Using a hand-held camera, Hammer initially shot on 8 mm stock. Her second film—created in 1968 while the artist is still married, and her name is Barbara Ward—programmatically shows the desecration of a graveyard. Though only at the beginning of her development as an artist, she already disturbs the peace of the dead, confidently erecting a monument to herself amid them: “Barbara Ward Will Never Die.” The young filmmaker stakes her claim to a place in history. From now on she will document her own coming-out and her sexual liberation (“X,” 1973). She creates portraits of herself and lovers in lesbian relationships and biographies (“Double Strength,” 1978) and seeks to define an active, participant, and passionate gaze on lesbian sex. Her films broach taboos such as the female orgasm and menstruation. The rise of the performance art movement inspires films such as “Menses” (1974) and “Superdyke” (1975), created spontaneously during collective actions and ritual experiments. The feminist occupation of public spaces—including San Francisco’s city hall—and the parodic appropriation of cinematographic myths of masculinity ranging from Robin Hood to Easy Rider coalesce in “Superdyke.” “Blue Film No. 6: Love Is Where You Find It” (1998) is a found porn flick: a threesome. Hammer excises the male part, retaining the two ladies and an amusing digest of voyeuristic platitudes.
Hammer frequently appears in front of the camera, by herself or with friends, filling the cinematic screen with her own presence. She participates in the feminist project of making the private—in her case, even the most intimate aspects of life—public. To date, she has created an oeuvre comprising ca. eighty films, beginning with short and experimental formats but soon adding more extensive documentary works. Hammer, who moved to New York in 1983, time and again reflects on her own life and body, for instance addressing her bout with cancer in “A Horse Is Not a Metaphor” (2009). At the same time, she works to create filmic structures beyond narrative, linear space and linear time, by chronicling the biographies of marginalized women, and experiments with the filmic material itself.
1+2 Barbara Hammer, “The Politics of Abstraction,” in Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, ed. Martha Gever, John Greyson, Pratibha Parmar (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 71.
