“I’ve never shown ten of my films in chronological order before. I’m going to be sitting there with you and seeing where I was and maybe getting an idea of where I’m going.”1
Late in 2018, Barbara Hammer embarked on a tour of four locations across the United States to present ‘The Art of Dying or (Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety)’, a performance lecture that brought together films from her formidable back catalogue with insights into five decades of artmaking. Hammer set well-known works such as ‘Dyketactics’ (1974), ‘Sync Touch’ (1981) and ‘Sanctus’ (1990) alongside two films that revolve around the body’s negotiation of living with late-stage cancer: ‘A Horse Is Not A Metaphor’ (2009) and ‘Evidentiary Bodies’ (2018). “I’m not fighting cancer; I’m living with cancer” says Hammer early on – a statement which serves to clarify the language around dying. ‘Palliative’ derives from the Latin palliare (‘to cloak’) – a telling description of the peripheral space end-of-life care occupies in Euro-American cultures. Hammer navigates metaphor and representation in ‘The Art of Dying’ with characteristic generosity and wit, underscoring the links between this project and the thinking that drove her earlier works. By encouraging us to think about death and dying, Hammer opens ‘palliative art making’ out to a broader, and perhaps a more public, circulation of the term. Hammer described the lecture as a riff on Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, a record of written correspondence between Rilke and an aspiring writer seeking guidance and critique. It’s easy to find the comparison with Hammer herself in the act of imparting wisdom to a younger generation, but the significance doesn’t end there. Rilke advises the poet to “write about what your everyday life offers you; […] A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.”2 Herein lies the crux of ‘The Art of Dying’. In addressing the need to offset the exposure of art making and social advocacy with care, Hammer showed us that the personal was always at stake. During the lectured at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hammer’s tone became momentarily conspiratorial. “Guess what,” she said, “the art of the dying is the same as the art of the living.”
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Hammer made her first film in 1968 and didn’t stop for another 50 years. Her work parallels the enormous cultural and theoretical shifts that took place from the tail end of modernism to the present day. Hammer’s art draws on the liberation movements of the 1970s, early 20th-century gay and lesbian histories, poststructuralist, Marxist and psychoanalytical theories, and her own auto-ethnography: as such, it is a body of work that defies unity. As Hammer noted, “there is not a feminism, but feminisms, not a lesbian cinema but lesbian cinemas, and there is not abstraction but multiple manifestations of abstraction.”3 This stress on plurality is crucial for revealing the wider stakes of her projects. Her films unpack celluloid worlds populated by lesbian, queer and gender diverse subjects, erotic, comfortable and changing bodies. They press visual paradigms that have expunged or else appropriated such representations. In films from the 1980s onwards, queer world-making, organising and ‘herstory’ come into contact with ecological politics and human rights issues.4 Attempts to categorise Hammer’s work often leave out these migrations, and yet they are a powerful record of her unerring commitment to intersectional thinking.
As an artist Hammer was incredibly prolific – her movement across film and video, performance, sculpture, drawing and collage makes this clear. Her filmography consists of more than 80 works in Super-8, 16mm and video, but enumerations of it have been known to shapeshift: for example, the early experimental ‘Aldebaran Sees’ (or ‘Seas’ depending on where you look) is available to watch online but is curiously absent from the filmography listed in her rollicking memoir HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life. This isn’t an anomaly; Hammer’s films continue to bubble to the surface. A set of previously unfinished films will screen at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio in September 2019, following Hammer’s invitation to the filmmakers Lynne Sachs, Deborah Stratman, Mark Street and Dan Veltri to work on the films under her supervision. This isn’t collaboration in a straightforward sense: the conversations begun in her work will unfold in parallel visions. Such an endeavour emphasises the folly of trying to appraise her work through a comprehensive study, while also pointing to the ways in which archives like Hammer’s are wilfully shaped beyond a lifetime.
