island and isolation of Ilam. He brought with him cameras and ideas, zeal, and a personal vision that drew on the unfolding utopian philosophy of Buckminster Fuller and the latest media understandings of Marshall McLuhan. Shustak reveals the man as artist, teacher, friend, father, husband, provocateur, agitator, character.
This documentary brings together the teacher and student with a unique eye for the interplay and scope between image and text, with Page punctuating his footage with Shustak’s own original prints and archival material. The viewer becomes aware of a dynamic between Shustak and Page and their shared and renewed interest in the visual language of the street, graffiti and living in an ever-changing sign - age. Page combines his own mix of unconventional ‘talking head’ interviews with animated photos and words scanning his former teacher’s career from stunning Harlem social photo essays to provocative fish eye nudes, and from stark black and white 16mm shorts to lush Polaroids.