Gestures of Urgency: Woolworths Choir of 1979 (Elizabeth Price, 2012)
Seminarraum 7
In the video installation Woolworths Choir of 1979 (2012), Elizabeth Price sutures three seemingly unrelated hand gestures from very different historical and media contexts: the drawing of the sword in Gothic tomb sculpture, the undulating movements that accompany The Shangri-Las? performance of ?Out in the Streets? for the BBC in 1965, and the desperate waving of shop girls trapped behind barred windows found in news footage of a deadly fire in a Manchester department store in 1979. Price describes this suture as a performance of communal mourning, of calling to memory the lingering effects of the gendered division of labor in accumulative capitalism. In this lecture, we will discuss how a politically engaged, feminist artwork like Woolworths Choir of 1979 can negotiate memory and remembrance as non-teleological, as a responsibility of collectives, and through experimental aesthetic forms, namely by sound, and in particular by ways of rhythm.
Kristina Pia Hofer is a post-doc researcher and lecturer at the Departments of Art History and Media Theory, University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her research interests include film sound, exploitation genres, and feminist_queer theory. Recent publications: ?Dirty Sound: The Camp Materialism of Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls,? in: The Dark Side of Camp Aesthetics. Queer Economies of Dust, Dirt and Patina, ed. Ingrid Hotz-Davies, Franziska Bermann, Georg Vogt, London: Routledge 2018, 88-100; Dated Formats Now: Material Practices in Audiovisual Art (ed., with Marietta Kesting). FKW Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur 61, February 2017.