Barbara Hammer: In This Body

Abstract

This past March saw the loss of two pioneering artists and filmmakers who made the body and women’s sexuality central to their work: Barbara Hammer and Carolee Schneemann. While Schneemann’s practice is often cited as multidisciplinary, Hammer is primarily celebrated within the contexts of queer and experimental cinema. Barbara Hammer: In This Body , an exhibition curated by Jennifer Lange at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University in Columbus, looked to the artist’s interdisciplinary works, particularly those that focus on the body’s vulnerability and fragility as read through the textures of media [Image 1]. IMAGE 1. Chest X-ray 5 (2016) by Barbara Hammer; courtesy The Barbara Hammer Estate, COMPANY, New York, and KOW, Berlin; © The Barbara Hammer Estate. Known primarily for her work to make visible the lives and bodies of lesbians through film and video, Hammer was also deeply attuned to women’s similarly invisible experiences with disease. Like Hammer’s ecstatic study of intimacy through the pleasures of touch in hallmark films like Dyketactics (1974), the film, video, photography, collage, sculpture, and installation on display at the Wexner explored themes of sickness and corporeal fragility through real or simulated tactile surfaces. This body of work incorporates images that employ what Laura U. Marks called “haptic visuality”1 as well as works that make the literal surfaces of media apparent through process or installation. For example, Blue Paint Film Scroll (2005), a vertical scroll that gathers in a pile on the floor, features a digital transfer print of an experiment Hammer conducted on 16mm film with crystals, hydrochloric acid, …