Elisabeth Subrin
Encyclopedia
Elisabeth Subrin is a Brooklyn-based film and video artist and curator.
. She then received an M.F.A. in video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995, where she stayed to teach in the First Year Graduate Programs until 1997. She has taught at Cooper Union, Amherst College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Graduate Program at Virginia Commonwealth University, Temple University and Harvard University.
Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally, including solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Vienna International Film Festival, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the San Francisco Cinematheque
, as well as group shows at the 2000 Whitney Biennial, the Guggenheim Museum, the Walker Art Center, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. She has also received numerous grants and fellowships.
Her film and video work explores relationships between history and subjectivity, especially within female biography, as well as the nature of evidence. Working across narrative, documentary
and conceptual art
practices, she also explores questions about the meaning of mental illness, the legacy of feminism
and the impact of recent social history, in particular, the ‘60s. Subrin has described her work as having been "fairly experimental, in the sense that it’s very difficult to say whether it’s fiction or nonfiction."
Subrin has found influence by feminist theory
as well as by independent filmmakers like Chantal Ackerman, Todd Haynes
, and Charles Burnett
. While she is often seen as a feminist filmmaker, she says her own work is, “more about history and subjectivity, the meaning of the dominant history and personal experience. Obviously that’s seen through a feminist perspective, but I think it would do it a disservice to say it’s either just feminist or just experimental. Feminism embodies so many different kinds of work.”
Subrin's first notable work is a film short which concentrates on early adolescence and focuses on the search for self-identification. Simultaneously, the film raises cultural and political questions concerning the contradictions of race, identity, and gender within a post-industrial, patriarchal culture structured on alienation and difference. Tina Wasserman wrote in The New Art Examiner (1996) that, "For Subrin, as the visual metaphor of silence or speechlessness---evidenced primarily by the repeated use of white-out on the body, text, and image---gains prominence in Swallow, it becomes clear that the fragility of female identity in post-feminist America appears, in part, as the failure of language itself.”
Shulie (1997)
Shulie is Subrin's most prominent work, shot on Super-8 and transferred to video which won a Los Angeles Film Critics Award in 1998. The piece is a shot-by-shot remake of the 1967 experimental documentary by an earlier generation of students at Art Institute of Chicago including Jerry Blumenthal, Sheppard Ferguson, James Leahy and Alan Rettig. The original version of Shulie (1967) is a cinema verite portrait of Shulamith Firestone
, author of the radical modern feminist text The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution during her final B.F.A. year at the Chicago Art Institute in 1970. Kate Haug wrote in a review of the film, “Given the late ‘80s art world trends of appropriation and the ever-growing experience of simulacrum, it is not so shocking that an innovative filmmaker would take on celluloid cloning” and continued to state that "by creating a replica film of the ‘60s she [Subrin] harnesses the remake’s amorphous quality of time to deftly address contemporary politics." This film forces its viewers to reconnect to and become re-aware of the historical context – the individual and radical origins of U.S. feminism’s Second Wave and how that course of events was subsumed and re-defined by the ensuing conservative political culture of the ‘80s. B. Ruby Rich, author of the book Chick Flicks noted, “She has created a document within a document that makes us remember what we didn’t know, [and] makes us realize all over again how much we’ve lost." "The temporal gap between 1967 and 1997 grants the audience a chance to re-think the future of feminism. By not completing or adding to Firestone’s biography, Subrin intentionally leaves the history of feminism incomplete – instead of following Firestone as she matures, Shulie (1967 and 1997) stops before feminism takes off."
"The film animates melancholia
for both a collective political past and an individual subject’s child-self, suggesting that there may also be a productive afterlife to identities that seem foreclosed within the filmmaker’s own present tense: second-wave feminist, girlchild of the 1970s, even student." "Refusing distance from the child-self becomes a means of critiquing contemporary public culture in the 1997 Shulie, in Subrin’s other videotape Swallow, in the works she has produced with Sadie Benning, and in the ‘zines and videos of the 1990s."
The Fancy (2000)
Subrin's video piece, The Fancy, is a experimental biography of the life, death, and intriguing legacy of photographer Francesca Woodman
, who committed suicide at age 22. Nicole Armour wrote of Subrin's videowork in The Fancy, that she "turns her critical gaze to the life and art of a renowned young female photographer whose early death left behind a controversial body of work rife with psychosexual implication. Rigorously structural in form, this speculative bringing-to-light meticulously sifts physical evidence and sketchy facts in an attempt to uncover the traces of a seemingly suppressed history embedded behind the photographers’ pictures.”
for MTV
, and The File Room (1994), an interactive electronic archives produced by Antonio Muntadas.
