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Jennifer Lange
Jun 06, 2019
I have a male voice. I was created by men in their own image, so I have a man’s voice. They would not think to give women a voice. However, by appropriating, the women will have a voice. So there.
Made with a 1980s Commodore Amiga computer and shot on 16mm film, No No Nooky T.V. shows Barbara Hammer at her most playfully subversive as she challenges the social constructs that inform our views on women and sexuality. Combining early digital graphics, computer-generated narration, and explicit language about lesbian sex, Hammer invites viewers to consider the differences between how the female body is represented and how it is perceived. In her memoir Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life (2010), she writes: “Although the 80s were a conservative time, ideas of social construction of almost everything [were] in the air. This was liberating for me as I thought about the social construction of lesbians. I questioned what lesbian identity and representation meant and I put these ideas into practice one summer playing with a new girlfriend and an Amiga computer.”
An artist whose references to her own past work were often fluidly incorporated into new works, Hammer pulls footage from some of her earlier films including Multiple Orgasm (1976) into this hybrid film/video. A whimsical work that eroticizes and aestheticizes the screen and monitor, this visually and sonically dazzling piece pokes fun at romance, lust, and love in the “post-computer” age.
Our presentation of No No Nooky T.V. this month is part of the exhibition Barbara Hammer: In This Body, which runs through August 11, 2019. Also on view (in our Film/Video Theater) is Barbara Hammer: The Body in Film, a three-part series that expands on and provides further context for the exhibition.
––Jennifer Lange Curator, Film/Video Studio Program
Barbara Hammer (1939–2019) was born in Los Angeles, California. She died in March of this year after living with ovarian cancer for over a decade. With more than 80 films made during a 50-year career, Hammer was a pioneering experimental filmmaker best known for her daring depictions of lesbian life and sexuality. She first came to the Wex as a visiting filmmaker in 1993 to screen Nitrate Kisses (1992). During that visit, she was introduced to the Film/Video Studio and the following year returned for her first residency to complete Out in South Africa (1994), a film about gay and lesbian communities in postapartheid South Africa. Over the years, Hammer completed several other projects with support from the Wexner Center, including The Female Closet (1998), Devotion (2000), and Lover Other (2006). In 2017, she was the recipient of a multiyear Artist Residency Award in Film/Video to support the creation of two distinct projects. For the first project, Hammer completed Evidentiary Bodies (2018), an immersive, multichannel installation that poignantly synthesizes her life in film and her life with cancer; the work is now on view in the exhibition Barbara Hammer: In This Body. For the second, Hammer invited filmmakers Lynne Sachs, Deborah Stratman, Mark Street, and Dan Veltri to work with unused footage from her archives to create new films. The first of these to be finished, Stratman’s Vever (for Barbara) (2019), had its world premiere at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival.
Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Barbara Hammer: In This Body, this three-evening series draws conceptual and formal parallels between Hammer's gallery work and her films, showcasing Hammer’s contributions to experimental cinema and her undisputed status as a pioneer of queer and feminist filmmaking.
Thu, June 6 | 7 PM Mortal Bodies Barbara Ward Will Never Die (1968) Vital Signs (1991) A Horse Is Not a Metaphor (2008) Double Strength (1978) Optic Nerve (1985)
Thu, June 13 | 7 PM Sensual Bodies Sync Touch (1981) Stress Scars & Pleasure Wrinkles (1976) Multiple Orgasm (1976) Place Mattes (1987) Women I Love (1976) Psychosynthesis (1975)
Thu, June 20 | 7 pm Political Bodies Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS (1986) Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor? A New York Subway Tape (1985) Nitrate Kisses (1992)
Film prints courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
Barbara Hammer No No Nooky T.V., 1987 12 mins., 16mm film transferred to video
