Susan Mogul

Who is Susan Mogul? Part of the answer to this question can be found in the pioneering video artworks she made in the early 1970s, which took the form of a performative autobiography staged before the camera. If what we see is to be believed, then Susan Mogul is a decidedly witty feminist with an engaging and expressive laugh, whose work focuses on the process of mediated self-questioning. In addition to herself, she also focuses on her social environment in an almost organic way: mother, father, siblings, friends, neighbours, comrades-in-arms, and the stories of numerous men, which are often characterized by intimate distances and an exploration of different kinds of relationships.

“The conflict in establishing one's identity in relation to a group – be it family or culture in general – was a fundamental theme in my work. I tried to define and simultaneously deconstruct my self-image through humorous autobiographical anecdotes." (Susan Mogul)

The legendary Feminist Art Program initiated by Judy Chicago at the California Institute of the Arts, followed by the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles are just two of the stages in her biography reflected in works of art, which includes videos, photography, mail art, installation and performance art. Mogul currently lives in Los Angeles. (Dietmar Schwärzler)

Programm 1: 24.04.um 20:30

Q&A with Susan Mogul and Claudia Slanar

Dressing Up (1973, 7 min)
Take Off (1974, 10 min)
Susan Mogul's Woman's Building (2010, 9 min)
Everyday Echo Street: A Summer Diary (1993, 32 min)
Sing, O Barren Woman (2000, 11 min)
Mom's Move (2018, 25 min)

What should I wear today? What happens if I sit in front of the camera with a dildo in my hand? Dressing Up and Take Off provide funny answers to these questions. Susan Mogul's Woman's Building is a look back at one of the most important spaces for women in the United States, a place whose primary concerns included self-determination, occupying space, (re)adjusting art history (from which women had been written out and often not even included), and consciousness-raising were central concerns. Mogul's neighbourhood in the Echo Street/L.A. area – her hood – is the setting for Everyday Echo Street: A Summer Diary, a flirtation film. The program is rounded up by a compilation of interviews with women who have decided not to have children, staged as a medley (Sing, O Barren Woman), and a film about her 88-year-old mother´s move, which becomes a walk down memory lane about her and her work as a photographer (Mom´s Move). (ds)

Programm 2: 25.04. um 18:00

Q&A mit Susan Mogul und Dietmar Schwärzler

Mogul is Mobil Volume III Redux (1975/ 2022, 4 min)
Dear Dennis (1988, 4 min)
Driving Men (2008, 68 min)

When Mogul moved from New York to Los Angeles, she had to get a driver's license to become, as the artist smugly puts it, a “Hollywood Mogul”. She produced a postcard (a piece of mail art) with the slogan "Mogul is Mobil," which she sent to everyone she knew. Dear Dennis, on the other hand, is conceived as a video letter to Dennis Hopper, with whom she shared a dentist. Driving Men presents an intimate treatise – a video diary – on Mogul's relationships with men, be they sexual, amical, or familial. Her participation in the feminist movement, the protest movement against the Vietnam War, her support of the Black Power movement, and her Jewish identity also incorporate self-reflective artistic methods that reveal how “the personal is the political” can be a very subversive attitude. (ds)

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a collaboration between sixpackfilm and AustrianFilmmuseum
Thanks to Claudia Slanar for the idea for this programme and Carola Dertnig for the co-operation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.