- Joe Gibbons in Confessions of a Sociopath
Tomorrow night at 7 PM the Nightingale will present a program of works by Joe Gibbons, who’s been making experimental films and videos since the mid-1970s. Over the course of his four-decade career, the Whitney Biennial has included his work on four separate occasions, and he’s been a mainstay of underground film festivals across the country. Gibbons has taught at Bard College and at MIT, and in 2001 he was honored with a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Yet he’s never gotten more media attention than he has in the past two months, since he was arrested on New Year’s Eve for robbing $1,002 from a bank in New York’s Chinatown.
In Confessions, for instance, the scenes of Gibbons talking to a psychiatrist are actual psychiatric sessions. The medical reports that appear onscreen are genuine records of Gibbons’s stay at the McLean Hospital in the 1980s. The most outlandish story Gibbons recounts in the film—about walking out of the Oakland Museum with a painting tucked under his shirt in 1978—is verified by clips from TV news broadcasts reporting the incident. Gibbons has admitted to periods of drug addiction (“I just worried if I had enough problems within me that I could exploit; so when I ran out of my own, I started creating them”), but it’s uncertain whether the scenes of heroin use in Confessions are real.
