Exhibition
Ghosts in the Machine
07/18/12-09/30/12
Screenings · Exhibition-Related
“Ghosts on the Screen”: The Deadman, 1989, and The Color of Love, 1994, dir. Peggy Ahwesh
Cover Image:
Peggy Ahwesh, The Color of Love, 1994. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Moving image technologies have transformed the visual arts in myriad ways. As movie cameras and film stock became widely accessible outside of the studio system in the 1960s, artists began to explore the potentials of narrative film in a variety of genres. On three Saturdays, we will screen films made by artists that explore the visual dimensions of narrative and the narrative dimension of form.
PLEASE BE ADVISED: This screening contains explicit sexual content and graphic depictions of violence and human degradation.
The Deadman, dir. Peggy Ahwesh, 1989 (35 min)
Made in collaboration with Keith Sanborn, The Deadman is based on a story by Georges Bataille, charting “the adventures of a near-naked heroine who sets in motion a scabrous free-from orgy before returning to the house to die—a combination of elegance, raunchy defilement and barbaric splendor,” wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader.
The Color of Love, dir. Peggy Ahwesh, 1994 (10 min)
Ahwesh subjects an apparently found pornographic film to coloring, optical printing, and general fragmentation—the source material threatens to virtually collapse under the beautiful violence of her filmic treatment. What emerges is a portrait at once nostalgic and horrible: the degraded image locked in symbiotic relation with an image of degradation.
Presented with Alone, dir. Stephen Dwoskin, 1963 (13 min)
“Alone is a major departure into projecting feelings and senses of loneliness, timelessness, and the sensual self. The film presents moments that are passing tones in any life, yet far from registering a passive despair, protests against a traditional culture which is unable to confront such moments and passes them by as both trivial and obscene,” is how Dwoskin described this film. Alone explores the onanistic potential of both the female body and the camera, and was the source and the inspiration for J.G. Ballard’s collage Does the Angle Between Two Walls Have a Happy Ending? (1967).
Sponsors
Lead Sponsor
Funding for “Ghosts in the Machine” is provided by the David Bermant Foundation.
Additional support is provided by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V.
The accompanying exhibition publication is made possible by the J. McSweeney and G. Mills Publications Fund at the New Museum.
Education and public programs are made possible by a generous grant from Goldman Sachs Gives at the recommendation of David and Hermine Heller.
