The murals - a hodgepodge of Old Testament prophecy and Whitmanesque self-beatification - chronicle the private life of Mr. Zagar, whom critics typically dismiss as an outsider artist. "No museum was willing to exhibit my work, so I put it on public display in the street," said Mr. Zagar, 70, a Brooklyn-born bohemian. "I use art as a spider web, to trap people and change how they look, feel, dream." Artist Isaiah Zagar served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Peru in the 1960's.
Isaiah Zagar, whose mosaics cover buildings in South Philadelphia, is the subject of a documentary, "In a Dream," by his son Jeremiah Zagar
Studying Dad's Favorite Topic: Himself
Angshuman Ghosh/HBO
Isaiah Zagar, whose mosaics cover buildings in South Philadelphia, is the subject of a documentary, "In a Dream," by his son Jeremiah Zagar.
By FRANZ LIDZ
Published: August 13, 2009
THE buildings that Isaiah Zagar calls his "Temples of Art" squat heavily along the South Street corridor in Philadelphia. He has blanketed their outer walls with shimmering mosaics of broken mirror, shattered tile, cracked crockery and enough signs and symbols to confound Umberto Eco.
The murals - a hodgepodge of Old Testament prophecy and Whitmanesque self-beatification - chronicle the private life of Mr. Zagar, whom critics typically dismiss as an outsider artist. "No museum was willing to exhibit my work, so I put it on public display in the street," said Mr. Zagar, 70, a Brooklyn-born bohemian. "I use art as a spider web, to trap people and change how they look, feel, dream."
A thin drip of a man with a flourishing gray beard, Mr. Zagar sparks ideas like free-form fireworks. The art that adorns his temples, he says, flows from him as a kind of human need as essential as eating.
On this particular summer day he hasn't eaten much. "I've got shingles, and I'm in lots of pain," he explains, rubbing the red blisters that encrust his face. "I had the same reaction to shingles that I had after watching the documentary about my life: ‘How did this happen to me?' "
That documentary, a kind of biographical mosaic created by his youngest son, Jeremiah, is titled "In a Dream" and makes its debut Wednesday on HBO2.
"In a Dream," which pieces together everything from home movies to animation derived from Mr. Zagar's sketches, is anything but hagiography. Though Jeremiah, 28, clearly adores his mother, Julia, the light he shines on his father can be harsh and unflattering. "My dad has a well of insanity that's usually expressed in his work," Jeremiah said recently over a plate of potato pancakes at a South Philadelphia delicatessen.
"There are people who see ‘In a Dream' and think he's a monster," he added. "As much as I love him, it's very easy to see him that way."
For all his talk about the revelatory nature of existence, Isaiah is at bottom a solipsist for whom everyone else matters only as they affect him. During one pivotal scene of the film, as Jeremiah's older brother, Ezekiel, struggles with a painkiller addiction, Isaiah says serenely, "No matter what happens to Zeke, he's part of my art world."
The only person able to distract Isaiah from himself is Julia, his muse, provider and wife of four decades. "He's kind of a rare flower," she says of him early in the movie. "A thistle maybe."
Jeremiah keeps the camera rolling while Isaiah recalls being molested as a boy, attempting suicide at 29 and repeatedly trying to rip off his genitals during a stay in a mental hospital.
On the drive to fetch Ezekiel from a detox center Isaiah - having been instructed to avoid turmoil - suddenly confesses an extramarital affair to Julia, who rages at him, to the point of nearly vomiting. When she kicks Isaiah out of their home, he plunges into severe depression, and Ezekiel returns to detox.
Jeremiah tries to record his fragmenting family with the emotional distance of, say, an anthropologist filming a tribe of Baka pygmies. "If I had pulled the lens away from my eye, I would have broken down, too," said Jeremiah, who appears on screen fleetingly. "As an observer I could be with my folks without adding to their misery."
That approach helped the film avoid a trap that snares numerous documentarians, according to executives at HBO. "Many personal documentaries navel-gaze to a point that's only useful or meaningful to the people involved," said Lisa Heller, vice president of HBO Documentary Films. "The hard part is to get an audience to care. What makes ‘In A Dream' both tender and potent is its intimacy."
Jeremiah grew up on lower South Street, the gentrifying enclave where his parents moved in 1968 after a three-year Peace Corps hitch in Peru. Julia ran a Latin American crafts shop; Isaiah embellished the derelict buildings they bought and rented out.
Jeremiah's boyhood was enlivened by public-performance pieces in which Isaiah cavorted in "body suits" of paint and mud. "I remember going to shows and thinking ‘Ugh!' and walking out with my mom," Jeremiah said. "That's how I've reacted to my father's craziness for most of my life - walking away. Filming "In a Dream" was probably the first time I stayed."
Jeremiah says he decided to become a filmmaker at the age of 8, during a matinee of Terry Gilliam's film "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen." Enthralled by this meditation on the magical possibilities of imagination and wonder, father and son sat through three screenings. "The Baron, my dad and I share a love of the impractical dream," Jeremiah said.
When he started shooting his film, he was a 19-year-old student at Emerson College and had just finished a short about an orphanage in India. Julia suggested that he make a movie about Isaiah. "She saw it as a way for us to spend more time together," Jeremiah said. "I never really expected the footage to amount to anything."
Over the next seven years the project went through numerous permutations. It was only after the veteran editor Keiko Deguchi was enlisted that "In a Dream" became more than pastiche.
"Keiko is married, with two kids, and understands love and family better then me," Jeremiah said. "She made my father likable and brought out his humanity, which I had taken for granted."
Jeremiah didn't heed all of Ms. Deguchi's advice. Over her objections he left in his father's soliloquy on feces.
The film had its premiere last year at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex., and has made the festival rounds. Isaiah said he hoped that the added TV exposure will help propel his "end run into art history."
He said he was resigned to the possibility that his greatness may never be properly acknowledged. "The trick is to prove it to myself," he said with a crusty grin. "I'm in the process."
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 16, 2009
An article on Page 19 this weekend about "In a Dream," a documentary on the life of the artist Isaiah Zagar, misstates the date of its debut on HBO2. It is Wednesday, not Monday.
