Our next evening will be very special night, and a first for Queer/Art/Film. Last year, we saw the monumental "ACT UP New York" show at Harvard's Carpenter Center, and we've been working to help bring it to New York, its rightful home, ever since. In September, this historic show will be opening at the artists space White Columns, and to herald its arrival, we've invited Douglas Crimp, the ever influential provocateur and AIDS activist, to be this months' guest artist! It should be a special n...
Our next evening will be very special night, and a first for Queer/Art/Film. Last year, we saw the monumental "ACT UP New York" show at Harvard's Carpenter Center, and we've been working to help bring it to New York, its rightful home, ever since. In September, this historic show will be opening at the artists space White Columns, and to herald its arrival, we've invited Douglas Crimp, the ever influential provocateur and AIDS activist, to be this months' guest artist! It should be a special night, a gathering of old faces and new, as we remember, honor, and are inspired by the artists and activists of ACT UP NEW YORK.
For tonight's screenings, Crimp will be presenting a highly personal selection of the AIDS and activist videos that have meant the most to him, including FAST TRIP, LONG DROP by Gregg Bordowitz, and works by Matt Ebert, Ryan Landry, Maria Maggenti, and Jean Carlomusto, many of whom will be with us for tonights screening!
PLEASE NOTE, FOR THIS EVENING ONLY WE WILL SCREEN AT 7PM & 9PM
The evening likely to sell out, so buy your tix in advance at:
http://www.movietickets.com/pre_purchase.asp?house_id=9598&movie_id=100372&rdate=09/13/2010
This event is co-sponsored by MIX NYC
For information about the events at White Columns:
http://www.whitecolumns.org/view.html?type=exhibitions&id=524
DOUGLAS CRIMP on THE FILMS OF ACT UP
When people ask me what made ACT UP different, my answer is: ACT UP was queer. How to explain?
In the summer of 1987, I saw the pilot video of Testing the Limits, the first documentary about the emerging AIDS activist movement. The video inspired me to join ACT UP. It was a life-changing decision; it also inspired a very brash statement: Art does have the power to save lives. I meant safe-sex videos, but I soon realized that what I said was more widely applicable. So, for example, DOCTORS, LIARS, AND WOMEN: AIDS ACTIVISTS SAY NO TO COSMO, by Jean Carlomusto and Maria Maggenti, shows how countering the medias lies about AIDS could save lives. It shows a lot more too: how women found their voice in ACT UP by putting together a demonstration against Cosmopolitan magazine, how the mainstream media usurped that voice, and how the ACT UP women reasserted it by making and distributing their own media. MARTA, PORTRAIT OF A TEEN ACTIVIST, by Matt Ebert and Ryan Landry, is also about the women of ACT UP, figured in the character Marta, played by Landry in drag. Its about how inspiring the women of the movement were to the men, and its also about how queer we all were, how queer it felt to be activists, how awkward and bewildering and un-heroic. And scary and sad: Gregg Bordowitzs FAST TRIP, LONG DROP, with its despondency only slightly relieved by mordant humor, is a meditation on the accidents and tragedies of history in the mode of autobiography, the autobiography of an AIDS activist videomaker living with HIV and with very little hope. At the same time, like the other two videos, Bordowitzs meditation is also self-reflexive about being an activist and about making activist video. This is what was queer about ACT UP: we knew our activism was totally necessary, but it didnt make us any less self-conscious about it.
ON DOUGLAS
When Douglas Crimp first published an essay called "Mourning and Militancy in 1989 he set off a bomb in both the art and AIDS activism worlds in which he was deeply entrenched. Among his many other acts of notoriety, Crimp was the curator of the supremely influential "Pictures" exhibition at Artists Space, New York, in 1977 and an editor of October magazine from 1977 to 1990. Now the Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester, Crimp is the author of MELANCHOLIA AND MORALISM: ESSAYS ON QUEER POLITICS (MIT Press, 2002), ON TEH MUSEUMS RUINS (MIT Press, 1993), and AIDS DEMO GRAPHICS (Bay Press, 1990). Most recently, he organized with Lynne Cooke the exhibition "Mixed Use, Manhattan," currently on view at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa, Madrid. He is completing a book about Andy Warhols films and working on a memoir of New York in the 1970s.