Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

DIRTY LOOKS, a New York-based platform for queer experimental film and video, will screen FEMALE TROUBLE as part of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ series Bros Before Hos: Masculinity and its Discontents. FEMALE TROUBLE is a selection of works that explore & explode normative roles of femininity and gender. With pieces that span five decades, these artists queer female subject space via drag tactics, narrative juxtaposition and overt performativity, with approaches ranging from masquerade to mythic, performance document to exposé video zine.

Curator Bradford Nordeen will moderate a conversation with filmmakers Zackary Drucker and Narcissister after the screening.

Program:
Conrad Ventur, Mario Montez Screen Test, 2010 
Patti Podesta, Stepping, 1981 
Steven Arnold, Messages, Messages, 1968 
Matthias Müller, Home Stories, 1990
Narcissister, Every Woman, 2010 
Zackary Drucker, Fish, 2008 
Vaginal Davis, Barbi Twins (excerpt), 1993 
And a very special, surprise premiere!

With Mario Montez Screen Test, Conrad Ventur resubmits Jack Smith/Warhol Superstar Mario Montez to Warhol's screen test format some 45 years later. Patti Podesta writes of her video Stepping, "I wanted to make something about risk, about repetition and a sort of lulling into nonsense of a very dangerous situation." Steven Arnold won the Best New Director award at the Cannes Film Festival for his film Messages, Messages continuing in the tradition of Cocteau and Anger, following its singular protagonist through a psychosexual labyrinth of libidinal delights and genderfuck costumery.

Matthias Müller's Home Stories culls from classic Hollywood Woman's Films like Written on the Wind, Madame X and The Birds, re-editing footage shot off the t.v. to examine the finite gestures and the repetitive interplays of genre (and gendered) cinema. Narcissister's Every Woman is a performance document in which the artist dresses herself in the slinky feminine attire, which she unspools from every bodily orifice imaginable, all to Chaka Khan's ubiquitous anthem, of course. A chapter from Vaginal Davis' Fertile La Toyah Jackson "Aksionist Video Magazine," Barbi Twins documents an incongruous sister duo's Los Angeles exploits and lively recollections in true reportage form. Zackary Drucker's short video, Fish, is a self-described "matrilineage of cunty white woman realness."