Carte blanche to Anne Golden

On March 31, 2022 at 7 pm
Reservation and wearing a mask required.

The program will start at 7 pm sharp

Vidéographe and Dazibao entrust the talented artist and curator Anne Golden with a carte blanche for the dv_vd series. Golden, the winner of the Prix Robert-Forget, has chosen this program to highlight the works that have inspired her throughout her prolific career.

NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP

" The program title refers to the 1980s song by Rick Astley.

Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you

The lyrics express how I feel about the works in this program and the admiration I have for the artists. I would never give them up and they have certainly never let me down. In fact, these are works I have returned to over and over again.

My 1980s included lots of exposure to video art and independent film, meetings and marches, actions, and the beginning of long associations with Image et nation gaie et lesbienne (now Image+Nation) and Groupe Intervention Vidéo. I am taken with films and videos produced by queer artists. I realize much later that I was waiting for these works. They make a fan out of me. They teach me. They make me laugh. I believe they helped make me. In the past little while, I have experienced memories of what these works represented/represent for me.

My selections reflect the fact that I have had key formative experiences in my professional life. I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Film Studies from Concordia. I had little idea about what I could do as work, beyond watching, loving, and analyzing films. I applied to the Festival international de films et vidéos de femmes de Montréal (now sadly defunct.) I was hired as an assistant film programmer, a term that is no longer in vogue. I saw video art for the first time and was intrigued, then hooked. The second festival I worked for was Image et Nation. My two festival work experiences overlapped. I would work at the Festival international de films et vidéos de femmes for six months and volunteer at Image et Nation for the other six. I also began working at Groupe Intervention Vidéo in 1989. I was in positions that meant I was seeing media artworks constantly.

This program is a reflection of my interest in early video art, in works that foreground activism around HIV/AIDS, and in experimental works, whether these reflect experimentation in form or content. Eight years ago, I joined the programming team for MUFF (Montreal Underground Film Festival) and grasped how much I had missed the communal experience of watching works.

This is a program about nostalgia and bereavement. Esther Valiquette and Cathy Sisler were often in my thoughts as I watched works and thought about my selections. The two men in DHPG Mon Amour, David and Joe, so alive and vibrant in Super 8, are gone. There is also a nostalgia informed by obsolete video formats and editing procedures. I have also been thinking of the many friends and colleagues who viewed and discussed these works with me. I recall (memory or wish?) that we laughed in the right places and felt anger and sadness in solidarity with the artists. Never gonna give you up."

— Anne Golden, 2022

Program

Charles Binamé, Réaction 26 (1971) — 4 min. 35 sec.
Distribution: Vidéographe

Réaction 26 is one of several feedback tapes from the early seventies that bypassed the only method of editing video in 1971. Video editing has developed into a series of co-existing procedures, but in the early years of the art it was laborious, time intensive and sometimes imprecise. Fluid, sixties-inspired groovy patterns set to music bely the preponderance of long takes used in contemporary video productions from this time. Tapes like Réaction 26 appear to come from a parallel time, one where the subject matter was not bound inexorably to the recording process. Feedback was a way of generating a kind of (largely) uncontrollable special effect, which modified the image. Réaction 26 is a loosely constructed counterculture head-trip.

Jean-Pierre Boyer, Vidéo-Cortex (1974) — 6 min. 35 sec.
Distribution: Vidéographe

Jean-Pierre Boyer is one of my video heroes and is also a founding member of Groupe Intervention Vidéo.

Video artist Jean-Pierre Boyer invented the boyétizeur, a synthesizer device that allowed artists to experiment with images curling in upon themselves, among other effects. His videos from the early to mid-seventies present elegant abstractions created by his own invention. In 1974, Jean-Pierre Boyer was the organizer of the event “L’Image électronique” held at the Musée d’art contemporain. Among the participants were Woody and Steina Vasulka. The conference included sections on the Paik-Abe and the Rutt-Etra synthesizers. According to the pamphlet, the event was, first and foremost, to provide information on “the unexplored possibilities of the television medium” (my translation) (Boyer, 1974, 2). The text uses “television” and “video” interchangeably and demonstrates a tone that approaches the utopian.

Louise Gendron, Femmes de rêve (1979) — 10 min.
Distribution: GIV

A classic from the late seventies — a roll call of the feminine and ‘femininity’ as advertised on television and in print. This video demonstrates rigorous montage and a gleeful pillaging of popular culture in order to comment on the idea of ‘woman’. Louise Gendron is a founding member of GIV.

Femmes de rêve presents rapid-fire montage of images that have been lifted from TV (repiquage). This was a new trend that has been used to great effect by artists in countless videos to this day. Femmes de rêve becomes television turned on itself, used to 'broadcast' an alternative evaluation of the images that careen before us. This video is an early condemnation of the destructive notion of a superwoman in commercials of the day promising improvement and canned happiness. Informed by feminism and video technology, Femmes de rêve is a barrage of humour and rage.

