Nick Zedd is an American filmmaker and author based in Mexico City. He coined the term Cinema of Transgression in 1985 to describe a loose-knit group of like-minded filmmakers and artists using shock value and black humor in their work. These filmmakers and artistic collaborators included Richard Kern, Tessa Hughes Freeland, Lung Leg and Lydia Lunch. Under numerous pen names, Zedd edited and wrote the Underground Film Bulletin which publicized the work of these filmmakers. The Cinema of Transgression was explored in Jack Sargeant's book Deathtripping.
Career
Nick Zedd has directed several super-low-budget feature-length movies, including They Eat Scum , Geek Maggot Bingo, War Is Menstrual Envy and numerous short films. With Rev. Jen Miller, he is the co-creator of the public access series Electra Elf, featuring Miller, Faceboy, Andrew J. Lederer and a "who's who" of New York downtown artists and performers. He served as director of photography on another TV series called Chop Chop, produced by Nate Hill. Additionally, Zedd has acted in such low-budget movies as the Super-8 film The Manhattan Love Suicides, What About Me, Bubblegum, Jonas in the Desert, Troma Films'Terror Firmer and Thus Spake Zarathustra. He also appeared in the documentaries Llik Your Idols and Blank City. He is the author of two autobiographical books, Bleed and Totem of the Depraved, as well as the self-published novel From Entropy to Ecstasy. Additional writing by Zedd was featured in Up Is Up But So Is Down as well as in Captured and Low Rent. Zedd anonymously published Cinema of Transgression Manifesto, an essay outlining his philosophy, in the Underground Film Bulletin and The Theory of Xenomorphosis. In the early 1990s, Zedd toured with Lisa Crystal Carver's Suckdog Circus, exhibiting his films. Performing with experimental noise band Zyklon Beatles, Zedd released the "Consume and Die" 7" single on Rubric Records in 2000. After exhibiting oil paintings in 2010 at the ADA and Pendu galleries, Zedd presented a major retrospective of films, videos and paintings at the Microscope Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn before moving to Mexico in March 2011. In 2012, he attended a retrospective of his films at the eighth Berlin International Directors Lounge and exhibited work at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in the same city. In 2013, Zedd published "The Extremist Manifesto", an essay denouncing contemporary art and the class structure that promotes it while announcing the emergence of the Extremist Art movement in Mexico City subverting the edicts of established art institutions and curatorial ideologues. This manifesto, first released online, then in a self-published Hatred of Capitalism magazine issued in Mexico City, sent shock waves through the art world and was reprinted a year later by the Chopo Museum, along with two more issues as part of the Fanzinoteka exhibition. At a screening in the New Museum in New York, Zedd was presented with the Acker Award for Lifetime Achievement, a tribute given to "members of the avant garde arts community who have made outstanding contributions in their discipline in defiance of convention, or else served their fellow writers and artists in outstanding ways". In 2014, Zedd exhibited three motion pictures at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as part of a retrospective of films by Christoph Schlingensief, who, prior to his death, had cited Zedd as a major influence on his work. Later in 2014, Zedd presented his first public exhibition of paintings in Mexico City, in a group show curated by Aldo Flores at Salon des Aztecas Gallery in Coyoacán. In 2015, Zedd presented his first one-man show of paintings at the V&S Galery in Mexico City. Zedd also shot an 8mm short entitled Paradise Lost with a borrowed Russian camera for inclusion in a feature-length compilation with contributions from underground filmmakers from many countries. Zedd's movie documents the contents of his apartment and his family in Condesa during an eviction proceeding that resulted in the complete destruction of the building's architectural integrity along with the forced exile of all of the tenants.
