Feminism

As if trapped inside a nightmare, the main protagonist of Poster Girl is haunted by disturbing visions, thoughts and fantasies, which the viewer is privy to. She is joined at various points in the video by another woman, whose role in the narrative remains unclear – is she meant to function as a guardian or a demon? The video further complicates the matter by representing both women as simultaneously wounded and wounding, inviting and threatening, vulnerable and menacing.

This 3-disc DVD collection features nine works by maverick film and video maker Peggy Ahwesh. The set also includes title descriptions, a biography, film/videography, a selected bibliography, and the following texts:

• Pistolary! Films and Videos by Peggy Ahwesh -- Eileen Myles
• Film, Baby -- Peggy Ahwesh
• Interview with Peggy Ahwesh -- Scott MacDonald

The two Social Studies videos call into question fundamental assumptions about the cross-purposes of entertainment: to entertain, to present cultural values, to mediate public policies, and to define social relationships.

A woman is lying on her back on the floor.  She seems to be tied down on the ground, but she is holding her ankles with her own hands.  She wears only tights and a pair of high-heeled red shoes.  Her hair-covered face makes her an anonymous victim of the camera, which is making converging circles around her body.

This title is also available on Hester Scheurwater Videoworks: Volume 1.

I moved three thousand miles from the east coast to join the feminist art program at CAL ARTS in 1973.  I had only been in LA three weeks when Judy Chicago took us to a "Menstruation" art exhibition at Womanspace Gallery.  The exhibit included every conceivable medium about menstruation - paintings, weavings, sculpture.  I was amazed - nothing was taboo.  Being outrageous was normal in this LA feminist art environment.  Around the same time I read "Female Eunuch" by Germaine Greer.  She wrote, and I paraphrase, "If you taste your blood when you scratch your fin

Performance artist/sculptor Ana Mendieta used the raw materials of nature: water, mud, fire, rock, and grass. The consciousness of her politics and the poetics of her expression fill her work with an emotionally charged vision that is powerfully conveyed in this posthumous video profile. Drawing upon the raw spiritual power of Afro-Cuban religion, Mendieta used her art as a ritualistic and symbolic activity to celebrate the forces of life and the continuum of change.

Playing with cliched feminine personae, Eleanor Antin in The Adventures of a Nurse manipulates cut-out paper dolls to tell the story of innocent Nurse Eleanor who meets one gorgeous, intriguing, and available man after another. Nurse Eleanor is the fantasy creation of Antin, who is costumed as a nurse. Staged on a bedspread and acted by a cast of one, The Adventures of a Nurse moves through successive layers of irony to unravel a childlike, self-enclosed fantasy of a young woman’s life.