In 2002 she directed the music video well, well, well for New York-based feminist electronic band Le Tigre
and worked as a creative consultant and videographer for the historical documentary Slumming It: Myth and Culture on the Bowery (2002), produced by Mixed Greens.
Her most recent work consists of a two channel video installation
, Sweet Ruin (2008, HD), showed at PARTICIPANT, Inc. in New York City and will be presented in Copenhagen later this year. Her feature narrative project, Up, is in development with Forensic Films placing herself as director in collaboration with Los Angeles-based writing partner, Evan Carlson. She is currently working on a new two channel installation about the haunting of 9/11 in daily life in New York.
Biography
In 1990 she received a B.F.A. in film from Massachusetts College of ArtMassachusetts College of Art
Massachusetts College of Art and Design is a publicly-funded college of visual and applied art, founded in 1873. It is one of the oldest art schools, the only publicly-funded free-standing art school in the United States, and was the first art college in the United States to grant an artistic degree...
. She then received an M.F.A. in video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995, where she stayed to teach in the First Year Graduate Programs until 1997. She has taught at Cooper Union, Amherst College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Graduate Program at Virginia Commonwealth University, Temple University and Harvard University.
Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally, including solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Vienna International Film Festival, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the San Francisco Cinematheque
San Francisco Cinematheque
San Francisco Cinematheque is a film society founded in 1961 by a group of filmmakers, including Bruce Baillie and Chick Strand. Working with other groups like Canyon Cinema, the SF Cinematheque has shown experimental film and video in cooperation with venues such as San Francisco Art Institute,...
, as well as group shows at the 2000 Whitney Biennial, the Guggenheim Museum, the Walker Art Center, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. She has also received numerous grants and fellowships.
Her film and video work explores relationships between history and subjectivity, especially within female biography, as well as the nature of evidence. Working across narrative, documentary
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
and conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
practices, she also explores questions about the meaning of mental illness, the legacy of feminism
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
and the impact of recent social history, in particular, the ‘60s. Subrin has described her work as having been "fairly experimental, in the sense that it’s very difficult to say whether it’s fiction or nonfiction."
Subrin has found influence by feminist theory
Feminist theory
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical discourse, it aims to understand the nature of gender inequality...
as well as by independent filmmakers like Chantal Ackerman, Todd Haynes
Todd Haynes
Todd Haynes is an American independent film director and screenwriter. He is best known for his feature films Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Poison, Velvet Goldmine, Safe, and the Academy Award-nominated Far from Heaven and I'm Not There.- Style and themes :The writes that "Haynes is...
, and Charles Burnett
Charles Burnett
Charles Burnett may refer to:*Charles Burnett , American film director*Charles Burnett , Scottish Officer of Arms*Charles Burnett , Royal Air Force officer and Australian Chief of the Air Staff...
. While she is often seen as a feminist filmmaker, she says her own work is, “more about history and subjectivity, the meaning of the dominant history and personal experience. Obviously that’s seen through a feminist perspective, but I think it would do it a disservice to say it’s either just feminist or just experimental. Feminism embodies so many different kinds of work.”
Film and Video Work
Swallow (1995)Subrin's first notable work is a film short which concentrates on early adolescence and focuses on the search for self-identification. Simultaneously, the film raises cultural and political questions concerning the contradictions of race, identity, and gender within a post-industrial, patriarchal culture structured on alienation and difference. Tina Wasserman wrote in The New Art Examiner (1996) that, "For Subrin, as the visual metaphor of silence or speechlessness---evidenced primarily by the repeated use of white-out on the body, text, and image---gains prominence in Swallow, it becomes clear that the fragility of female identity in post-feminist America appears, in part, as the failure of language itself.”
Shulie (1997)
Shulie is Subrin's most prominent work, shot on Super-8 and transferred to video which won a Los Angeles Film Critics Award in 1998. The piece is a shot-by-shot remake of the 1967 experimental documentary by an earlier generation of students at Art Institute of Chicago including Jerry Blumenthal, Sheppard Ferguson, James Leahy and Alan Rettig. The original version of Shulie (1967) is a cinema verite portrait of Shulamith Firestone
Shulamith Firestone
Shulamith Firestone , is a Jewish, Canadian-born feminist. She was a central figure in the early development of radical feminism, having been a founding member of the New York Radical Women, Redstockings, and New York Radical Feminists...
