{"id":92874,"date":"2015-12-14T14:07:23","date_gmt":"2015-12-14T19:07:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=92874"},"modified":"2015-12-14T16:42:05","modified_gmt":"2015-12-14T21:42:05","slug":"lesbian-whale-an-interview-with-barbara-hammer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/12\/14\/lesbian-whale-an-interview-with-barbara-hammer\/","title":{"rendered":"Lesbian Whale: An Interview with Barbara Hammer"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Installation view of Lesbian Whale<\/i>. Courtesy Barbara Hammer and Company Gallery.<\/p><\/div>\n

Barbara Hammer is something of a legend in queer feminist and experimental filmmaking circles. In the seventies, she was the first lesbian feminist to make open, celebratory films about her sexuality. In the eighties, her films took their inspiration from structuralism, using paint, animation, and optical printing to explore notions of embodied spectatorship. By the nineties, she\u2019d helped to pioneer \u201cessay films,\u201d an attempt to produce \u201ca genealogy of survival\u201d amid the thrust of identity politics. Her work foregrounded important queer figures in history\u2014Willa Cather, Alice Austen, and Hannah <\/em>H\u00f6ch among them\u2014and their historical erasure. <\/em><\/p>\n

Hammer\u2019s forays into suppressed queer history have evolved into feature-length documentaries. Tellingly, the subjects of these films are early twentieth-century lesbians\u2014artists and writers whose official biographies often elide their sexuality. <\/em>Lover Other: The Story of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore (2006), for example, is a moving portrait of the couple\u2019s lifelong collaboration and love affair. Hammer\u2019s latest work, <\/em>Welcome to This House, a Film on Elizabeth Bishop (2015) follows the poet\u2019s life from her bleak New England childhood to her ten-year romance with the architect Maria Carlota Costallat de Macedo Soares. Elliptical and poignant, it runs counter to mainstream accounts of Bishop\u2019s life, many of which\u2014right down to her Wikipedia entry\u2014still omit these relationships and their impact on Bishop\u2019s work. <\/em><\/p>\n

On the occasion of her recent exhibition, \u201cLesbian Whale: Early Drawings and Paintings<\/a>,\u201d I spoke with Hammer about the radical changes she made in the sixties and about her approach to film. <\/em><\/p>\n

Most of the historical women artists you\u2019ve made films about\u2014Claude Cahun, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Bishop\u2014predate you. Is there a drive, perhaps, to create a sort of record for future generations, a record that you were deprived of? Your generation was denied open lesbian role models, with a few potential exceptions. <\/strong><\/p>\n

My role models were male artists, who I learned about by reading their biographies. It\u2019s a unique way to go to \u201cart school,\u201d reading the life choices of Vincent van Gogh and Emile Gauguin. I was redefining myself between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty, and I noted that these artists I admired had taken great social risks. Gauguin, in particular, had left his family and a bourgeois job. I could do it, too, I thought, just in a different way. I left my husband in April of 1970 and came out in August of that year. I had no idea before then that I desired women. Isn\u2019t it Wittgenstein who says one needs the language before one can think of the concept? I hadn\u2019t even heard the L word until the middle of that summer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Once I came out and began to look for historical role models, I found a lot of cover-ups and obscure biographical conceits. When I spent time in archives, I was told by those who\u2019d come before me not to mention that I was gay or that I was looking for lesbian signifiers\u2014small historic fragments from history that I could piece together. I made these films because I intuited that lesbian artists needed a cultural foundation, and that it was there, if one looked hard enough.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Hammer in 2012. Photo: Jim Norrena<\/p><\/div>\n

The works in \u201c<\/strong>Lesbian Whale\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>represent a pivotal time in your life. You decided to leave your husband, come out as a lesbian, and pursue filmmaking all at roughly the same time\u2014momentous decisions for a woman in the 1960s. What was that like? \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the late sixties, I was trying to identify myself as an artist. Even though I\u2019d gone around the world on a Lambretta and built a house from the ground up with the man I married the day after graduating from UCLA\u2014I was a child of the white-picket-fence fifties\u2014I knew there was something inside me I wanted to express, and it wasn\u2019t nurtured by household work or even teaching. I was studying painting with William Morehouse at Sonoma State College. He was the first person who saw me as an artist, but he also nearly wiped out that identification by putting the make on me. I was about to leave my husband at the time, but not because I was a lesbian\u2014I scarcely knew what the term meant then.<\/p>\n

Those tensions resonate in your work. At first glance, the bright colors and buoyant lines that animate your early paintings evoke a playful, exploratory quality. Looking closer, though, I see something darker in in the faces of certain self-portraits. <\/strong><\/p>\n

I think the joy you noticed is the pleasure of color and mark making. The freedom to put anything at all on paper\u2014even the roll of dust brought out from an empty washing machine after the clothes are emptied. I found a page of this lint in a 1969 sketch pad. And yes, the self-portraits, as you\u2019ve noted, reveal the struggle to emerge from a housewife homebuilder to a motorcycle dyke artist.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

An installation view from \u201cLesbian Whale.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

The film you created for the show\u2014Lesbian Whale<\/em>, from which the show takes its title\u2014uses many of those notebook drawings, and it almost seems to synthesize these tensions.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since the late sixties, I\u2019ve kept an organized paper archive of my writing, drawings, journals, letters, exhibitions, et cetera. I had my assistant scan all the drawings, and we animated selections from just a few\u2014from 1969 to \u201971. I was curious. I wanted to hear the comments from the young, vibrant queer artists who came through my studio when I showed them a few minutes of these animations. So I turned on the microphone and left them alone, and then I created the sound track from these myriad voices, to make this intergenerational animated film.<\/p>\n

