Through a Glass, Darkly
Friday, March 23, 2018, 4:45 p.m.
MoMA
Program 76 min.
The program’s opening film is a radical statement of the edgy terrain and industrial subcultures represented throughout this eclectic grouping. The Wound’s surrealistic, progressively abstracted images of female body parts, and its transgressive voiceover, were created by Jill Westwood, a member of the noise band Fistfuck who also ran an S&M fetish stall in Kensington Market. Some of the experimental works that follow mine cinema history, as in Cordelia Swann’s feminist, dreamy video reworking of the Douglas Sirk melodrama All That Heaven Allows. Others, including Richard Heslop (working with the avant-funk band 23 Skidoo) and Holly Warburton (who mixed Super8, video, and tape loops in her romantic tryptic), engage expanded cinema presentations of multiple projection and music. The body remains a site for wide-ranging investigations: Fashion photographer Michael Kostiff combines delicately distorted Super8 images of John Maybury in ballet-like poses with the glow of a sea of television monitors, while Japanese-born video artist Akiko Hada uses her body as an element within an assemblage of text, mystical imagery, and industrial sounds. Others bring nature into the metaphysical recasting of bodily experiences: Jennifer Binnie weaves together bucolic images of Grayson Perry with a Velvet Underground soundtrack, while Judith Goddard hints at more existential themes with analog video effects that bleed public, private, ecological, and meditative visions into one.
The Wound. 1984. Great Britain. Directed Jill Westwood. Digital video from Super8mm. 18 min.
Winter Journey in the Hartz Mountains. 1983. Great Britain. Directed by Cordelia Swann. Video. 12 min.
Liquid Video. 1983. Great Britain. Directed by Michael Kostiff. With John Maybury. Digital video from Super8mm. 10 min.
The Branks. 1982. Great Britain. Directed by Akiko Hada. Video. 7 min.
All Veneer and No Backbone. 1980–84. Great Britain. Directed by Holly Warburton. Digital video from Super8mm, video, and slide installation. 5 min.
23 Skidoo: “F.U.G.I.”. 1983. Great Britain. Directed by Richard Heslop. Digital video from Super8mm and video. 5 min.
Grayson/Flowers/Jewels. 1985. Great Britain. Directed by Jennifer Binnie. With Grayson Perry. Digital video from Super8mm. 3 min.
Lyrical Doubt. 1984. Great Britain. Directed by Judith Goddard. Video. 16 min.
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