, author of the radical modern feminist text The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution during her final B.F.A. year at the Chicago Art Institute in 1970. Kate Haug wrote in a review of the film, “Given the late ‘80s art world trends of appropriation and the ever-growing experience of simulacrum, it is not so shocking that an innovative filmmaker would take on celluloid cloning” and continued to state that "by creating a replica film of the ‘60s she [Subrin] harnesses the remake’s amorphous quality of time to deftly address contemporary politics." This film forces its viewers to reconnect to and become re-aware of the historical context – the individual and radical origins of U.S. feminism’s Second Wave and how that course of events was subsumed and re-defined by the ensuing conservative political culture of the ‘80s. B. Ruby Rich, author of the book Chick Flicks noted, “She has created a document within a document that makes us remember what we didn’t know, [and] makes us realize all over again how much we’ve lost." "The temporal gap between 1967 and 1997 grants the audience a chance to re-think the future of feminism. By not completing or adding to Firestone’s biography, Subrin intentionally leaves the history of feminism incomplete – instead of following Firestone as she matures, Shulie (1967 and 1997) stops before feminism takes off."
"The film animates melancholia
Melancholia
Melancholia , also lugubriousness, from the Latin lugere, to mourn; moroseness, from the Latin morosus, self-willed, fastidious habit; wistfulness, from old English wist: intent, or saturnine, , in contemporary usage, is a mood disorder of non-specific depression,...
for both a collective political past and an individual subject’s child-self, suggesting that there may also be a productive afterlife to identities that seem foreclosed within the filmmaker’s own present tense: second-wave feminist, girlchild of the 1970s, even student." "Refusing distance from the child-self becomes a means of critiquing contemporary public culture in the 1997 Shulie, in Subrin’s other videotape Swallow, in the works she has produced with Sadie Benning, and in the ‘zines and videos of the 1990s."
The Fancy (2000)
Subrin's video piece, The Fancy, is a experimental biography of the life, death, and intriguing legacy of photographer Francesca Woodman
Francesca Woodman
Francesca Woodman was an American photographer best known for her black and white pictures featuring herself and female models. Many of her photographs show young women who are nude, who are blurred , who are merging with their surroundings, or whose faces are obscured...
, who committed suicide at age 22. Nicole Armour wrote of Subrin's videowork in The Fancy, that she "turns her critical gaze to the life and art of a renowned young female photographer whose early death left behind a controversial body of work rife with psychosexual implication. Rigorously structural in form, this speculative bringing-to-light meticulously sifts physical evidence and sketchy facts in an attempt to uncover the traces of a seemingly suppressed history embedded behind the photographers’ pictures.”
Other Work by Subrin
Subrin has also worked in collaboration with many artists and producers, such as on Crisis in Woodlawn (1994). Other projects include The Judy Spots (1995) five television spots produced with Sadie BenningSadie Benning
Sadie Benning is a video maker, visual artist, and musician.She first made her name in the early 1990s as a teenage video maker from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Raised by her mother in inner-city Milwaukee, Benning left school at age 16, primarily due to the homophobia she experienced...
for MTV
MTV
MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....
, and The File Room (1994), an interactive electronic archives produced by Antonio Muntadas.
In 2002 she directed the music video well, well, well for New York-based feminist electronic band Le Tigre
Le Tigre
Le Tigre is an American electroclash band, formed by Kathleen Hanna and Johanna Fateman in 1998. It also featured Sadie Benning from 1998 until 2001, and JD Samson for the rest of the group's run...
and worked as a creative consultant and videographer for the historical documentary Slumming It: Myth and Culture on the Bowery (2002), produced by Mixed Greens.
Her most recent work consists of a two channel video installation
Video installation
Video installation is a contemporary art form that combines video technology with installation art, making use of all aspects of the surrounding environment to affect the audience. Tracing its origins to the birth of video art in the 1970s, it has increased in popularity as digital video production...
, Sweet Ruin (2008, HD), showed at PARTICIPANT, Inc. in New York City and will be presented in Copenhagen later this year. Her feature narrative project, Up, is in development with Forensic Films placing herself as director in collaboration with Los Angeles-based writing partner, Evan Carlson. She is currently working on a new two channel installation about the haunting of 9/11 in daily life in New York.