Barbara Rubin (1945-1980) - The Allen Ginsberg Project (2024)

(an image of Allen in a top hat is placed, significantly, next to them)

Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Barbara Rubin, Bob Dylan,and Daniel Kramer,backstageat McCarter Theater, in Princeton, New Jersey, September 1964 Photograph c. Daniel Kramer

In 1965 she’s with Allen, in London, in the front row, at the legendary Albert Hall Dylan concert. They go back-stage afterwards and that’s where Allen first meets The Beatles.)

Several weeks later, she’s the primary instigator (not Allen, it turns out), of the great (likewise legendary) international poetry reading at that same venue – the Royal Albert Hall – the First International Poetry IncarnationAllen has confessed it: “(It was) all Barbara’s idea”

Later in 1965, Barbara (through the intermediary of Gerard Malanga) introduces Andy Warhol to the Velvet Underground (out of which was spawned…)

“When Barbara Rubin asked Gerard to help her make a movie about the Velvets playing at the Bizarre (sic). Gerard asked Paul Morrissey to help and Paul said why didn’t I come along, and so we all went down there to see them.” (Andy Warhol)

Andy: She was “one of the first people to get multi-media going around New York”

Her subsequent utter renunciation of her art and retreat into a Hasidic community child-bearing ritual is a tale unto itself – enigma and erasure.

Meanwhile…

“Barbara Rubin’s 29-minuteChristmas on Earth is the filmic record of an orgy staged in a New York City apartment in 1963. This double-projection of overlapping images of nude men and women clowning around and making love is one of the first sexually explicit works in the American postwar avant-garde…Many consider it to be an essential document of queer and feminist cinema..” (Daniel Belasco in Barbara Rubin – The Vanished Prodigy)

More scholarly observation and contextualization here: “Embodying the Spectator – Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth and the p*rnographic Avant-Garde”

Ara Osterweil at McGill remains the pre-eminent authority, download (in two parts) her definitive article here

and here(so the art outlives the artists) is the film.

and here, as an addenda (with rare footage of Allen and Barbara in it)is Jonas Mekas’ film portrait”To Barbara Rubin With Love”

and here Allen, 1965, naked with Barbara

Allen Ginsberg and Barbara Rubin, June 3 1965, in London at Barry Miles apartment, on the occasion of Allen’s 39th birthday. Photograph by John (“Hoppy”) Hopkins

2018 addenda – Chuck Smith‘s documentary , Barbara Rubin and The Exploding NY Underground, is, to use our (perhaps over-used) term, “essential viewing”