In the opening frames of Matt Creed’s “Mary Heilmann: Waves, Roads, & Hallucinations,” an abstract painting sells for nearly a million dollars in an auction. The work was painted by Mary Heilmann, a fixture of America’s abstract art community for more than half a century who is still hard at work at 84 years old — and doesn’t quite know how to feel about the financial windfall. Her attempts to rectify her anti-consumerist ideals that were forged in the 1960s with modern market realities amount to little more than a shrug of acceptance.
“You never thought about selling art,” she said of the ethos that prevailed during her formative years as a young artist. “And now, with the new art world, a new art culture in the world, you’re producing a marketable commodity. Which is something we were just grossed out by.”
That tension between ’60s counterculture and 21st century modernism proves to be the narrative thread that connects much of “Waves, Roads, and Hallucinations.” Heilmann’s biography reads like a quintessential hippie coming-of-age saga: Born in San Francisco in the early 1940s, she rebelled against her Catholic upbringing by taking solace in the world of beatnik poets, eventually moving to New York City and immersing herself in the contemporary art scene. She did drugs with many of the era’s most prominent painters, eventually developing her own distinct style that featured waves of color partially inspired by her psychedelic experiences.
But while Heilmann is happy to reminisce about her interactions with pivotal countercultural figures, she’s far from an old timer who refuses to let go of the past. For all of her misgivings about the high price tags that her paintings fetch, “Waves, Roads, and Hallucinations” is a portrait of a working artist who has done an impressive job of adapting to the realities of the modern world. Creed films Heilmann as she oversees the installation of her latest work in galleries, obsessing over the placement of paintings and ensuring that patrons have chairs to sit in so they spend more time looking at her work. She even praises a collector for buying several of her smaller pieces at once and displaying them as one large piece, explaining that the work became a collaboration between an artist, a curator, and a buyer. It becomes clear that, for all of her philosophical objections to fine arts becoming a hobby for the ultra wealthy, Heilmann remains a pragmatist whose top priority is expressing herself creatively and allowing the work to be seen.
Heilmann’s existing fans will likely find “Waves, Roads, and Hallucinations” to be a delightful piece of supplemental material about one of the most significant figures in American contemporary art. Creed clings tightly to the formal conventions of traditional documentaries — a rather ironic choice for a film about an artist who loves to redefine form, but it gets the job done. Cutting between Heilmann’s reflections on her life story and behind-the-scenes footage from her latest endeavors, the film offers a nuanced take on a woman who refused to let her commitment to aesthetic creativity trap her in a single era. But the film requires a bit of prior knowledge to truly appreciate, and those looking for an introduction to Heilmann’s work would be better off looking elsewhere. Myriad references to influential painters from the ’60s and ’70s will be charming Easter Eggs to some, but the subtleties of her gradual adaptation to the 21st century art landscape might be lost on those who didn’t follow those changes in real time.
While the film does make an effort to showcase Heilmann’s actual paintings — a seemingly low bar that a surprising amount of art documentaries fail to clear — it ultimately runs into a wall induced by the fact that abstract art exists in the context of so much art that came before it. The very nuances that make Heilmann’s work so rich and culturally significant become hurdles to appreciating it through still frames in a 70 minute documentary. While stories of artists adapting to changing times and counterculture evolving into big business are universal, “Mary Heilmann: Waves, Roads & Hallucinations” is ultimately a work best left to the artist’s hardcore fans.
Grade: C+
A Tribeca Films release, “Mary Heilmann: Waves, Roads, & Hallucinations” will debut on VOD platforms including AppleTV and Prime Video on Tuesday, July 30.
