2006, 88 minutes,
DV-Cam.
A film about breaking a taboo
By Reinhild Dettmer-Finke In Collaboration with Matthias Reichelt,
composition by Dieter Ilg

In his work the 80-year-old New York NO! Artist, Boris Lurie, brings together what doesn’t belong together: gassed corpses and the naked, the Shoah and pin-ups.
It’s not perverted art, but a comment on a perverted society, says Lurie, and he draws a line from the Shoah to the war in Iraq. Lurie would have liked to
have painted comfortable, comforting things, like the Impressionists did,
but something kept him from doing so. And that something is what this film
explores. The search takes us via Riga and Buchenwald to the New York of the 50s and 60s, when NO! Art developed as an obstinate reaction to Pop Art. NO! is Boris Lurie’s motto: NO! to the expectations of the art market, NO! To bourgeois decorum, NO! to victim mentality. A film about the timeless/timely questions of remembering, and about coping, through art, with the extermination of the Jews.
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