Griselda Pollock
VIDEO & AUDIO

​With the arrival of portable video Griselda Pollock began to make video films which were exhibited in galleries and also included in her lectures as visual presentations.

 

She was exploring video as a medium for expanded art historical and cultural analysis and for performance academic lectures inspired by the work of her early work included two videos with deeper biographical resonance: one an early form of a video essay, influenced by new, discursive and feminist cinema, musing on the life of a feminist scholar who chose also to become a mother in the context of feminist theory exploring maternal subjectivity. The film is visually situated between a rural home and the geometry of modernist architecture in the woman’s place of work.  

 

A second film essay, Deadly Tales,  is formed in seven sections and explores grief, loss and mourning. This work was initially created as a performance-lecture in person at the launch at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1992 of Elisabeth Bronfen’s book, Over Her Dead Body: Death Femininity and the Aesthetic. 

 

The idea of replacing a formal lecture with a performance piece, speaking in the first person, and confronting the inconsolable character of grief with reference to Barthes and Freud was experimental  and challenged the divisions between public and private personae.

 

The live presentation was then translated into a filmed work as an early form of video essay. It intercut historical images with photographs from the family album and a rare piece of  16mm film from 1942 that held a fleeting image of Griselda's mother on her wedding day.  The film speaks of both her bereavement by her early death and alsoGriselda's impossible mourning for miscarried babies,  when miscarriage as mournable loss was slowly being acknowledged through feminist testimony at the time.

 

Another film, is a response to the artworks of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger and was created for the Hilla Rebay Memorial Lecture at the Guggenheim Museum in 1995.

 

Hilla Rebay (1890-1967) was a trained modern artist and the co-founder and first director of this museum, and advocate for abstract art. ​
 

As an interval in the spoken lecture, her wordless film with music was screened in its entirety (16 mins). She was experimenting with other forms than the typical, slide-illustrated art history lecture.

 

The use of video editing allowed Griselda to traverse the paintings’ surfaces and intercut key elements to indicate the layers of seeing and multiple readings of the works in cultural context.

 

She was also aiming to create an affective experience that related to the interpretation that she was offering of Ettinger’s work which she termed a ‘backward glance that does not kill’ i.e. was not Orphic, but matrixial. This extended the exploration of non-phallic gazing in art and in interpretation of art. 

 

Deadly Tales and Painting as a Backward Glance that Does Not Kill: Eurydice by Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger has since been included in several exhibitions, shown on video monitors.

 

Several other video presentations, such as Visions of Sex and That Old Chestnut: the Gaze, never transferred to digital form, Griselda Pollock continued the experiment with video films in lieu of slide presentation that enabled an exploration of different voices and positions in presentation of art historical analysis, releasing the artworks from the authority of the single voice of interpretation.

​1992  Conflicted Desire: A Feminist Reflection on the Sites of Labour and Maternal Subjectivity 

1993  Who is the Other? (first shown at Vancouver Art Gallery)

1994  Deadly Tales I (first shown at Experimental Art Centre, Adelaide)

1997  Parallel Lives (first shown at Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth)

1997  Painting as a Backward Glance that Does Not Kill: Eurydice by Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger
(first shown at the Guggenheim Museum)

1997  Deadly Tales II Leeds Metropolitan University Art Gallery and Leeds University 2009

1999  Visions of Sex (Vienna)
2001  That Old Chestnut: The Gaze (Princeton University)

2009  Painting as a Backward Glance that Does Not Kill: Eurydice by Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Freud Museum London

2015  Christine Taylor Patten micro/macro, Leyden Gallery, London and 14th Istanbul Biennial