A significant body of contemporary feminist work explores questions of adaptation, reiteration, and change through formal, temporal, and aesthetic means. Queer and feminist makers are re-writing the historical narrative while pushing the boundaries of multiple mediums. From Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon, Cecelia Condit’s Oh, Rapunzel, and Midi Onodera’s Ten Cents a Dance, to Elisabeth Subrin’s Shulie, Jennifer Montgomery’s Deliver, Amy Ruhl’s How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body, and Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz’s Salomania, to Ja’tovia Gary’s An Ecstatic Experience, Christina Corfield’s Petticoat Nation, Kate Lain’s friskies paté (for joyce wieland) and Irene Lusztig’s Yours in Sisterhood— these makers masterfully reiterate, reinscribe, and reimagine the past in order to transform the present. Every Monday this month I will post a video exploring this growing body of work that queerly questions the possibilities of re-production in the digital age.

Irene Gustafson’s 2009 55 minute video Portrait of Turner re-stages Shirley Clark’s challenging 1967 classic Portrait of Jason. In Gustafson’s experiment, her camera is turned upon performance artist Scott Turner Schofield, raising a series of questions about the nature of performance, experiment, and repetition. This obscure gem formally connects contemporary queer video practice to feminist film histories, insisting on comparison and re-vision that demands continued debate.

Enjoy!

https://vimeo.com/102774623