John Greyson, The Ads Epidemic (1989) — 4 min.
Distribution: Vtape

A parody of Death in Venice. In fact, "This is not a Death in Venice...". Aschenbach succumbs to an attack of ADS (Acquired Dread of Sex) while Tadzio learns that Safe Sex is Fun. Greyson takes a musical, humorous/educational approach and in a brief four minutes makes a plea for practicing Safe Sex. A timely pitch, then as now.

During a screening of Greyson’s mini-musical at Image et Nation in 1990, I listened as some members of an audience sang along with the video. It was a funny, stirring and poignant moment.

Carl Michael George, DHPG Mon Amour (1989) — 12 min.
Distribution: The Filmmakers Coop

This work gutted me when I first viewed it. Raw, honest and matter of fact, the work typifies the ‘talking back’ practiced by AIDS activists/artists. The power of this film lies partly in the portrayal of two guys performing quotidian rituals that just happen to include injecting themselves with medications not yet available through prescription. DHPG Mon Amour is a testament to individuals making their own decisions for managing their health. The men have obtained the drugs through underground channels, deciding that taking a chance on an experimental treatment option is better than the alternative. The film shows two men taking decisions and actions, not being acted upon.

For a description of this film, I prefer the following to anything I have tried to write.

“Carl M. George’s super-8 movie, DHPG Mon Amour, is a profoundly moving, quirky and difficult film which narrates a day in the life of two men, David Conover and Joe Walsh. Following Walsh as he leaves his job at New York’s Community Research Initiative and shops for food, the film opens with Ella Fitzgerald’s Nights in Tunisia played beneath Walsh describing himself and Conover, his lover of eight years. Joe was diagnosed HIV positive in 1985; David has been living with AIDS for several years and is currently dealing with CMV retinitis, a condition which can lead to severe impairment of vision and possibly blindness. Refusing to accept standard and ‘official’ medical advice on appropriate drug treatments and methodology, David chooses instead to self-administer the medication DHPG Gancyclovire, opting for an infusaport applicator (which remains under the skin) rather than a bulky and physically prohibitive Hickman catheter.”

The writer of these words, Tom Kalin, goes on to analyze the film in some detail. I recommend the book from which this passage was taken, A Leap In the Dark: AIDS, Art and Contemporary Cultures (eds. Allan Klusacek and Ken Morrisson, 1993, Véhicule Press)

Esther Valiquette, Extenderis (1993) — 10 min. 06 sec.
Distribution: Vidéographe

Esther Valiquette was a brilliant artist. She made three magnificent pieces, Le récit d’A, Le singe bleu and Extenderis. Her media artworks are among my favourites because they are personal meditations that also speak to issues around HIV/AIDS.

Extenderis looks at DNA and archaelogical excavation. The tape slips into a hypnotic barrage of information from a universal past. Images appear to arrive from a distant point to briefly register and then seem to zoom off behind us. It is a profoundly spiritual tape that builds up until Valiquette achieves an orchestrated chaos. Technology is used to help us as viewers experience the notion of collective unconscious.

Cathy Sisler, Aberrant Motion #4: Face Story, Stagger Stories (1993)
— 14 min. 31 sec.
Distribution: GIV

I remember first seeing Cathy Sisler’s videos and being amazed and overcome by the power, humour and rage expressed in her works. I was working at GIV full-time in 1993 and we acquired Cathy’s videos for distribution. Cathy Sisler passed away in December, 2021. The sense of loss is immeasurable. Her seminal videos are iconoclastic, prescient and luminous, words I would also use to describe Cathy Sisler.

In Aberrant Motion #4: Face Story, Stagger Stories, The Spinning Woman reveals her many social labels: alcoholic, white, female, lesbian, fat. Spinning in place attracts attention, disturbs and creates a break in the flow of passers-by.

Dana Inkster, Welcome to Africville (1999) — 15 min.
Distribution: GIV

Inkster's beautiful fiction references the destruction of Africville on the outskirts of Halifax in 1969. Four characters speak directly to the camera about their lives. This use of direct address says 'documentary', but the actors speak Inkster's bittersweet words.

In Welcome to Africville, Inkster invites us to see her fictional characters as subjects in a documentary. In 1969, the community of Africville, Nova Scotia was razed to the ground. As Inkster says in the voiceover “The citizens of Canada’s oldest urban black community lost their homes.” Welcome to Africville provides a different and enduring location for the long gone community. Inkster creates sense of place through characters and sets. From off camera, we hear Inkster’s voice as a documentary director in Africville to capture the feelings of the inhabitants on the eve of demolition. In this Africville, Dusty, Anna, Julius and Mary speak about their lives and loves in a bar, on a veranda, in a bedroom. Characters are not defined by their imminent loss. We meet charismatic, conflicted, outrageous and funny people. There is no physical Africville anymore. The community is now memory, archival footage, written word, a commemorative plaque. Welcome to Africville offers possible stories that hummed through a vibrant community.