FEMALE TROUBLE: a genderfuck program///
Conrad Ventur, Mario Montez Screen Test, 2010
Patti Podesta, Stepping, 1981
Steven Arnold, Messages, Messages, 1968
Narcissister, Every Woman, 2010
Vaginal Davis, Barbi Twins (excerpt), 1993
Zackary Drucker, Fish, 2010
Pelle Lowe, Earthly Possessions, 1993
Screening time: Approximately 80 mins.
DIRTY LOOKS, a monthly platform for queer experimental film and video, presents a program that explores & explodes normative roles of
femininity and gender. With work that spans five decades, these artists
queer female subject space via drag tactics, narrative juxtaposition
and overt performativity, with styles ranging from masquerade to
mythic, performance document to exposé video zine.
With Mario Montez Screen Test, Conrad Ventur resubmits Jack Smith/Warhol Superstar Mario Montez to Warhol's screen test format some 45 years later. Patti Podesta writes of her video Stepping, "I wanted to make something about risk, about repetition and a sort of lulling into nonsense of a very dangerous situation." Steven Arnold won the Best New Director award at the Cannes Film Festival for his film Messages, Messages, continuing in the tradition of Cocteau and Anger, following a singular protagonist through a psychosexual labyrinth of libidinal delights and genderfuck costumery.
Narcissister's Every Woman is a performance document in which the artist dresses herself in the slinky feminine attire, which she unspools from every bodily orifice imaginable, all to Chaka Khan's ubiquitous anthem, of course. A chapter from Vaginal Davis' Fertile La Toyah Jackson "Aksionist Video Magazine," Barbi Twins documents an incongruous sister duo's Los Angeles exploits and lively recollections in true reportage form. Z Drucker's short video, Fish, is a self-described "matrilineage of cunty white woman realness." Pelle Lowe's Earthly Possessions is a ghostly super8mm evocation, a "contemporary gothic depiction of fragmented identity using texts by Emily Brontë; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning."
The screening will be accompanied by an illustrated publication.
http://www.dirtylooksnyc.org/
