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As (perhaps) bad for the collective attention span as social media has been, it’s broken a barrier that should never been in place — it hooks people up to a hard drive of avant-garde films by women. Any rudimentary film class could introduce you to the idea of Shirley Clarke and Maya Deren, but without the context of their being a little more than just one more experimental filmmaker next to the Kuchars and Kenneth Anger, it means a little less to be shown their flights of geometric feminine abstraction. The biggest example is when Cecilia Condit became a brief tiktok sensation, but now you no longer have to travel to Anthology film archives to learn about, let alone see, works by Barbaras Hammer and Klutinis, Candace Reckinger, and Tessa Hughes-Freeland. All of these names were swimming through my head wondering about the lack of institutional care and funding that should be lavished on the avant-garde while watching a marvelously informal screening of the work Cathy Cook — Baltimore-based artist, Guggenheim Memorial Fellow, and Associate Professor in Visual Arts at the University of Maryland Baltimore County — in the front garden of Current Space during a torrential downpour. But then such circumstances are bound to make anyone swim.
June Brides (1987) - 10min, 16mm
The beauty of Cook’s work, which infiltrated the surroundings, is the celebratory nature of the insouciance of her mission as a filmmaker. She collects testimonies, versions of femininity, and presents them like the dresses of the women in her ecstatic short June Brides. It was Cook’s birthday, so there was cake and old friends, some of whom featured throughout the decade-spanning retro, all of it beamed in from Cook’s laptop. The temporary freeze and the pouring rain were variously a melancholy compliment to the raw determination of her work, or the hand of a gatekeeping god preventing, as ever, the work of liberated womanhood from finding an audience. I’ve been in a bit of a mood lately because my dear friend Bridget died a few weeks ago and have hardly left my bed. Critic and friend Alex Lei pulled me out of my stupor to go the retro and the clouds followed me to the screening. I’ve been listening to a podcast appearance she did, over and over again, about decorating your room with art, how art is both a changeable declaration of the moment’s vibe and yet a permanent log of the things you have always felt and wanted to project. I knew her antic need to redecorate, a reflection of the struggle in her mind to get through a day, a month, a year. She’d call me and describe the last week’s trials and tribulations. “Been a long week…” I’d offer. “Let’s be real, it’s been a long life.” Not long enough.
Bust-Up (1989) - 7min, 16mm
I think about her as I watch Cook’s Bust-Up, the highlight of the program, in which “Milwaukee’s talented iconic trans idol Holly Brown” portrays a deranged housewife doling out tea and platitudes for an audience of two - an unnamed, unglimpsed dinner companion, and Cook’s eager camera. Brown flits between Jackie Onassis’ feline midatlantic charm school rearing to Bette Davis and Joan Crawford’s knowing harridanism to Divine’s sexual hysteria in Multiple Maniacs between her murder spree and the arrival of Lobstorra to perform the film-capping violation. When Brown drops one act to emerge from a closet in strobe lights, hands like the claws of a monster, teeth bared, hair and make-up like a kabuki demon, it’s a terrifying and beautiful escape from the corset of mid-century manners, from anyone’s definition of the female but the one “we” invent every time we open the door to reveal ourselves. Cook has split the program into threes, one titled “Gurly & Women Films” but there’s no hiding that wonderfully unselfconscious perspective throughout the program. Even the word “gurly” has a sweetly transgressive charge.
The Match That Started My Fire (1992) - 20min, 16mm
The Match That Started My Fire is a collage of original and found footage set to the audio of women recalling their first flowering of sexual thought, of barbie dolls in bondage and skirts that fly up when twirled. The unemphatic, sarcastic musings of Cook’s friends with their boyish cadence and self-deprecating laughter create a space of freedom under the soil of images. Innocence recalled by women whose testimonies speak to a lifetime of learning things the hard way. And yet every encounter, every half-remembered thrill, every time they came alive under the male gaze they courted, communicates galaxies of experience only know recalled in non-linear films like Cook’s. As Joyce Chopra, Bette Gordon, Martha Coolidge, and Susan Seidelman’s films were documents of undocumented personal rebellion (and the horrors that made them necessary), filmmakers like Cook, completely unheralded and too undiscovered, were everywhere in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, but were not allowed to penetrate a male artistic vanguard. Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow were keen observers of the female form, but their own form prevented a greater understanding to manifest in the work. Warhol provided space for women to become themselves without ever letting his own images pass beneath the surface. Bust-Up predicts Chris Cunningham’s video for The Horrors’ “Sheena is a Parasite” in which an alien tries to escape from Samantha Morton’s dancing body: womanhood as extra-terrestrial. You can see her in the 40-second, retrospective-concluding Cook short Ass Dance as well.
tar guys (2006) - 5 min, S-8 film to DV, featuring poetry by Cathy Cook
Both Towers Have Fallen (2001) - 2min, video
Emily & Liberace # 1763 (2003) - 1:45 min, 16mm film to DV, featuring poetry by Emily Dickinson
Conversely there’s a side to her work about the distance of observation. There’s 2006’s tar guys in which she sees men doing a job of work from out her window. *Both Towers Have Fallen* is a desktop documentary featuring a controlled demolition visible from one side of her Brooklyn apartment and the smoke from the 9/11 terror attacks playing right next to each other. Two different kinds of destruction, each making way for a new geography, a new world which she can do little but gaze upon. She complicates her comparatively diminutive stature before tectonic shifts by turning them into windows on her screen. Similarly in #1763 Emily & Liberace she merges the flamboyant pianist’s very public life with Emily Dickinson’s poetry of repression and anxiety, of watching the world happen from your window like Cook’s own camera. These are works that announce control in a world that seemed so desperate to wrest it from women like Cook, growing up without the kinds of role model who would have alerted her to the difference her art can make. I think of Bridget’s walls, her little apartment in Queens, then the one she moved to in Columbus, Ohio where she died. It was never the same space twice, but it was always hers. She felt powerless to change her life, her career, the way she was viewed by men and by the intangible world of commodities and occupations. She wanted to be more than she was, because she didn’t see, no matter how often I’d spend telling her on the phone, that she was so many beautiful things already. She lived in a stasis of inner torment, but she always laughed. She was a reliable purveyor of chaotic womanhood, who followed her impulses no matter what it said about her. She shared with me secret rendezvous and her death drive, her inability to stem the flow of her sadness, but she was always able to laugh about it. People are so much you could spend a lifetime disentangling their every strand and synapse trying to lay them out and locate the narrative, but the truth is no one is ever just one thing. Bridget was a hundred things to me and I’ll spend the rest of my life mourning each one of them. It was nice to get out of the house.
