Nick Zedd

American filmmaker, screenwriter and painter (25 January 1958/8 May 1959, Takoma Park, Maryland — 27 February 2022, Mexico City, Mexico), best known under his pseudonym Nick Zedd. With a career spanning almost four decades, Zedd established an underground cult following, pioneering shock value, provocation, black humor, and ultra-low production quality in his work and spearheading the Cinema of Transgression movement in the mid-1980s. This freeform group of like-minded filmmakers and experimental artists included Richard Kern, Lydia Lunch, Kembra Pfahler, David Wojnarowicz, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Casandra Stark, Beth B, Lung Leg, Tommy Turner, Jon Moritsugu, Manuel De Landa and many others. Harding grew up in Baltimore and moved to New York City in 1976 to study at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In 1979, he debuted as a film director under a Nick Zedd alias with an ultra-low-budget comedy/drama They Eat Scum. Zedd directed numerous shorts and several feature-length movies since then, including Geek Maggot Bingo (1983), War Is Menstrual Envy (1992), and Thus Spake Zarathustra (2001), co-directed with Jon "Vomit" Worthley. He also produced a few TV series, such as Electra Elf (2004–08), co-created with Jen Miller. (Zedd collaborated with Miller on other occasions, including Werewolf Bitches from Outer Space film they co-directed with D.M. Greenberg in 2016). As an actor, Nick Zedd appeared in over thirty roles, notably Manhattan Love Suicides (1985), What About Me (1993), Joe's Apartment (96) and Other People's Mirrors (2004). Between 1984 and 1990, James Harding published Underground Film Bulletin zine under an alternative pen-name, Orion Jeriko, which actively promoted the "Cinema of Transgression" movement, publishing Zedd's manifesto in one of the ten issues. He authored two autobiographical books, Bleed: Part One (1992) and Totem of the Depraved (97), and self-published a fictional novel, From Entropy to Ecstasy, in 1996. Zedd performed with his short-lived experimental noise band Zyklon Beatles, which released one 7" single, Consume And Die / Generation Z, on New York-based independent label Rubric Records in 2000. He also exhibited short films touring with Lisa Carver's Suckdog circus in the early 1990s. In 2011, Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn hosted a major retrospective of Zedd's films, videos, and paintings. The director was screened at New York's MoMA several times, including Christoph Schlingensief's posthumous retrospective in 2014 (who cited Nick Zedd as one of his crucial influences) and a largescale "Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983" exhibition in October 2017–April 2018, which featured most of Zedd's early feature-length films. In 2013, Nick Zedd published The Extremist Manifesto, denouncing contemporary art and its class structure and proclaiming the emergence of the "Extremist Art" movement in Mexico, aiming to disrupt established institutions and rigid curatorial ideologies. The artist spent his final years in Mexico, focusing more on painting. Various solo and group exhibitions of Zedd's work have appeared in Mexico City since late 2014. He died, aged 63, from cancer and various other health complications. The "Nick Zedd Papers (1963–2016)" archive is held by Fales Library & Special Collections at New York University.