Thursday, February 3, 6:00 pm
- She Had Her Gun Already (Vivienne Dick, 1978). Courtesy the artist and LUX, London.
“The quintessential No Wave filmmaker.” —J. Hoberman
One of the most important filmmakers to emerge from New York’s seething No Wave scene, and currently enjoying a resurgence of interest in her work, Ireland-born Vivienne Dick created a series of Super-8 films in the late 1970s that balance stripped-down narratives with visceral and moody performances by artists and musicians like Lydia Lunch, Pat Place, Adele Bertei, and Ikue Mori. Writes Ed Halter in Artforum, “Obsessed with exhuming repressed traumas, voicing beaten-down identities, and generally meandering through a complex matrix of bad vibes, Dick’s works …are unapologetically messy, subjective, and political—thereby proposing that so, too, is life.” This evening’s program features a collection of her No Wave films, including the small-gauge masterpieces, She Had Her Gun Already (1978) and Beauty Becomes the Beast (1979), among others. 1978-79, Vivienne Dick, USA, Super-8mm on PAL Digibeta video, ca. 80 mins.
VIVIENNE DICK (b. 1950, Donegal, Ireland) studied Archaeology and French at the University College Dublin and received an MA in film and video at the University of Arts, London. In her early hears, she lived in France and Germany and traveled throughout India. Moving to New York City in the mid-1970s, she was part of a loose group of filmmakers, artists, and musicians. Her early films initially screened in music venues, later traveling to many independent cinemas across the US and Europe. She moved to London in 1984 and returned to the west of Ireland in 1999, where she continues to make films and videos. Her work has screened at many festivals, including New York, Edinburgh and Berlin, and museums, including the Tate Britain, MoMA, The Whitney Museum of Art, the Walker Arts Center, and the IMMA Dublin. She was the recent subject of several large-scale retrospectives at the Tate, Crawford Art Gallery, and Artists Space in New York.