Cooper Gallery Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee Press Release February 2020

A is for Avant-Garde, Z is for Zero & Peter Wollen

Laura Mulvey Artist’s Talk: Thursday 19 March, 1pm (off-site UoD) Preview: Thursday 19 March, 5.30–7.30pm Exhibition: 20 March — 18 April 2020 (Film still) © British Film Institute Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen,

Riddles of the Sphinx of the Riddles , 1977.

A is for Avant-Garde, Z is for Zero: Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen is a retrospective exhibition that uses the gallery space as a means to refract the work of influential theorists and filmmakers Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen through the prism of art.

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen are best known as film theorists and filmmakers. As writers, they made highly influential interventions in film theory such as Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and Wollen’s The Two Avant-Gardes (both 1975). Seeking cinematic forms that investigated and countered dominant languages of looking, signification and narration, Mulvey and Wollen made six films between 1974 and 1983 that engaged the viewer in a rigorous and still timely conceptual debate that brought into contact semiotics, feminism, psychoanalysis, alongside histories and theories of the avant-garde.

Mulvey and Wollen’s engagement with art and artists has always been a central dimension of their activities, exemplified by their numerous documentaries and ‘theory films’ about or featuring artists, critical writings, teaching, curating, their production of artworks, and their role as important interlocutors for artists. Incorporating moving-image works, audio recordings, drawings, diagrams, photographs and archival materials, A is for Avant-Garde, Z is for Zero maps the co-ordinates of two transdisciplinary, overlapping practices which includes collaborations and conversations with esteemed figures in art and culture such as Faysal Abdullah, Kathy Acker, Emma Hedditch, Mary Kelly, Mark Lewis, Yvonne Rainer and Kerry Tribe. In addition to proposing that Mulvey and Wollen can be understood within the broader frame of artists and art theorists influenced by and contributing to the discourses of feminism and socialism, the exhibition utilises Cooper Gallery’s art school context to suggest their important role as teachers and the mutual influence between educational and artistic work. Art historian Griselda Pollock stated that the 1970s can be understood as an ‘avant-garde moment’, characterised by overlaps and interactions between independent cinema, video art, conceptual art, feminist appropriations of psychoanalysis, and the reanimation of activist practices and reinvigorated production of theoretical discourses relating to gender and sexuality. The constellation of materials presented in the exhibition demonstrates how Mulvey and Wollen sustained the critical and innovative energies of the 1970’s beyond that decade, keeping the urgent inquiries inherent to this ‘avant-garde moment’ open.

The title, A is for Avant-Garde, Z is for Zero, captures the gamut of Mulvey and Wollen’s interest in the avant-garde as models of cultural production; by making references to the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s and the post-revolutionary Mexican avant-garde. As well as signalling their ambition to anatomise and reinvent film language, the title cites Wollen’s deployment of the alphabetic form in some of his essays, as well as the use of numbers and games as generative constraints in other writings and in Mulvey and Wollen’s films. Embodying a complete and resolute break with the past, the ‘zero’ of the title foregrounds Mulvey and Wollen’s desire to negate previous cinematic forms and start again from nothing, an aspiration succinctly crystallised by their work in the early to mid- 1970s: the scorched earth of counter-cinema.

The exhibition is accompanied by a public programme of events and is curated by Oliver Fuke and Nicolas Helm-Grovas in association with Cooper Gallery.

Signs Meanings Riddles: Film into Poetry Writing workshop led by Jane Goldman Thursday 26 March, 6–7.30pm

Riddles of the Sphinx Screening and Artist’s Response by Margaret Salmon Wednesday 15 April, 6–8pm

Biographies

Laura Mulvey (born 1941 in Oxford) is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of . She was Director of Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) from 2012 to 2015. She is the author of Visual and Other Pleasures (1989); Citizen Kane (1992); Fetishism and Curiosity (1996); Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006); and Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times(2019). She has co-edited British Experimental Television (2007); Feminisms (2015); and Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and British Experimental Film in the 1970s (2017). Mulvey made six films in collaboration with Peter Wollen, including Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), and two films with artist and filmmaker Mark Lewis.

