Abigail Child: Is This What You Were Born For? @ Gray Area
As an artist and writer, Abigail Child has worked seriously across a range of media. In all of them, her principal form has been montage, developing, as Tom Gunning writes, “a system founded not on coherence, but on breakdown, not on continuity, but interruption.”
— (Colin Beckett)
About the Artist
Abigail Child has been at the forefront of experimental media and writing since the 1980s, having completed more than fifty film/video works and installations and written six books. An acknowledged pioneer in montage, Child addresses the interplay between sound and image, to make, in the words of the LA Weekly: “brilliant exciting work… a vibrant political filmmaking that’s attentive to form.” In her work, Child has restlessly explored different mediums and modes, often working with preexisting footage—drawn from Hollywood films, advertisements, home movies and many other sources—which she radically transforms in ways that unite formal experimentation and social-political analysis. But what unifies her moving-image work above all is the unparalleled dynamism of her investigations into the relationship between sound and image, the still not-fully-tapped possibilities of cinematic montage, the technique of audiovisual fragmentation and the complex mechanisms of language. Child’s films, videos, and installations activate the potential energy of the cinema to an extraordinary degree. In her first San Francisco appearance since 2013, Cinematheque and Gray Area are thrilled to welcome Abigail Child in person to present a two-program sampler retrospective drawn from her rich and complex body of work. (Program note adapted from Anthology Film Archives)
Abigail Child: Is This What You Were Born For?
Abigail Child’s series Is This What You Were Born For? is one of the most assured and important projects to have emerged over [the 1980s]. Constructing from and subverting a wide galaxy of source materials, these films are archeological digs into the very stuff, the conceptions, we are born into. Child decomposes the materials and gestures that would compose us. The films are charged with a startling and playful musicality and poetic and rigorous compression. Each image and sound cuts deep and works over time containing hidden and unhidden detonations working against the manufactured ambush that images have in store. Agile dances through treacherous debris, they negotiate an obstacle course of polar anatomies zig-zagging with corkscrew twists and nuclear splits—a gambol against the hazards. Detournments, deviations, disruptions, allures. Can aggression be sumptuous? These films are volatile and they have bite. Here the subliminal cannot caress, it comes out with its hands up, the smile wiped from its face. The accelerated velocity of these films doesn’t create an alternate camouflage. At this speed viewer passivity is unsafe and active viewing is a necessary pleasure. We are provoked to get up to speed, to be resourceful, dance, break step. These films put a spin on things. Shift the coordinates. The peripheries relocate to the core drawn by the centrifugal force of the editing. Posing a threat to threatening poses these frictions erupt with new clarity. (Mark McElhatten)
Screening
Prefaces (ITWYWBF? part 1) (1981) by Abigail Child; color, sound, 12 minutes.
Mutiny (ITWYWBF? part 2) (1982–1983) by Abigail Child; color, sound, 11 minutes.
Perils (ITWYWBF? part 4) (1986) by Abigail Child; b&w, sound, 5 minutes.
Covert Action (ITWYWBF? part 5) (1984) by Abigail Child; b&w, sound, 11 minutes.
Mayhem (ITWYWBF? part 6) (1987) by Abigail Child; b&w, sound, 20 minutes.
Mercy (ITWYWBF? part 7) (1989) by Abigail Child; color, sound, 10 minutes.
PLUS:Surface Noise (2000) by Abigail Child; color, sound, 18 minutes.
All works to screen as digital video. TRT: 87 minutes.