Meet Stuart Marshall: AIDS film and video work 1984-1993

The Concordia University Community Lecture Series on HIV/AIDS presents a special retrospective screening of UK-based experimental film and video artist Stuart Marshall's (1949 - 1993) AIDS-related works:

Program 1 -- 14h:

"Go Through the Motions" 1975, 6 min.

A component of Stuart Marshall's Mouthworks series, "Go Through the Motions" represents a shift to single monitor video following a decade in sound, performance and installation. Made in the UK between 1975-1978 while Marshall was teaching at Newcastle Polytechnic, these works reference Bruce Nauman's earlier Lip Sync from 1969, or the early video works of William Wegman. Parallel works Mouth Room and Arcanum illustrate Marshall's debt to feminist video practice and the 'semanalysis' theories of Julia Kristeva, with art as a signifying and re-signifying practice, as conveyed through Marshall's video theory in development at the same time. Retrospectively, Marshall's refrain of '...go through the motions of saying one thing and meaning another...' bespeaks the closet and the possibility of transformation. "Go Through The Motions" establishes the conceptual content and visual economy later explored by Marshall's "Journal of the Plague Year" and "Pedagogue".

"Pedagogue", 1988, 11 min.

"Pedagogue" is a 1988 collaboration between Stuart Marshall, author, playwright and performer Neil Bartlett (b.1958), and students at Newcastle Polytechnic. Marshall and Bartlett conceived Pedagogue as an improvised, agit-prop video to “cock a snook” at the Thatcher government's Section 28, in progress at the time. Section 28 was a repressive, homophobic legislation prohibiting the promotion of homosexual lifestyles that tried to turn the tide on two decades of LGBT political gains. By seeking to expose the absurdity of Section 28 Pedagogue humorously evokes the cultural opposition to regressive homophobic and anti-sex attitudes of the Thatcher's Britain promulgated in the right-wing press during the AIDS crisis. As a contemporary account states this 'deconstructs the two establishment myths that homosexuality can be "taught" and is "infectious," thereby returning to pedagogical and pathological ideas of homosexuality, first explored in "Bright Eyes". (Quote from Between Imagination and Reality, ICA 1990.)

"Bright Eyes", 1984, 80 min.

"Bright Eyes" was commissioned by and first broadcast on UK television's Channel 4 in December 1984 in the context of a virulently homophobic media response to the emergence of HIV/AIDS. Marshall's innovative and experimental video-essay charts the media depiction of HIV/AIDS as a gay disease within the long durée of homosexual stigmatization and pathologization. For Marshall this entails earlier attempted sexual reform movements, political repression, ongoing censorship and entrapment. As a history of the present "Bright Eyes" combines archival material, historical reenactment and agit-prop theatricality with interviews featuring those on the frontline of the UK and US AIDS crisis such as lesbian and gay activists, health workers and people with AIDS. At the time, Marshall's historical, political and cultural analysis, radical image-text juxtapositions and intertextuality broke the mould and demanded an ethical and political response from its viewers. Displaying polemical attitude, artistic flair and intellectual acuity, "Bright Eyes" set the tone for AIDS cultural activism and analysis and continues to resonate with ongoing representations of HIV/AIDS and LGBTQI issues.

Program 2 — 17h:

"Over Our Dead Bodies", 1991. 74 min.

"Over Our Dead Bodies" is Marshall's follow-up to Bright Eyes commissioned by and broadcast through dedicated lesbian and gay magazine OUT on UK Television's Channel 4 in August 1991. Documenting the rise of US AIDS activism and the corresponding UK activist scene, Marshall features extensive interviews with members of ACT UP, QUEER NATION, their UK chapters and corresponding UK activist group OutRage! AIDS activist and OutRage co-founder Simon Watney maps out the US and UK scenes, while activist video by ACT UP and OutRage! members and affiliated groups demonstrates the step-change in the cultural and political self-articulation and self-determination of AIDS activism.

"Robert Marshall", 1991, 10 min.

"Robert Marshall", (filmed with the assistance of John Greyson) charts Stuart Marshall's journey to make a video and visit family in Canada. Here Marshall seeks out 8mm film footage of his earlier family life that includes his deceased father Robert, who died in the filmmaker's company during childhood. Marshall's Barthesian narrative is a eulogy to his father, a paean to the power of the moving image, an account of Marshall's alternative medical treatment for AIDS at the same time as offering a poignant reflection on mortality and memory. Influenced by the writings of the women's health movement and Susan Sontag's Illness As Metaphor Marshall states, 'I believe that one should take some control over one's own disease process.' As such, Robert Marshall parallels the work of UK artist Jo Spence, displaying a historically committed, materialist regard for ethical convictions and political content. These works ask who goes before and what comes after us, while remaining indicative of Marshall's singular and unfaded polemical, critical and artistic abilities.

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This retrospective is an event in conjunction with the public lecture:

"Meet Stuart Marshall - Art, Activism and the AIDS Crisis:
Learning in a Public Medium "

https://www.facebook.com/events/1611950799109581/

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And a special exhibition in collaboration with the VAV Gallery:

"Generations"

Featuring work by Concordia Fine Arts Students in conversation with Stuart Marshall’s "Journal of the Plague Year"

Nov 28th - Dec 9th
VAV Gallery | 1395 Rene-Levesque Blvd. W.

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