Dara Birnbaum Arabesque (single screen edit)
Babette Mangolte Trisha Brown Watermotor, 7’55”
Martha Rosler God Bless America 1 min
Marnie Weber The Night of Forevermore, 2012, 14.45 min, Simon Lee Gallery
Joan Jonas Song Delay (18’) 1971 EAI and Wilkinson Gallery
Running time approx. 30 minutes
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Friday 20 March | 10.00 - 12.00 | studio theatre
Performance on film
During the 1960s artists played with the moving image. First artists used film cameras, 16mm, and 8mm and eventually video to record performances and actions. Where male performance artists such as Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra, moved on to sculpture and the commercial sector many women continued their work with the moving image and performance. One of the big advantages of the new medium is that it had not yet been adopted and owned by men. Until recently because these performance and video works did not enter the established order of the commercial sector, it was also largely ignored in the museums. Today Museums around the world are coming late to the issue. Included in this programme is the work of Marnie Weber an artist of a younger generation who uses performance and sculpture in her work.
Further reading and looking Dara Birnbaum
Further reading and looking Dara Birnbaum
Shifting between media, Marnie Weber’s multifaceted, interconnected practice encompasses performance, film, video, sculpture, collage, music and costume. Blending the carnivalesque, the bacchanalian, the mystical and the absurd, Weber creates uncanny worlds that exist in a realm between fantasy and reality, and invite viewers to an exploration of the subconscious.
In her work, one finds hybrid creatures, sometimes realized in two dimensions, and others incorporating mannequins disguised in ornate costumes and masks. These function as contemporary grotesques in the spirit of Hieronymus Bosch, and place emphasis on unnatural bodies and surreal worlds. The darkness of Weber’s vision can be seen to lie in the precarious relationship between the parable, quasi-Wizard of Oz aesthetic and the overtly adult subject matter: sex, drugs and death.
Since the 1990s, several pictorial tropes have recurred with frequency in Weber’s works, most notably: the mythological anthropomorphising of animals and the relationship between animals and humans; appropriation and the re-contextualization of images, which place women in positions of power and primacy; and the importance of the backdrop or milieu as a site of transformation and magic. Exploring the loss of innocence, the community of living things, spiritualism and the subconscious, Weber’s folkloric works present psychologically-charged, neo-gothic fairytales. Disorienting and mysterious, they elicit responses from viewers, which fluctuate between melancholy and delight, attraction and repulsion, humour and tragedy.
Dara Birnbaum Arabesque (single screen edit) 6’37”, Wilkinson Gallery, Marion Goodman
Babette Mangolte Trisha Brown Watermotor, 7’55”, Broadway 1602.
Martha Rosler God Bless America
Marnie Weber The Night of Forevermore, 2012, 14.45 min, Simon Lee Gallery
Joan Jonas Song Delay (18’) 1971 EAI and Wilkinson Gallery