Things have been going uphill ever since. I’m getting recognition with art institutions and being represented by commercial galleries. I never would have thought I’d be one of those kinds of artists. It doesn’t happen to funky people. Unless you come from the upper echelons of the world, you’re basically relegated to the status quo of nothingness.
A few years back, the New Yorker described you as “content with her place as an outsider of the institutional art world.” Is that still true?
Yes, because [institutions] may open the back door a little for someone like me to enter, but I’ll never feel truly part of those kinds of worlds. But that’s fine to not be fully accepted within those realms. That’s okay with me.
You can’t change institutions from within. Institutions always wind up changing you, and not for the better.
You Made The White to Be Angry in 1999. Will it resonate differently today?
At the time that I started making The White To Be Angry, there was this cultural discourse surrounding Black anger and rage. It was so ludicrous, as if Blacks existed in a state of perpetual broil.
It’s all perspective. Blacks are thought of in negative and criminal terms, but White anger and rage is assertive, forceful and necessary. Thus the title of my film, which came from my friend Jeffreyland Hilbert, who is the star of the last segment, Beggars of Life, taking a jab at Bruce La Bruce and his debut feature film, No Skin Off My Ass. Using the natty rock music video as my pastiche template, I integrated the songs of my art band PME as a way of taking the piss out of the reverence for film directors like Woody Allen.
All the things I’ve worked on dealing with race, class, and gender are more prevalent now and more timely than they were back then.
I don’t like to explain myself and my work. I just like to put it out there and let people absorb what they will, either good or bad. It’s not a mainstream movie. It’s an experimental short subject, and people who are expecting a linear, mainstream-oriented film are going to be disappointed in any of the films I do. Most people wouldn’t even think of them as films because they’re used to seeing mainstream Hollywood productions. The kind of things I do, they’re going to say, “This is bizarre.” So, we’ll see what happens.
When you created the work soon to be shown in Chicago, who was your intended audience? Has your audience changed since then?
When I first started making little experimental works, I didn’t think in terms of an audience. I just made things to amuse myself and my friends. We were all just part of our own little movement.
One of the earliest little films I made back in the early 80s was called That Fertile Feeling, and I worked then with an LA art collective called Amoeba Records and Film Works with Quasi O’Shea and Keith Holland. Quasi wanted to send it to some of the burgeoning gay and lesbian film festivals that had just started, and he sent it to San Francisco’s. I told him not to. I said the gays are just too normative, and they’re not going to get this or like it.
He sent it anyway, and oh my God, they were so offended. They called and told him, this is so horrible and you people should not be making films ever.
I figured, oh God, we must have been doing something right for them to get that belligerent about it!
Years later, the film was shown as part of a little retrospectacle they did of me in New York at the Anthology Film Archives, and at that retrospectacle, Marilyn Manson was there and saw That Fertile Feeling, and he wanted me to direct a music video-though it didn’t happen.
