Barbara Rubin’s  twenty nine minute Christmas on Earth is a film of an orgy staged in the Lower East Side apartment of Tony Conrad and John Cale at 56 Ludlow Street in 1963.  She was seventeen at the time.  The double projection of overlapping images of nude men and women clowning and making love is one of the first sexually explicit works of art in the american postwar avant-garde. Rubin spent three months “chopping the hours of film up into a basket” until its contents were ultimately separated onto two different reels, with one reel projected at half size inside the other reel’s full-screen image. In 1966, the film was projected onto the performing Velvet Underground as a part of Andy Warhol Up-Tight (an early incarnation of his Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia events). Rubin, who later introduced Bob Dylan to Allen Ginsberg (and, according to John Cale, Edie Sedgwick to Andy Warhol), died in 1980 (in childbirth, in France) at the age of thirty five.

Barbara Rubin, “Christmas on Earth” (1963)

An exhibit of her work is currently At Boo-Hooray Gallery (265 Canal St., 6th Fl., btw. Broadway & Lafayette).