Pixelated Lesbian Mixtape: Azian Nurudin’s Wicked Times
Pixelated Lesbian Mixtape: Azian Nurudin’s Wicked Times
“Welcome, fellow wicked Queers!” Let me quote Daryl Cheong, Sasha Han, and Renee Ng, curators of the Queer East Film Festival, London, 2006, from their excellent Zine, created for the screening of works by Azian Nurudin:
“Sasha first encountered Azian Nurudin’s work while doing research on the PLX2000, a Fisher-Price black and white toy camera that recorded audiovisual material on cassette tapes. Between the diary videos of Sadie Benning to the sprawling feature-length video Joe-Joe (1993) by Cecilia Dougherty and Leslie Singer, the grainy, heavily pixelated image has since become synonymous with some of the most recognisable works by queer artists from the United States between the 1980s-1990s.
“At the San Francisco Art Institute, Azian worked alongside Dougherty and Singer in a “bratty pack” of women insurgent artists [italics mine], reflecting a tight-knit micro-community which shared equipment and was often able to act on impulse and swiftly execute her ideas.”
Congrats to Azian! And it’s nice to see how our work at SFAI and our pixel vision is regarded. Highly, basically. Thank you Daryl Cheong, Sasha Han, and Renee Ng!
Curated by Steve Seid program online January 12–Febuary 7, 2023
Includes work by Cecilia Dougherty, Azian Nurudin, Leslie Singer, Marshall Weber, Dale Hoyt, Paula Levine, Emjay Wilson, Andy Heustis, and Ivar Smedstad.
Video still from Your World Dies Screaming by Dale Hoyt
SCREENING: Your World Dies Screaming (1981) by Dale Hoyt; Garbage Head (1981) by Marshall Weber; The Madonna Series, Parts 1–5 (1987) by Leslie Singer; Fuck You, Purdue (1987) by Cecilia Dougherty; Jungle Gym (1981) by Andrew Huestis; Mirror, Mirror (1987) by Paula Levine; High Fidelity (1986) by Ivar Smedstad; Funk Is Its Own Reward (1981) by Marshall Weber; Malaysian Series, Parts 1–6 (1987) by Azian Nurudin; My Pal Foot (excerpt) (1981) by Andrew Huestis; Donkey-Skin (1988) by Emjay Wilson.
Remember Dale Hoyt! Support video art and artists!
CHAOS THEORY by Steve Seid
How would you describe a gathering group of unruly artists? A fortuitous anarchism, or just trouble on the way? And if such a faction existed in one particular moment and in one particular place, the SFAI, providing unruly succor for its constituent parts, what would you call that moment? A discordant convergence?
Just such a thing occurred at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early-and-mid eighties when a gaggle of singular young artists converged on the recently formed Performance/Video Department and all (heaven and) hell broke loose. A moment, such as it was.
With every upheaval, whether aesthetic or political, there are ringleaders, and among them at the P/V Dept. was a bratty pact—Dale Hoyt, along with his pals Marshall Weber (who would go on to found Artists’ Television Access) and Andrew Huestis—and Cecilia Dougherty, leading an insurgent group of women artists that included Leslie Singer, Azian Nurudin, Didi Dunphy, Jill Garellick and others. The creative energy welling from this convergence was enough to overheat nearby North Beach. If you add to that mix a core faculty of Howard Fried, Paul Kos, Sharon Grace, Doug Hall, Kathy Acker and Tony Labat, you had fissionable artistic material.
