Skip to main content

Waiting at the Soda Fountain

Susan Mogul

1980 00:24:00 United StatesEnglishColorMono4:3Video
Tags:

Description

This performance video offers a humorous critique of Hollywood power relations. Mogul masquerades as a stereotypical male film director auditioning would-be starlets at a soda fountain--a parody of the rags-to-riches legend of Lana Turner's "discovery" at Schwab's drugstore. In over-the-top performances that poke fun at traditional female passivity, feminist artists including Arlene Raven, Cheri Gaulke and Nancy Angelo, enact the roles of pliant actresses-in-waiting who submit to the whims and sexist jabs of a dictatorial director. Balancing structure and improvisation, reality and artifice, the video is composed of footage shot during a three-hour on-location happening directed by Mogul, who scripted the scenarios, but not the dialog.

About Susan Mogul

Having been involved with video since the early 1970s, Susan Mogul is a pioneer of the medium. Initially producing an important series of humorous and staunchly feminist performance videos, her practice quickly expanded to more complicated and experimental forms of narrative, including feature length work. Mogul has received grants including: Guggenheim Fellowship, ITVS commission, National
Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Getty Trust Fellowship, and Center for Cultural Innovation grant. 

A survey of Moguls video/films took place in Vienna at the Austrian Film Museum in 2024. Mogul’s video/film retrospective was presented at Visions du Reel Film Festival in Switzerland in 2009. Driving Men (2008), a feature length documentary, screened in international competitions in Japan, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, and India. Mogul’s first solo museum exhibition – a major survey of her work- opened August 2022 at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland.

Mogul’s work has been featured in historic exhibitions: California Video at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles: Birth of an Art Capital at the Pompidou in Paris, and Where Art Might Happen: The early years of CalArts at the Kunsthaus Graz in Austria. Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video devotes a chapter to Mogul’s work and career. Mogul was the keynote speaker at a national conference in Zurich on film and autobiography.

Less is Never More, a solo installation was presented at as-is-la gallery in Los Angeles in 2019. Less... garnered a full-page review in the LA Times. A major essay in the 2020 summer issue of the Los Angeles arts quarterly, X-TRA, titled, A Feminist’s Survival Index, not only reviewed Mogul’s current work, but positioned it in the context of the history of feminist art, and her legacy as a Los Angeles artist.