Hammer used the title Evidentiary Bodies for both a film and an exhibition at New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art over 2017-18, which was remarkably the first retrospective of a living lesbian artist to be held at the gallery. In these contexts, to be evident is to affirm rather than be easily seen or clearly understood. Hammer used the term to locate visuality beyond the social and medical paradigms that mediate illness and age. In the wider narration of Hammer’s archive, evidence designates a site of self-fashioning and auto-visuality as opposed to epistemological truth. Hammer’s films self-consciously register the privileged topos of the archive as a space of validation and negation – one which is so often, as Catherine Lord put it, “a symptom of privilege – generally white, generally Western, ponderously male, tediously heterosexual.”5 While programme notes for screenings and film festivals chart a cultural cartography of recognition (although this often arrived later than for her male peers), it is the alternative modes of narratology and textuality in Hammer’s archive – letters, snapshots, annotations and scraps of paper – that provide the most vital traces of her world. Such artefacts teach us a valuable lesson about the ways that evidence revolves around accretive ephemera. Diligent requests to return letters and photocopies attest to Hammer’s commitment to amassing such a collection. “The archive has always been a pledge” Derrida remarked in Archive Fever, “a token of the future”.6 Guiding this ‘pledge’ is Hammer’s enduring interest in the archive as an active site: “I want future generations to have access to these materials, to use them as a resource.”7 Conversations in print, and crucially, in and around film, are imperative to this effort.8
My idea is that if an audience can take responsibility for seeing the picture… they are encouraged in some way to take responsibility for political decisions in their lives.9
In ‘Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor? A New York Subway Tape’ (1985), Hammer sets herself the task of enlivening a notoriously speech-resistant audience by asking passengers what they read on the subway. Donning a map-covered boiler suit and mask, Hammer approaches the subway with superhero bravado. This is a far cry from the taciturn intensity of Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1977). More often than not those that appear in the film are overcome by Hammer’s openness and guards momentarily drop down. “I’m reading a book about Chihuahuas”, one woman offers. Others make anxious parallels: “Did you ever want to meet people on the subway?”, Hammer asks an older woman. “Many years ago” she replies, “but not any longer… times have changed. We can’t trust people.” ‘Would You Like to Meet…’ demonstrates Hammer’s interest in exploring what an active cinema might accomplish, but ‘reactive’ might best describe how she approached talking in her filmmaking elsewhere.
In an earlier and better-known work from 1981 Hammer developed her proposal for a talking cinema. ‘Audience’ is a film comprised of encounters with majority women audiences in Toronto, London, Montreal and San Francisco. Hammer uses the film to query the ways her audiences interact with the screen, accosting them in lobbies, backrooms or sometimes the queue outside the cinema to ask for their thoughts on her work. There is much rhapsody, of course, but also frank criticism and direction. One group discusses the issue of single-sex screenings, but finds no consensus. Others offer formal advice: “I would have liked to have seen something more languishing with the bodies”. Such proximity to the filmmaker combined with the opportunity for redress is not often granted. Even more striking is Hammer’s impish joy – she clearly relishes the contact this performative mode of address permits.
Where Q&As have become a requisite form in the delivery of screenings, Audience points to a radical imperative for self-exposure. The result is a document of lesbian and feminist transatlantic cultural consciousness at a time of limited on-screen identifications. A few years after the film was shot Section 28 would enshrine discrimination against LGBTQ people into UK law. But it’s hard not to take delight in ‘Audience’ – in London, audience members find Hammer’s golden West Coast a tonic to the British triad of chips, bad weather and economic depression. In Montreal, a woman clearly already acquainted with Hammer waxes lyrical about the city. “Girls, believe me” she says, “it’s wonderful here.” Audience provides a crucial record of queer visibility during this period, as well as of cultural geographies and film cultures beyond the mainstream. Hammer’s paper archive also points to her investment in the social life of film. She lists first encounters with feminist figures such as Faith Wilding and Babette Mangolte in a filmography for Arlene Raven, while preview questionnaires make for subjective, sometimes fiery reads. One commentary on ‘Menses’ (1974) – a satirical take on the cotton-candy depiction of periods – reads: “A personal statement about the female condition as oppressed by Tampax. It works for me.” Others are detractors, childish, yet their inclusion suggests Hammer’s interest in the broadest sense of an audience and not just those that are gracious or familiar.
Other ephemera in her archive – acquired by Yale in 2017 – compress decades-long conversations into communiqués: in particular, a letter from Stan Brakhage thanking Hammer for her portrait of Jane Brakhage from 1975.10 While studying, Hammer was sent to collect the pair from the airport and deliver them to a talk Stan was giving in San Francisco. Seeing “so much more than Stan’s portrayal of her in ‘Window Water Baby Moving’ (1959),” Hammer was galvanised to film Jane for her graduate project.11 Brakhage’s letter is dated 1985 – a decade later. The letter serves as a reminder as to how impressionistic archives can be. In Hammer’s archive, few conversations are sustained in dialogue; we are unable to locate her letter from Brakhage within a chain of correspondence and are left to speculate on the letter’s mysterious insignia. Although Hammer was a thorough archivist, she knew that archives couldn’t reveal everything. In 2001, when the collection was still in her care, she wrote “suppositions can be made but not declared”.12 She was thinking about where her archive would go next.
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It is tempting to read the wily nature of Hammer’s personal archive apropos José Esteban Muñoz’s statement on the contingency of queer archives: “Ephemera, as I am using it here […] is all of those things that remain after a performance, a kind of evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself. It does not rest on epistemological foundations but is instead interested in following traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things.” Munoz draws on Raymond Williams’s oft-cited ‘structures of feelings’ in his articulation of how ephemera hold onto feelings and urgencies long after their lived experience. Hammer was interested in how film activates an audience through ‘textural’ layering and juxtaposing frames, and saw this as a way to push against the directives of narrative cinema. She similarly resisted Derrida’s ideas about the impossibility of archiving, turning to Maya Deren’s notion of verticality for a philosophy of cinema that served to accommodate its affective traces. As a form of visual stacking, verticality enabled Hammer to foreground emotional complexity: ‘specks’ which open out through non-sequitur arrangements; ‘residues’ of histories that retain their partial status; and dancing images that ‘glimmer’ when projected.
