Littoral: The Hole Picture: Barbara Hammer, A.L. Steiner, A.K. Burns, moderated by Kelly Dennis
The feminist reception and production of pornography has had a complicated & fascinating trajectory, a discourse of representation often bound by the logic of the male gaze. The Hole Picture brings together a selection of socio-sexual films & videos by artists Barbra Hammer, A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner that celebrate desire and redefine notions of queer sexuality and the lesbian body. Presenting a multigenerational overview of representation, this screening and panel discussion will focus on contemporary artistic practices which incorporate avant-garde visions of sexuality and erotics, dissecting the trope of pornography itself. Screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmakers, moderated by art historian Kelly Dennis, author of Art/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching. This event is presented in collaboration with MIX NYC.
Barbara Hammer was born on May 15, 1939 in Hollywood, California. She is a visual artist working primarily in film and video and has made over 80 works in a career that spans 40 years. She is considered a pioneer of queer cinema. She has received numerous awards, most recently the Teddy for the best LGBT film at the 2009 International Berlin Film Festival. Her first book on queer cinema, HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life launched at The Elizabeth Sackler Center at The Brooklyn Museum of Art on March 6, 2010 and is published by The Feminist Press of City University of New York. For one month in fall of 2010 Hammer was honored with her first US retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to be followed by The Tate Modern in London in fall 2011.
A.L. Steiner uses constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, collaboration, performance and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a cynical queer eco-feminist androgyne. Based in Brooklyn, NY, Steiner is a collective member of Chicks on Speed, the co-curator of Ridykeulous, a founding member of W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) and collaborates with numerous visual and performing artists. Her work has been recently featured in Greater New York 2010, P.S. 1, New York and has been subject to solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Sofia, Bulgaria, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art and the New Museum, New York. She is a visiting instructor at the School of Visual Arts and University of California Los Angeles, and is represented by Taxter & Spengemann, NY.
A.K. Burns lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. A.K. uses sculpture, video, collage and performed social actions to pervert and exploit interpretations and implications of form. A.K. is a founding member W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy), and co-editor of RANDY, a biannual transfeminist arts magazine. During 2010 the feature length video Community Action Center, created in collaboration with A.L. Steiner was released consecutively at Taxter & Spengemann, NY and Horton Gallery, Berlin. A.K. was also the artist-in-residence at Recess Activites Inc., NY, with her partner Katherine Hubbard. She received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.
Kelly Dennis is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and the History of Photography at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. She is the author of Art / Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching (Berg, 2009), on the role of touch in the reception of the nude from Plato to the Internet. She has published on fetishism and masturbation in art and wrote the definitive essay on beaver shots. She appears, along with Dr. Jocelyn Elders, Betty Dodson, and Scarlot Harlot, in the forthcoming feature-length documentary on masturbation, Sticky. Her work on photography, performance art, and pornography appears in A Cultural History of Sexuality (Berg, 2011), Photography: Theoretical Snapshots (Routledge, 2008), Strategies for Theory: From Marx to Madonna (SUNY, 2003), and in such journals as Art Journal, History of Photography, and n.paradoxa. She has lectured on pornography throughout North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia. She also has been a consultant for documentary films and theater productions on sexuality and cultural representation in photography. She is currently at work on a history of the political aesthetics of Western regional landscape photography.
Since 1987, MIX NYC has presented the latest in queer experimental film and previously unseen works from legendary figures in avant-garde cinema. In addition to our vanguard screenings, exciting interactive installations, and infamous parties, MIX NYC also provides year-round community screenings, a summer media workshop for queer youth, film preservation projects, and the groundbreaking ACT UP Oral History Project, documenting how collective action transformed AIDS activism, queer identity and health care in America.
The Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.
ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.
Littoral: The Hole Picture: An Intergenerational Dialogue on Erotics & Porn in Lesbian-Feminist Queer Cinema
The feminist reception and production of pornography has had a complicated & fascinating trajectory, a discourse of representation often bound by the logic of the male gaze. The Hole Picture brings together a selection of socio-sexual films & videos by artists Barbra Hammer, A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner that celebrate desire and redefine notions of queer sexuality and the lesbian body. Presenting a multigenerational overview of representation, this screening and panel discussion will focus on contemporary artistic practices which incorporate avant-garde visions of sexuality and erotics, dissecting the trope of pornography itself. Screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmakers, moderated by art historian Kelly Dennis, author of Art/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching. This event is presented in collaboration with MIX NYC.
Dyketactics, 1974, 4 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Menses, 1974, 4 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Multiple Orgasm, 1976, 6 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Women I Love, 1976, 22 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Superdyke Meets Madame X, 1977, 20 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Community Action Center, 2010, 69 mins., A.K. Burns + A.L. Steiner
Karen Finley
photo: timothy greenfield sanders
IMPULSE to SUCK
The performance of the apology and
The separation of sex and state
Karen Finley was in Albany, New York on March 10 in the Capital for a conference waiting to hear a speech from Governor Eliot Spitzer on Reproductive Health. Instead later that day, Spitzer performed an apology with his supportive, devastated wife standing next to him. Finley will speak about the performance of the apology, the erotic transference of the media’s fixation on Spitzer’s frown and the emotional starring role for his wife, Silda. Finley will perform her latest spoken word text which examines the confession, the apology, the imagining of the sexual encounter, the travel of the escort, the compulsion, the immigrant father’s plan for his son to succeed and the couples imagined therapy sessions. Looking at the psychodrama in the intimacy of our political leaders, Finley poses to see the agony of the son’s need for approval from the father and the ancient wrestling of the feminine archetypes of mother and whore.
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