Books
BARBARA HAMMER: EVIDENTIARY BODIES
Hardback Cloth Edition
ISBN: 9783777429922
Publication Date: March 2018
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
104 pages | 75 color plates | 8 x 10 | © 2018
Barbara Hammer is an American feminist artist known as a pioneer of queer experimental and
documentary film. In concert with an exhibition of her work at the Leslie Homan Museum of Gay &
Lesbian Art, this volume seeks to celebrate the depth and expanse of Hammer’s five decades of art making.
Bringing together both known and previously unseen works of film and video, installations, works on paper, and material from her archive, this volume addresses critical themes that appear throughout Hammer’s work, including sensation and intimacy, lesbian representation, and the maintenance of illness, in addition to exploring the artist’s relationship to experimental queer cinema, feminist history, and environmental activism. Featuring a wide range of responses, from personal anecdotes to academic analysis and poetic interpretation, this volume highlights the resonating impact of Hammer’s artistic narrative across cinema studies, art history, queer theory, and feminist thought.
“Hammer prefers the term ‘actionary’ to ‘visionary’ in describing the work of other queer artists she has documented and promoted over the decades. On the basis of this show, I’d say both terms apply to her.” – Holland Cotter, New York Times
“A testament to the singular combination of sincerity and irreverent humor that characterizes [Hammer’s] sex-positive feminism. . . . Hammer’s work reminds us that visibility is a political act.” – Artforum
BARBARA HAMMER: TRUANT: PHOTOGRAPHS 1970-1979
Publisher: Capricious
Publication Date: 2017
152 p. | 31.5 x 23 cm. | Hardback – Cloth | Sewn Bound | Offset Printed
Throughout the 1970s, filmmaker Barbara Hammer toured the United States, Africa, and Europe, making film after film about women and the lesbian experience, both of which had seldom been seen by a woman, for women on screen before. She made a slew of now-legendary experimental films, including Sisters! (1973), Dyketactics (1974), Multiple Orgasm (1976), Sappho (1978), and Double Strength (1978), more or less inventing lesbian cinema at a time when such material had largely been relegated to the pornographic imagination of male artists and filmmakers. During this prolific period, Hammer photographed her travels, her lovers, moments of community and kinship between her collaborators on set, private and public performances, friends, strangers. Through these photographs, Hammer explodes traditional notions of female sexuality by showing it for what it is: complex, messy, abstract, human.
Barbara Hammer is an experimental filmmaker whose work has pioneered feminist and lesbian cinema for five decades. She has had film retrospectives at the Jeu de Palme (Paris), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), National Gallery of Art (Washington, Dq, Kunsthall (Oslo, Norway), Toronto Film Festival, and Pink Life Queer Festival (Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey). Her work was included in the 1985, 1989, and 1993 Whitney Biennials and is included in the permanent collections of the Australian Center for the Moving Image, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Centre Georges Pompidou, and elsewhere. She is the author of Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and life (Feminist Press 2009). An exhibition of her notebooks was presented at Company Gallery in Fall 2014. A follow-up exhibition at Company, Truant: Photographs, 1970 – 1979, featuring unseen photographs from the 1970s, opened in October 2017.
HAMMER! MAKING MOVIES OUT OF SEX AND LIFE
Paperback Edition
ISBN: 9781558616127
Publication Date: 03-01-2010
Publisher: Feminist Press
Also available as an ebook.
HAMMER! is the first book by influential filmmaker Barbara Hammer, whose life and work have inspired a generation of queer, feminist, and avant-garde artists and filmmakers. The wild days of non-monogamy in the 1970s, the development of a queer aesthetic in the 1980s, the fight for visibility during the culture wars of the 1990s, her search for meaning as she contemplates mortality in the past ten years—HAMMER! includes texts from these periods, new writings, and fully contextualized film stills to create a memoir as innovative and disarming as her work has always been.
Barbara Hammer has made over ninety films and video works over the past forty years. Her experimental films of the 1970s often dealt with taboo subjects such as menstruation, female orgasm, and lesbian sexuality. In the 1980s she used optical printing to explore perception and the fragility of 16mm film life itself. Her documentaries tell the stories of marginalized peoples who have been hidden from history. Her most recent work, A Horse is Not a Metaphor, won the 2009 Teddy Award for Best Short Film at the Berlin International Film Festival. A retrospective screening of her work will be presented at the Museum of Modern Art in spring 2010 and will travel to the Reina Sophia in Madrid and the Tate Modern in London.
“What an amazingly inspirational book, filled with powerful stories and beautiful images. I truly love and recommend it. Thank you, Barbara Hammer!”
—Sadie Benning, artist
“Barbara Hammer’s genius is an erotic genius, one rich in intuitive intelligence. HAMMER! reveals a spirit that is at once youthful and worldly, full of conviction, and often optimistic, bold, ravenous, and celebratory.”
—Cecilia Dougherty, artist
“HAMMER! is a brilliant and shimmering feast of art and activism. Barbara’s fearless queer intelligence illuminates every page.”
—John Greyson, filmmaker
“Now the gift of Hammer’s sounds and images is matched by that of her words. Beautifully designed and illustrated, HAMMER! is a striking book, from its title to its impact.”
—Patricia White, author of Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability
“A candid and colorful memoir, HAMMER! offers valuable primary source material and original feminist film theory by a pioneer of avant-garde American cinema.”
—Livia Bloom, film curator
“Barbara Hammer is a true cinematic pioneer; her tremendous body of work continues to inspire audiences and artists alike.”
—Jenni Olson, LGBT film historian
“This is a book to read and treasure.”
–Lambda Literary (full review)
See also: Earnest, Jarrett. Time is an Emotional Muscle, 2007