Aside from a personal commitment to building a history through artefacts, Hammer amplified the role of the archive as a political toolkit in her work. Her first documentary film ‘Nitrate Kisses’ (and the first of her ‘history’ trilogy, 1992-2000) sequences marginalised representations that include older lesbians, couples from multiracial backgrounds and SM play, layering them with scenes from Lot in Sodom (1933), one of the earliest queer films in the US. ‘Nitrate Kisses’ is one of Hammer’s most discursive films and text plays a significant role; she includes citations from French philosophers as well as extracts of the Hays Code which saw exclusionist censorship laws extended over American film between 1930 and 1966. In ‘Nitrate Kisses’, bodies moving together underneath the scrolling text neither eliminate nor confront it directly but work to nullify the violence of its language. On working with remnants of minoritarian history, Hammer remarked that “one needs the present to understand the past”.13 In this case, appropriative reading undercuts writing as doctrine.
In ‘The Art of Dying’, Hammer makes a political address. She advocates for right-to-die legislation for terminally ill patients; “everyone has the right to die when she wishes” she says, “we don’t have the right to choose our birth, but we should be able to determine the time of our death should we wish to.” She describes how art-making can come from a place of rage, but also allow release. Drawing a parallel with David Wojnarowicz’s indictment of government inaction and hostile media in the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Just as members of ACT UP New York protested at the Whitney for their institutional failure to connect Wojnarowicz’s work to current HIV/AIDS realities and urgencies, Hammer draws attention to the necessity of resisting canonisation where life meets politics.
For her performance at the Whitney, Hammer flipped the usual Q&A format into an ‘A&Q’, picking on friends in the audience to probe the immediacy of the experience and how they in turn consider death. She reserves her last question for Florrie Burke, her partner of 30 years. “What would you say is the most difficult thing about me? And the most wonderful?” Having initially waved her away, Florrie responds with little delay: “You’re a Taurus and you’re really stubborn and bull-headed.” And the wonderful? “This was extraordinary. And yes, it was very hard. I so admire you and your strength and your willingness to be open to all these wonderful people, and to share what’s very, very personal. Because it needs to be shared.” As with Audience, Hammer takes rhetorical formats beyond obligation. Barbara Hammer’s cinema is a talking cinema in its most disarming sense: talking about cinema, talking with cinema, learning how to talk.
1. Barbara Hammer addressing the audience at a screening in ‘Audience’, 1981. 2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Letters to a Young Poet, Scriptor Press, 2001, p. 6. 3. Barbara Hammer, ‘The Politics of Abstraction’, in Martha Gever, John Greyson and Pratibha Parmar (eds.), Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, Routledge, 1993, p. 75. 4. The term ‘herstory’ gained traction in the second-wave feminisms of the 1970s and 80s, particularly in an American context. The reframing of history (his story) to herstory (her story) displaced a historically masculinist perspective within the making of history and centre the stories of women and feminists. 5. Catherine Lord, ‘Their Memory is Playing Tricks on Her: Notes Toward a Calligraphy of Rage’, in Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark (eds.), WACK: Art and the Feminist Revolution, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007, pp. 440–457, p. 442. 6. Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, in Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 9-63, p. 18. 7. Barbara Hammer, HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, New York: Feminist Press, 2010, p. 261. 8. Not forgetting how Hammer found herself having to talk around imposed censorship by programmers and projectionists over the years, both to prevent them from destroying her film in-situ and encourage them to turn the projector back on following complaints. See: Auto Italia interview with Barbara Hammer and Stuart Comer, 2012 [Part 1] (autoitaliasoutheast.org). 9. From a letter written by Barbara Hammer, dated 1984. 10. With the proceeds of the sale of her papers to Yale University, Hammer initiated the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant, an annual grant designed to support moving image work by lesbian artists. Hammer has allocated financial aid to another annual award supporting queer filmmakers at San Francisco State University. 11. Hammer, HAMMER!, p. 66. 12. Hammer, ‘The Ephemeral Archive’, in HAMMER!, p. 263. 13. Hammer, ‘When a Kiss is Not a Kiss but Nitrate’, in HAMMER!, p. 204.
Gabriella Beckhurst is a London-based writer, researcher and PhD candidate at the University of York, where they work on artists’ moving image, photography and performance at the intersection of queer, feminist and environmental politics. Recommendation: If rambling slapstick is your thing: the films of Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn.
This essay was originally published in Another Gaze 03. You can order our previous issues here.
