{"id":544,"date":"2011-11-04T18:22:13","date_gmt":"2011-11-04T17:22:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/?p=544"},"modified":"2025-04-24T02:39:07","modified_gmt":"2025-04-24T00:39:07","slug":"barbara-hammer-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/barbara-hammer-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"Barbara Hammer (2011)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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KOW Berlin<\/a><\/p>\n

Curated by Alexander Koch and Nikolaus Oberhuber<\/h2>\n

The documentary and experimental films of Barbara Hammer are considered among the earliest and most extensive representations of lesbian identity, love, and sexuality.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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To date, Hammer\u2019s work has received little attention from the art world. Yet film retrospectives at New York\u2019s MoMA (2010) and the Tate Modern, London, (2012) are now recalling the artist, who was born in Hollywood in 1939, as a pioneer of queer cinema who made decisive contributions to feminism and gay liberation as well as avant-garde cinema and performance art. On the occasion of Hammer\u2019s eighth participation in the Berlin International Film Festival, we are pleased to present the first ever-solo show of her work, with a focus on the 1970s.<\/p>\n

To the extent that love between women had made it into the movies at all, it remained embedded in a matrix of heterosexual\u2014and almost exclusively male\u2014gazes and narrative forms. \u201cEven if the characters were lesbian, the script projects lesbian characters within a heterosexual world of role-playing, lovemaking, and domestic and professional life,\u201d Hammer wrote (1). In order to create independent representations of women\u2019s passion for their own gender and to bring them to theaters, Barbara Hammer and the circle of lesbian feminists of which she was a member in early-1970s San Francisco discarded conventional cinematic practices and started from scratch. Beginning in 1970, Hammer experimented with filmic representations of a new lesbian self-awareness that was only just breaking free from social taboos. \u201cVisibility was the central concern for lesbians making cinema at this time, for the simple and profoundly sad reason that there were few or no pictures, images, or representations available. The screen space, on and off, was blank. Not just marginalized, but not there. There was no cinema to deconstruct. There was no gaze to analyze. [\u2026] We stepped into the void, the invisible, the blank screen, and named ourselves \u2018lesbian.\u2019\u201d(2)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Using a hand-held camera, Hammer initially shot on 8 mm stock. Her second film\u2014created in 1968 while the artist is still married, and her name is Barbara Ward\u2014programmatically 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: \u201cBarbara Ward Will Never Die.\u201d 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 (\u201cX,\u201d 1973). She creates portraits of herself and lovers in lesbian relationships and biographies (\u201cDouble Strength,\u201d 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 \u201cMenses\u201d (1974) and \u201cSuperdyke\u201d (1975), created spontaneously during collective actions and ritual experiments. The feminist occupation of public spaces\u2014including San Francisco\u2019s city hall\u2014and the parodic appropriation of cinematographic myths of masculinity ranging from Robin Hood to Easy Rider coalesce in \u201cSuperdyke.\u201d \u201cBlue Film No. 6: Love Is Where You Find It\u201d (1998) is a found porn flick: a threesome. Hammer excises the male part, retaining the two ladies and an amusing digest of voyeuristic platitudes.<\/p>\n

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\u2014in her case, even the most intimate aspects of life\u2014public. 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 \u201cA Horse Is Not a Metaphor\u201d (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.<\/p>\n

1+2 Barbara Hammer, \u201cThe Politics of Abstraction,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Alexander Koch
\nFebruary 2011<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KOW Berlin<\/p>\n

This project marked the first time Barbara Hammer\u2019s films were presented as artworks within an exhibition space, opening up a new field of reception for the U.S. pioneer of queer cinema. It was the beginning of a long-standing collaboration. Curated by Alexander Koch and Nikolaus Oberhuber.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-exhibitions","entry"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["de","en"],"languages":{"de":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":true},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":true}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3187,"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544\/revisions\/3187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexanderkoch.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}