To: typicalgirls <typicalgirls AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [TypicalGirls] Vivienne Dick at Artists Space
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 13:40:05 -0400
Vivienne Dick October 22-23
Artists Space 38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor New York, NY
Beginning
as an Irish expat in drop-dead New York, Vivienne Dick was among the
most celebrated and influential filmmakers to emerge from the downtown
No Wave scene. Obsessed with exhuming repressed traumas, voicing
beaten-down identities, and generally meandering through a complex
matrix of bad vibes, Dick has created an ever-evolving body of work that
constitutes one of the major corpuses of Super-8 cinema. The critic J.
Hoberman once referred to her as a “quintessential narrow-gauge
filmmaker,” noting how, in her films, “urban documentary,
confessional-psychodrama, ironic spectacle, and home-movie ‘dailiness’
are fused,” thereby totalizing the prevailing genres associated with the
lo-fi format.
Her first film, Guérillère Talks, with its
single-reel portraits of Pat Place, Ikue Mori, Lydia Lunch and others,
plays as proto-riot grrrl ethnography. Place and Lunch reappear in She Had Her Gun All Ready,
a threadbare narrative about two friends that “speaks the contemporary
unspeakable: woman's anger and hatred of woman at the crucial moment of
overpowering identification and obsessional thralldom,” as one writer
observed in the pages of Idiolects. For Beauty Becomes the Beast,
Dick sets a baby-faced Lunch against the decaying, rubble-strewn
corners of the city, invoking a backstory of parental abuse through
music choices like the Shangri-Las’ heart-torn lament “I Can Never Go
Home Anymore” and a wry shot of a subway ad reading HELP DESTROY A
FAMILY TRADITION. Full of dirty dolls and impromptu rug-cutting, it's a
Freudian meltdown, but feels like a party. Dick’s intertwining of fact
and fiction continues in Liberty’s Booty, a film that examines
the daily routines of middle-class call girls in New York through
snapshot-like images taken in their apartments, using off-the-cuff
interviews and staged scenarios to look at how women’s lives become
enmeshed in tightly-wound circuits of money and power.
Visibility: Moderate
obliquely engages with Dick’s own return to Ireland by imagining the
vacation movies of an incongruously glam new waver traveling to touristy
spots like the Blarney Stone, expressing Dick’s own love-hate distance
with disjointed bleats of punk and space jazz over ancient megaliths.
The subtexts of these earlier works become more explicit in her video
essay A Skinny Little Man Attacked Daddy, which uses handheld
footage of her family’s happy gatherings as counterpoint to
reminiscences like her parents’ coldness toward each other or a sister
dying of cancer in apartheid-era South Africa, digging up still-potent
artifacts from the wet bogs of memory. Here and elsewhere, Dick
obliterates the vernacular idiom of the home movie, reconstituting it
anew from what remains of its battered totems.
Friday, October 22
7:30pm
Guérillère Talks 1978, Super-8, 24 mins Staten Island 1978, Super-8, 5 mins She Had Her Gun All Ready
1978, Super-8, 28 mins
Followed by a conversation with the artist and Amy Taubin.
Saturday, October 23
7pm
Beauty Becomes the Beast 1979, Super-8, 41 mins Liberty's Booty
1980, Super-8, 48 mins
Followed by a conversation with the artist and Thomas Beard.
9:30pm
Visibility: Moderate 1981, Super-8, 45 mins Rothach 1985, 16mm, 8 mins A Skinny Little Man Attacked Daddy
1994, video, 28 mins
Followed by a conversation with the artist and Ed Halter.
Tickets - $5, available at door. Free for members.
Organized
by Thomas Beard, Ed Halter, and Treasa O’Brien as part of an ongoing
series of screenings curated by Beard and Halter for Artists Space.
Special thanks to Stuart Comer, Tate Modern.
[TypicalGirls] Vivienne Dick at Artists Space,
Thomas Beard, 10/20/2010