Turn off the lights, or turn up the brightness. Welcome to the weekend and our first Double Feature. Each Friday we’ll recommend two films, shorts, documentaries, music videos, video art pieces, etc. These will include, but not be limited to, works by Texas filmmakers. If you have a lead on an upcoming online release that might be fit to debut in this series, drop me a line.
A museum doesn’t even have to be open for the Guerrilla Girls to work their mischief. Before the Whitney opened in New York City’s Meatpacking District, a member known as Frida Kahlo put on her gorilla mask and protested the fracked gas pipeline underneath the structure in a performative ribbon-cutting. Later the group projected text on the $760 million-dollar building that poked at billionaires’ struggle to pay workers a living wage and afford the paintings in their collections.
Women whose names the Guerrilla Girls use as pseudonyms have indeed made collectors, curators, and even critics richer than the artists ever were. Kahlo didn’t make a living as a painter until the last ten years of her life, yet works like “The Two Fridas,” the artist’s envisioning of her heart and arteries in oil on canvas, were the catalyst of a DMA exhibit this summer that brought more than 76,000 visitors through its halls. Kahlo’s life and overcoming is chronicled in the Salma Hayek-led mainstream biopic Frida (2002) directed by Julie Taymor. In this scene depicting her wedding to Diego Rivera, Kahlo’s painting ‘Frida And Diego Rivera (1931)’ melts into the actors and the dance, a capsule look at how far a resonant work can carry itself, through decades and mediums unimaginable upon its first making. Amazon has the full movie for rent or purchase.
Kara Walker’s title and artist statement for a show announced this week imposes an historic and disruptive exhaustion on the formalities of presentation. She would probably hate that sentence. Walker’s words themselves are a masterful work that turns a slow, critical circle; you have to just read them. (The New York Times could only report the text she’d drawn up, as the artist “was still finishing paintings this week, and wasn’t taking any calls.”)
This episode of Art21 followed the artist as she built her giant sugar-coated sphinx for “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” (2014). Here she reflects on the history of sugar, who grows what’s eaten by nobility, and how caricature’s ubiquity can be a handy vehicle for power.
