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Originally written as a play in 1952 based on actual conversations between the abstract expressionists in their eponymous hangout, The Cedar Bar is a work of such magnitude that it mocks description in its self-declared "WAR BETWEEN THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE ART AND THOSE WHO WRITE ABOUT IT". Spectacularly elusive, this tussle of an artists' war against 'their' critic, Clement Greenberg, genuinely yokes the push-and- pull of a once 'new' painting style with the enormity of expressionist opera into an uncontainable psycho-tornado, lucid beyond language.

Compilation of stills from The Cedar Bar

The play itself, destroyed by fire in 1966, was rewritten from memory 20 years later, recorded during a staged reading in 1997, and figures in the film for the most part as New York slapstick voiceover with songs.Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, April Yabolonsky, gallerist John Myers et al are drinking for duration with Greenberg, their conversations as wild as one might expect, but also as one, in this instance, actually experiences. This is 'reality cinema'; the intensive orchestration of footage Leslie culled from his home video collection over four years is variously (and sometimes simultaneously) metaphor, illustration, entertainment, irony and mise-en-scene, image playing off image in the minds of an increasingly complicit and foregrounded audience. Vaudevillian singing and dancing, noir classics, bar brawls, lone drinkers, recent Oscar ceremonies, pornography, racial attacks, the Holocaust, crass digital effects and occasional text spiral into a complex multi-layering that is as spatial as it is surface. We, like Leslie, literally and visually 'overhear' the actors. We, like his real-life 'players', become drunks 'overhearing' drunks.

From its matinee-movie jungle drums, calling us to the think-tank of a shape-shifting Cedar Tavern, it is clear that hysteria is on the cards. Camp and pastiche jostle for position as everyone is out for Greenberg; he slaps Joan Mitchell for plucking porno cards from his breast pocket, and snippets of porn in the video become like the audience's cards, their repetition its own appalling gag. As de Kooning brags that Pollock "needed", him there is canned laughter and an Oscar ceremony; celebrity artists in their own incestuous making. The video's tone of brooding menace is no less presaged by footage of the Holocaust set to a nonsensical alphabet song in a sequence that ends with the A-bomb. Not only are "words but the shadows of ideas", they are also futile; and this is not any war, but, in 1957, a very recent one.

The Cedar Bar is too intelligent not to be riddled with red herrings, dead-ends and deliberate contradictions. Ultimately, Greenberg is humiliated and banished only for de Kooning to reclaim him with a telling conundrum: "He is us if he is anybody", but then we remember an earlier image of a black-tied Ronald Reagan and that de Kooning eventually also suffered with Alzheimer's, as his monologue withers and wanders to the end. It is a dark irony that these artists face the void of dawn with the unspoken knowing of denial: their horror at the implications of the relationship between artist, critic and commerce at the very moment they are conjuring its terms.

Compilation of stills from The Cedar Bar

Alcoholism is a vicious circle indeed and it is the barman who leaves the maelstrom happiest. He is rich, doesn it die young or slowly, his children inherit a thriving business. To say there is a moral in the tale would be a reduction, though nevertheless one to which the trainers of every bar-owner in Hoxton would testify.

In a letter to his friend and collaborator, the poet Frank O'Hara (equally a blueprint for their radical 1964 film, The Last Clean Shirt), Leslie lays The Cedar Bar is cornerstone: "We will shoot for two SEPERATE LEVELS on the film. One is the VISUAL, the other the HEARD & the spectator will be in TWO places or more SIMULTANEOUSLY. NOT AS MEMORY BUT AT THE SAME MOMENT. PARALLELISM! MULTIPLE POINTS OF VIEW!" (reprinted in the Millenium Edition of Leslie is "one-shot review", The Hasty Papers, first published 1960).

Specifically, The Cedar Bar extends and multiplies Leslie's brash and fearless formalism, his blatant irreverence and disregard for the permissible, in much the same way as he set O'Hara's lyrical poetry in storyboards of dirty schoolboy line drawings. While occupying an uncontested, electric present, The Cedar Bar also plays out a comedy of memories, its images oscillating between the 'now' and hindsight, prophecy and omen. When the play was rewritten it was transposed to 1957, a year after Jackson Pollock's death and his ghost, looming large, is almost tangible. Greenberg's actual comment in a snippet of rare archival footage at the end of the video that Pollock was, like Duchamp, "not too flat" in his engagement with the "arbitrary" might equally apply to Leslie's seemingly effortless yet impeccable grafting of cinematic and televisual ready-mades. There is not an image set to a word here that doesn't merit at least an in-vain paragraph of social, psychological or aesthetic investigation, that will in turn never be the sum of its meaning. Memory, in this game of flux, is itself made present.

More furious though no less profound than a meditation, The Cedar Bar is not only the personal history of a critical period and a provocative audio-visual trip, but a commentary on life, art, war, the inadequacy of language and the impossibility of contemporary artistic practice.

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