hammer lover other

Barbara Hammer showed her documentary film "Lover Other" at Tisch this evening and then talked with us for a while afterwards. The film is a dual biography of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore who made art together and resisted the Nazi occupation on Jersey from 1940-1945. The film was beautiful and compelling, with a fine vocal soundtrack by Pamela Z.

In the talk back, Hammer was asked about what she's working on. She is developing a new film with a younger filmmaker entitled "Generations" for the granting agency and "Bolex Dykes" more informally. She and her collaborator are using Bolex 16 mm cameras and shooting footage at Coney Island. As she said "the end of film, the end of Coney Island." She has a contract with the Feminist Press of CUNY to write her memoirs, which she hopes will be done by the spring of 2010 when MoMA plans a retrospective of her films. She spoke of the memoir and retrospective as a record of her life and career, in a touching and encouraging way, not sentimental.

With retirement in the brain and emotions, I have also been ruminating about such things. I hope to renovate my artcataloging.net site over the next year. At the same time, I have been asked by Rit Premnath if I want to participate in his curatorial project "On Certainty." His interest is based on his having read the paper on anonymous artist relationships on artcataloging.net. The paper is mostly the words of Liz O'Keefe but is a collaboration of the Cataloging Advisory Committee of ARLIS/NA with input from the Data Standards Committee of the Visual Resources Association.

We catalogers deal with certainty, and authority, as we go about our cataloging business. It is pleasing to think of it as part of a curatorial project.