Peter Wollen (born 1938 in London, died 2019) was a radical filmmaker, film theorist, and screenwriter, whose crucial book, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969), continues to challenge and provoke. His other books include: Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (1982), the alternative history of 20th century art Raiding the Icebox (1993), Paris/Hollywood: Writings on Film (2002), and Paris/Manhattan: Writings on Art (2004), all published by Verso, as well as a BFI Classic on Singin’ in the Rain (1992). He taught film at a number of universities and was Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. Wollen co-wrote the screenplay for ’s The Passenger (1975) and subsequently worked outside mainstream cinema, collaborating on six films with Laura Mulvey. His final feature film was a solo project, Friendship’s Death (1987) starring Tilda Swinton as an alien who lands in Amman, Jordan, during Black September, 1970. His expansive interests included organizing paradigm-shifting art exhibitions, such as “ and Tina Modotti” (with Laura Mulvey, 1982) and “On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International” (with Mark Francis, 1989). Venue Information

Address Cooper Gallery Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design University of Dundee 13 Perth Road Dundee DD1 4HT

Access The gallery is on two floors. First floor has ramped access and disabled toilet. Second floor is accessible via two flights of steps. There is an alternative route leading to a lift then a set of five steps. Wheelchair access is via a stair climber. Large print versions of the exhibition information handout are available, please ask our Guides. For access enquiries please contact: [email protected]

Opening hours Monday – Friday: 10am – 5pm Saturday: 11am – 5pm Sunday: Closed

Notes to Editors

1. A is for Avant-Garde, Z is for Zero: Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen is open 20 March – 18 April 2020 at Cooper Gallery, DJCAD, University of Dundee. 2. All are welcome to attend the exhibition preview on Thursday 19 March, 5.30–7.30pm for a drinks reception with Laura Mulvey in attendance. 3. The exhibition A is for Avant-Garde, Z is for Zero: Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen is co-curated by Oliver Fuke and Nicolas Helm-Grovas in association with Cooper Gallery, DJCAD, University of Dundee. 4. The project follows on Cooper Gallery’s 2017 retrospective screening programme of the work of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Urgency and Possibility: Counter-Cinema in the 70s and 80s. Full details: https://www.dundee.ac.uk/ cooper-gallery/exhibitions/lauramulveyandpeterwollen/ 5. Laura Mulvey will be available for interview on 19 March from 3–8pm at Cooper Gallery. Telephone interview can also be arranged, please contact Cooper Gallery Curatorial Assistant Peter Amoore: [email protected] 5. For more information on Laura Mulvey and her extraordinary contribution to feminist and avant-garde film practice and theory, see interview with BFI: https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/interviews/laura-mulvey-riddles-sphinx 6. For more information on the extradoinary practice and influence ofPeter Wollen read his BFI obituary here: https:// www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/obituaries/peter-wollen-film-theory-modernism-signs- meaning-riddles-sphinx-passenger and The Guardian obituary here: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jan/08/ peter-wollen-obituary 7. Cooper Gallery opening hours: Monday – Friday: 10am–5pm and Saturday 11am–5pm 8. For further information about the exhibition and events please visit Cooper Gallery’s website: https://www.dundee. ac.uk/cooper-gallery/exhibitions/aisforavant-gardezisforzerolauramulveypeterwollen/ 9. All associated events are free and open to all. For more information on events contact Curatorial Assistant Peter Amoore: [email protected] 10. Cooper Gallery DJCAD is a public gallery associated with one of the most respected art colleges in the UK, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD) established in 1892. Cooper Gallery has gained international recognition as a distinctive platform in Scotland with their radical curatorial research, international approach and focus on critical discourse in contemporary art and culture. With four galleries devoted to an integrated programme of new commissions, exhibitions, off-site projects, public engagement events, artists’/writers’ residencies and publishing, Cooper Gallery DJCAD actively develop meaningful and effective collaborations with national and international organisations and individuals. This approach enhances the reach and quality of its work, enabling the gallery to support, produce and disseminate the best practices of established and emerging, national and international artists and creative practitioners. For further information, please visit: https://www.dundee.ac.uk/cooper-gallery/exhibitions 11. A is for Avant-Garde, Z is for Zero: Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen has been made possible with funding support from Kings College London