Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

Moyra Davey

Canada, born 1958

Les Goddesses, 2011

Color video with sound, 61 min.

Courtesy of the artist, greengrassi, London; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York.

© Moyra Davey

Moyra Davey’s films and photographic works are filled with references to literature, poetry, and history, which she often reads aloud and records as she moves through her home, the street, or the subway. The film Les Goddesses takes its title from the American statesman Aaron Burr’s description of Mary Wollstonecraft’s two daughters, Fanny Imlay and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and their stepsister, Claire Clairmont. Imlay, Shelley, and Clairmont were inheritors of their mother’s remarkable legacy in their resistance to norms, in lives marked by the structural misogyny that limited their freedom, and by mental and physical illnesses, suicide, and substance abuse. Davey’s film interweaves their stories with events from her own life and the lives of her siblings and her own child, together with meditations on photography. The narrative bridges time through coincidences and parallels: the siblings’ adolescence and adulthood included their own experiences of addiction, eating disorders, mental illness, and Davey’s diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Les Goddesses asks what history can tell us about our own lives as it braids together past, present, and future with moments of poetry, loss, and liberation.

Content note: This video contains mature content, including images or language related to suicide, substance use, and sexuality. Please use discretion.

November 7 - November 24, 2024

Anna Halprin

United States, 1920–2021

Circle the Earth, 1986

Film by Coni Beeson

16 mm film, digitized, sound, color, 24 min.

The Elyse Eng Dance Collection / Museum of Performance + Design

Anna Halprin was a choreographer and dancer whose contributions to postmodern dance challenged many aspects of conventional dance training, focusing on movement’s capacity to develop and sustain community among people. Halprin was especially invested in collective dance as a container for communal healing. After moving to San Francisco with her husband, the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, in the mid-1940s, she went on to found the experimental San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop in 1955. Halprin’s numerous students in the following decades included Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Meredith Monk, Yvonne Rainer, and the duo Eiko and Koma.

In 1972 Halprin faced a diagnosis of colorectal cancer that reoriented her relationship to her body and her choreography. In 1978, with her daughter, Daria Halprin, she founded the Tamalpa Institute in Marin County, north of San Francisco. The institute offered movement as a therapy for those experiencing illness; by encouraging physical expression, practitioners believed they could ameliorate discomfort or disease within the body. In dialogue with her ongoing work at the Tamalpa Institute, Halprin choreographed Circle the Earth (1981), a community ritual intended to be performed by those living with cancer, HIV, or other illnesses. Staged in several iterations during the 1980s, Circle the Earth consists of an open-ended score that can be enacted in numerous contexts, with community-based catharsis and relational movement as its goal.

November 7 - November 24, 2024

Angela Ellsworth, United States, born 1964

TT Takemoto, United States, born 1967

Imag(in)ed Malady, 1997

Dir. TT Takemoto

digital video, 6:30 min.

Courtesy of the artists

Angela Ellsworth and TT Takemoto began performing collaboratively under the collective name Her/She Senses after meeting as graduate students at Rutgers University in 1991. Informed by the campus politics of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power), Ellsworth and Takemoto honed a queer and feminist performance practice that examined issues of health, grief, friendship, and intimacy. The video and photographic series Imag(in)ed Malady began in 1993, when Ellsworth was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma. At the time, Ellsworth was based in Phoenix, while Takemoto was pursuing a doctorate across the country in Rochester. The long-distance collaboration evolved organically: Ellsworth started photographing herself as she underwent cancer treatments to visualize and process her illness and its impact on her body. She would then send these photographs to Takemoto, who began restaging the images. Using homemade props and divergent settings, Takemoto’s “visual rhymes” imitate but intentionally do not replicate Ellsworth’s documentary photographs. The resulting images demonstrate the care of friendship while also acknowledging the divergent experiences of the two artists as they navigated the effects of cancer on Ellsworth and on their shared relationship.

Milford Graves

United States, 1941–2021

Heartbeat Drummer, 2004

Reuters, color video, 4:19 min.

LabVIEW animation, c. 2014-2020

LabView software screen captures, 4:21, 2:53, 4:32 mins.

Courtesy of the Estate of Milford Graves and Fridman Gallery

Fascinated by the material aspects of sound and its effects on the human body and mind, Milford Graves devoted himself to the study of rhythm and vibration. Graves was a leading percussionist in the Free Jazz movement and a polymath innovator in the fields of music, sound studies, martial arts, herbology, and acupuncture. His focus on the relation between the drumbeat and the heartbeat led him to challenge metronomic timing and, notably, to liberate the drummer from the role of timekeeper in jazz. Alongside his successful career in music, Graves trained as a medical laboratory technician to learn more about heart function. He subsequently joined the faculty of the Black Music Division of Bennington College and founded the Institute for Bio Creative Intuitive Music, where he connected students to EKG machines to monitor their heartbeats and study their responses to improvised music. In the early aughts, Graves developed idiosyncratic techniques at his home lab to extract melodies from heartbeats and turn them into visual patterns and digital animations.

