Wynn Chamberlain was a successful artist in New York in the 1960’s. He lived and worked at 222 Bowery and was friends with Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Frank O’Hara and Jonas Mekas. In 1969 he wrote and directed the ground-breaking film Brand X (released in May 1970) starring Taylor Mead, also attended constantly by Marcel Duchamp when it showed at the Elgin Theater in New York. In 1971 he went to India, and lived there for twenty years. In 1997 he moved to Marrakech, Morocco. Taylor Mead is an American poet, artist and actor who has appeared in more than twenty underground films by Andy Warhol, Jack Smith and Ron Rice. He is known as a beloved icon of the downtown New York art scene.

Brand X uses simplistic television programming as a frame to expose and ridicule the politics and taboos of the day. Brand X is subversive in that it undermines and deconstructs broadcast TV so that your belief in its rationality is seriously challenged. When viewing Brand X now, it is important to recall that six months before production of this picture began, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy had both been murdered, Richard Nixon had just been sworn in as President of the United States, and two weeks before Brand X opened in New York, at a University in Ohio the National Guard over a period of 13 seconds fired 67 rounds of ammunition into an unarmed group of students protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. Four students were killed, nine were permanently paralyzed and many injured. 1968-69 was historically a disastrous period. So terrible that Lil Picard an exiled survivor of the German disaster of the 1930’s writing in “inter/VIEW” magazine compared it to the last days of the Weimar Republic in Germany immediately before Hitler and his gang took power and she recalled a poem written by the famous dramatist Bertolt Brecht in 1932 whose first line reads, “Really we are Living in Disastrous Times”. Picard, writing about Brand X in 1970, went on to predict that, “It could well be this film will in time become a Brechtian Truth Comedy, a prophetic metaphor for many of the things we would soon be experiencing in American life”. And so it was. Just as the freedom of the Weimar Republic in Germany brought on the repressions of the Nazi party, so did the desire for justice and freedom in the United States nurture the Wood-stock Festival, the antics of The Chicago Seven, the Black Panthers and countless other revolutionary groups which inevitably gave way to a new recidivist movement that began with Nixon, was bowdlerized by Gerald Ford, glamorized by Ronald Reagan and carried to unprecedented levels of attacks on the Constitution of the United States and other public institutions by George W Bush. At Brand X, however, people are laughing. Abraham Lincoln is quoted as saying, “With the fearful strain that is upon us night and day, if I did not laugh, I should die”. You can rant and rave at the powerful who openly proclaim they are the rulers of the world, but to laugh at them as Brand X does causes one to catch one’s breath and laugh in relief that someone has done it at last. To laugh at the voodoo of powerful ogres, however, can be dangerous. Brand X was blackballed and shut down because it was among the first to do so.

Wynn Chamberlain