Jennifer Montgomery
Well, I am totally in love with Jennifer Montgomery, as was probably apparent in class. Not in a "Chasing Amy" kind of way. Not in a school girls peeing on rooftops fascination kind of way either.
I am in love with Jennifer Montgomery's completely accessible feminist film style, where she connects the medium she uses to an extension of the body. Each of her films carries with it this theme of how to use equipment, making a strong and subtle connection to the power we gain by our knowledge of tools. It's a funny thing to say, when I read it again. It's very masculine, "tool-user," and yet her exploration of it as extending from the body makes it into an exploration of feminine power.
It is that exploration, from the very plain and simple "How to Use Equipment," where there is only the slightest connections of power politics with the how-to portion of using a door, to the long stretches of girls urinating on rooftops and each other in the most introspective of manners. Each act of bodily experimentation carries with it an exploration of the equipment of the body and the power that it engenders. The connections made are on the order of instructions turned into action, and of sexual curiousity turned into play and experiment; always as an exploration of how to use this marvelous equipment that is the body.
The gross out factor lingers for a moment, but then, after I was used to seeing a naked woman making art with her menstrual blood, it became easier to accept this as more of the same exploration and extension of self as part of an entire package.
Montgomery talks about her style as being modular, as if it were blocky. I have to wind up disagreeing with her. I didn't feel like these were interchangeable modules at all. Multi-threaded experimental narrative is more like it. The themes were not disjointed, I was never confused from moment to moment. It was foreign at times, but it should be, I am a man after all. However, it was great to see an artist exploring lesbian themes, feminist themes without it being couched in some kind of male terms. It was the simplest of human explorations- How do I use this equipment of being.
"How to use equipment."
Hand Processed
Relationship with the apparatus.
How to use equipment, with poorly used equipment.
"Age 12: love with a little l"
Notes on the death of kodachrome
I am in love with Jennifer Montgomery's completely accessible feminist film style, where she connects the medium she uses to an extension of the body. Each of her films carries with it this theme of how to use equipment, making a strong and subtle connection to the power we gain by our knowledge of tools. It's a funny thing to say, when I read it again. It's very masculine, "tool-user," and yet her exploration of it as extending from the body makes it into an exploration of feminine power.
It is that exploration, from the very plain and simple "How to Use Equipment," where there is only the slightest connections of power politics with the how-to portion of using a door, to the long stretches of girls urinating on rooftops and each other in the most introspective of manners. Each act of bodily experimentation carries with it an exploration of the equipment of the body and the power that it engenders. The connections made are on the order of instructions turned into action, and of sexual curiousity turned into play and experiment; always as an exploration of how to use this marvelous equipment that is the body.
The gross out factor lingers for a moment, but then, after I was used to seeing a naked woman making art with her menstrual blood, it became easier to accept this as more of the same exploration and extension of self as part of an entire package.
Montgomery talks about her style as being modular, as if it were blocky. I have to wind up disagreeing with her. I didn't feel like these were interchangeable modules at all. Multi-threaded experimental narrative is more like it. The themes were not disjointed, I was never confused from moment to moment. It was foreign at times, but it should be, I am a man after all. However, it was great to see an artist exploring lesbian themes, feminist themes without it being couched in some kind of male terms. It was the simplest of human explorations- How do I use this equipment of being.
"How to use equipment."
Hand Processed
Relationship with the apparatus.
How to use equipment, with poorly used equipment.
"Age 12: love with a little l"
Notes on the death of kodachrome
posted by Daniel Kelly at 9:11 AM
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