The Thousands

What:
Herb and Dorothy

Where and when:
At ACMI from tonight! Jan 7-10

Watch the trailer:
Here

Win:
Thanks to ACMI, we have 5 dbls for Fri Jan 8 at 7pm! To enter, email win@threethousand.com.au with the subject  ‘I always thought of them as sort of mascots of the art world’ **Aged 88 and 75 respectively, Herb and Dorothy Vogel may look like New York hobbits who dote on their cat Archie, but Megumi Sasaki’s intimate, funny documentary reveals the all-consuming passion that’s made the Vogels among America’s most important minimal and conceptual art collectors.

Hearteningly, adorably, the Vogels aren’t snobs. From the early 1960s, they lived on Dorothy’s librarian salary and used Herb’s postal-worker wage to buy art. They befriend and voraciously collect their favourite artists, and venture into dilapidated studios to deal with them personally (thus pissing off art dealers). They only buy works that’ll fit in their tiny apartment, and refuse to sell anything (thus avoiding art-market roller coasters). They even bartered a collage by Christo and Jeanne-Claude for a summer of taking care of their cat, Gladys.

Sasaki’s interviews and observational footage reveal the Vogels’ acute visual instincts at work. Herb “points at the art like a hound,” says artist Lucio Pozzi. “He’s like those dogs that dig underneath for truffles.” In 1992 they gifted their collection – five giant removal trucks’ worth – to Washington DC’s National Gallery. Instead of retiring comfortably, Herb and Dorothy used the gallery’s annual stipend to start again from scratch. Inspirational stuff.