How do you choose your subjects?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ideas, subjects, themes appear as possibilities and I follow them. Welcome to This House<\/em> began with an architectural concept. I had a residency in the Cape Cod Modern House Trust, where I had a week to film in a 1970s home\u2014glass, metal, stone. Some years earlier, I\u2019d lived for a month in a dune shack made of scrap driftwood and salvaged beams. The space and structures we work in influence our art, and I\u2019d wanted to contrast the two. I shot sixty minutes of film in the modern house, but to understand the architecture and landscape, I needed a human figure. I learned that Elizabeth Bishop had summered as a teen in a camp very close to the house I was in. Voila! I ended up visiting and filming her homes around the world\u2014in Nova Scotia, Key West, three locations in Brazil, Boston, Cambridge.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From Welcome to This House<\/i>, 2015.<\/p><\/div>\n

Found footage is a constant in your work, especially in the essay films. Were there any influences that helped to shape your use of it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nitrate Kisses<\/em>, from 1992, was my first feature-length essay documentary. When I was making it, I had no idea it was an essay film. There weren\u2019t any books on the subject then, and it wasn\u2019t the hot topic in documentary filmmaking that it is today. I only had fragments of gay\/lesbian\/bi\/trans\/asexual historic remains to draw upon, these little pieces of sixteen-millimeter film. I realized I could collide, extend, interrupt, refuse, or celebrate them, and, most importantly, in that collision of montage, I could make meaning, make a film. I read Walter Benjamin\u2019s Theses on the Philosophy of History<\/em>, and I felt supported by his notion that \u201cthinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well,\u201d and his belief that an artist\u2019s task is \u201cto brush history against the grain.\u201d<\/p>\n

By 1979 I was already tired of showing my films to a passive audience. I thought, How can they make political choices if they aren\u2019t active? To get them out of their seats, I made a film called Available Space<\/em> where I projected from a wheeled rotary projector table, which I took around the architectural space. The audience had to move to see the cinema. The image is a woman pushing out of the frame. Thirteen years later, I wanted to activate the minds of the audience, and the collage format worked perfectly to stimulate without telling.<\/p>\n

Collage features prominently in your work, especially in the shorts of the eighties, where there\u2019s a lot of visually entrancing abstraction and fast-cut edits. These works stand out for their relative lack of human presence\u2014but they exude a strong sense of touch.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was studying Jung at the time, and when he defined intelligence in four areas\u2014intellectual, intuitive, emotional, and sensational\u2014I knew that in my personal hierarchy it was touch, or sensation, that ruled. My eyes are directly connected to my sense of touch. In Dyketactics<\/em>, one of my first films, there are 110 images in four minutes, and every image is an image of touching. Reading Ashley Montagu\u2019s Touching<\/em>\u2014from 1971, and the only book I could find then on the sense of touch, which seems scandalous now\u2014I learned that the area of the brain related to touch is much larger than that for sight or sound. I wanted the audience to be embraced, as if they felt their hands or bodies moving across the screen, connecting touch with the images. I want the audience to feel in their bodies what they see on the screen.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From Dyketactics<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

You use lots of material references to the process of filmmaking\u2014images of frames, screens, cameras, filmstrips\u2014in your work, too. <\/strong>Endangered <\/strong>culminates in scenes of you operating a camera. Did you mean to embody this phenomenological approach to cinema you\u2019ve alluded to?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, but those images also come out of the structural cinema of the late seventies and early eighties, which addressed the elements of the camera, the tripod and film celluloid. I wanted to reference the material itself, to remind us that these images\u2014this subject matter, this abstraction\u2014are grounded in plastic with holes, recorded by a metal camera that can swing and walk or stand as steady as a statue. This is film. This is not a story. Endangered sees the medium, light itself, and the filmmaker as endangered species on a planet turning from film toward digitization. I ran some of the frames through a sewing machine, to show their fragility. Others were bipacked with sequences of crabs in the Gal\u00e1pagos, which I\u2019d torn, pulling the crabs apart. And some strips I\u2019d just scratched, peeling away the emulsion, showing film as the aging skin it is. When the camera was invented and artists feared painting would end, it didn\u2019t. But since the new, lightweight, large-pixel files of the digital camera have become accessible, we\u2019ve seen the decline of cinema as filmic material. That\u2019s another reason why it is important to reference the medium used\u2014especially as film enters an archival period.<\/p>\n

Jane Ursula Harris\u2019s writing\u00a0has appeared in <\/em><\/em>Art in America, <\/em><\/em>Artforum, <\/em><\/em>Time Out New York,\u00a0<\/em><\/em>The Village Voice, <\/em><\/em>The Believer, and elsewhere.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Barbara Hammer is something of a legend in queer feminist and experimental filmmaking circles. In the seventies, she was the first lesbian feminist to make open, celebratory films about her sexuality. In the eighties, her films took their inspiration from structuralism, using paint, animation, and optical printing to explore notions of embodied spectatorship. By the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":755,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[35,9241,20563,7713,20566,629,13963,8705,1132,20565,20568,20460,20564,20567,20569,7557],"class_list":["post-92874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-art","tag-artists","tag-barbara-hammer","tag-claude-cahun","tag-dyketactics","tag-elizabeth-bishop","tag-filmmaking","tag-films","tag-interviews","tag-lesbian-whale","tag-lesbianism","tag-marcel-moore","tag-queer-artists","tag-touch","tag-welcome-to-this-house","tag-willa-cather"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLesbian Whale: An Interview with Barbara Hammer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"An Interview with legendary queer feminist and experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/12\/14\/lesbian-whale-an-interview-with-barbara-hammer\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lesbian Whale: An Interview with Barbara Hammer by Jane Harris\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 14, 2015 \u2013 Barbara Hammer is something of a legend in queer feminist and experimental filmmaking circles. 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