Sensory note: Some videos may contain flashes of moving lights and loud sounds that may trigger photosensitivity or audio sensitivity.

Gregg Bordowitz

United States, born 1964

Fast Trip, Long Drop, 1993.

video, color, stereo, 54:04 min.

Courtesy of Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

© Gregg Bordowitz

In the mid-1980s, artist and writer Gregg Bordowitz dropped out of New York University to co-found Testing the Limits, a filmmaking collective that documented the ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) movement. In the following years, Bordowitz crafted a practice of guerrilla-style video documentation of and for people living with HIV/AIDS. Emphasizing a stark realism alongside intimately framed shots, Bordowitz’s videos draw their audience into a political landscape of community, grief, fear, love, and protest. The artist appears throughout Fast Trip, Long Drop, variously as himself, posed as other figures, or in the role of narrator. In one section, Bordowitz, who has been HIV-positive since 1988, appears to read his own eulogy. He has said that the late 1980s and early 1990s were transformative for him not only because he tested positive for HIV, but also because of his grandparents’ death in a car accident and the cancer diagnosis of his close friend the artist and dancer Yvonne Rainer. At one moment, Rainer asks Bordowitz who will die first—her of cancer, or him of AIDS? The question hangs in the air, answerable only by the inevitable passage of time. At another point in the film, he offers a possible answer: “I’m not a hero, I’m not a revolutionary body. I’m not an angel. I’m just trying to reconcile the fact that I’m going to die with the daily monotony of my life.”

P. Staff

United Kingdom, born 1987

Weed Killer, 2017

video, color, sound, 16:49 min.

Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth & Council

© P. Staff, 2017

Los Angeles–based artist P. Staff’s video Weed Killer derives its title from the artist Catherine Lord’s memoir The Summer of Her Baldness (2004), which chronicles the author’s experience of cancer treatment. Describing chemotherapy as “mainlining weed killer,” Lord evokes the cost and radical potential of remaking the body through biomedical intervention. Staff’s video is filled with footage of performers—all of whom identify as transgender—undulating under atmospheric lights, sometimes colored by thermal imaging. While recognizing the particularities of each person’s experiences, Weed Killer sutures the bodily struggles of cancer together with experiences of bodily alteration, transition, love, and survival.

Barbara Hammer

b. 1939, Hollywood, CA; d. 2019, New York City 

Sanctus, 1990  

16 mm film on HD video, color, sound, 18:16 min.  

Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix 

Barbara Hammer was a critical figure in feminist and lesbian filmmaking who made nearly one hundred films over her fifty-year career. Sanctus features cinefluorographic X-rays made by Dr. James Sibley Watson, a physician who experimented with motion pictures in the 1940s. Hammer layers Dr. Watson’s moving X-rays with brilliant blasts of color, shape, and light, exploring the opposition between radiation as a source of risk and as one of revelation.

Sensory note: These videos contain flashes of moving lights and sounds that may trigger photosensitivity or audio sensitivity.

Identifying the vulnerable body as a throughline for art in the United States in recent decades, the exhibition focuses on the ways health issues intervene in life and in art, transforming artists’ processes, subject matter, and politics. Informed by intersecting social movements that include civil rights, antiwar, women’s and gay liberation, and disability rights, artists have approached the body—in all its variance—as a field of inquiry.

Featuring an intergenerational group of eighty artists, the exhibition includes work by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Yvonne Rainer, Howardena Pindell, and David Hockney, among others, to more recent contributions by artists such as Christine Sun Kim, Simone Leigh, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Park McArthur. Considering disability through a broad lens, For Dear Life suggests affinities between those living with a range of maladies and conditions, recognizing that all of us experience illness and disability throughout our lives.

Southern California’s landmark arts event, PST ART, returns in September 2024 with more than 60 exhibitions from museums and other institutions across the region, all exploring the intersections of art and science, both past and present. Dozens of cultural, scientific, and community organizations will join the latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, with exhibitions on subjects ranging from ancient cosmologies to Indigenous sci-fi, and from environmental justice to artificial intelligence. Art & Science Collide will share groundbreaking research, create indelible experiences for the public, and generate new ways of understanding our complex world. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit pst.art