Shana MacDonald

This article examines the use of intersubjective modes of address in Canadian feminist experimental film between 1979 and 1987. It compares Patricia Gruben’s The Central Character (1979) and Brenda Longfellow’s Our Marilyn (1987), noting how the use of experimental forms of address in both affectively blur the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic space, unsettling the certainty of the spectator’s viewing position. The article counters the reading of feminist avant-garde film from this decade as being engaged in disruptive practices.  While dissonance and dislocation are a part of the history of feminist experimental film aesthetics, the article argues it is equally necessary to map moments of resonance and intersubjective exchange in these films. Gruben and Longfellow’s experiments with cinematic address are framed as important interventions into dominant forms of representation that expand the range of possibilities for both the image of woman onscreen and the feminist spectator in the audience.

This article examines how sound was used as an effective tool of formal resistance in the work of influential feminist filmmakers including Carolee Schneemann (USA), Gunvor Nelson (Sweden), and Joyce Wieland (Canada). It situates the three filmmakers as forerunners in the development of the feminist experimental film movement.  Through close readings of Wieland’s film Water Sark (1965), Schneemann’s film Plumb Line (1968-71), and Nelson’s film My Name is Oona (1969), the article demonstrates how each artist advance a critical politics through dissonant sound-image dissonance. While their work is different in both aesthetic approach and thematics, their strategic use of sound as point of disruption within their early films set an important standard for future feminist experimental film practice.  The article outlines how each filmmaker advanced their politics through the dialectial relationship between image and sound that often challenged viewers. Each produced defamiliarized landscapes out of domestic spaces commonly over-coded by gendered systems of representation including the kitchen, the home and the garden. Further, each film offered alternative forms for articulating women’s subjectivity that challenged the roles made available to the during the 1960s.

This essay argues that contemporary projection art functions as an important space of aesthetic protest.  I consider how projection art is able to build sites of intersubjective exchange between spectators, artists and art. I look at projection art that explores the thresholds between onscreen bodies and spaces alongside the spaces and embodied audiences outside the architecture of the screen. I am interested in how the formal indexing and animation of these thresholds constructs aesthetic spaces of protest that produce liminal sites of viewing engagement. I argue a key aesthetic principle of projection art is found in its performative reimagining of spatial contexts.  By undermining traditional viewing structures and conditions, projection art explores alternative forms of visual exchange that create a greater awareness in viewers of their own body and subject positions.  My reading contends that by situating spectators as embodied viewer-participants works by Shirin Neshat and Krzysztof Wodiczko open up a sense of relatedness that calls viewers to recognition, greater awareness and perhaps action.

While rupture has been a generative form of political intervention within art, ‘On Resonance in Contemporary Site-Specific Projection Art’ proposes that an equally necessary element connecting aesthetics and politics is art’s desire to forge connections with the provisional community of the audience. Through a consideration of the large-scale exhibit ‘Land|Slide: Possible Futures,’ the author explores examples of contemporary site-specific projection art that formally seek a sense resonance within the viewer.  The article argues works in 'Land|Slide'  encourage a productive unfixing of the borders between media and spaces, effectively encouraging embodied, intersubjective engagements between art and audience. The author examines the performative structures of particular screen-based works included in the exhibition. The article claims that gestures of connection and collaboration between object, screen, site, and viewer within these works pose an important counterpoint to threats of aesthetic co-optation under neoliberalism.