Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
THE VIDEO WORK OF ED BOWES: LANGUAGE AND LIGHT
December 6 – December 9
December 6-9, 2024
Though under-celebrated in recent years, Ed Bowes has been a crucial part of moving-image culture in New York and beyond for the past fifty years, as a pioneer of early feature-length narrative video; a maker of utterly unique experimental videos long and short; a cinematographer for filmmakers and artists including Richard Foreman, Kathryn Bigelow, Vito Acconci, and Lizzie Borden; and a collaborator of numerous others, including Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and Eric Bogosian, among many, many others.
This long-overdue retrospective begins with Bowes’s first moving-image work, ROMANCE (1976), which was the first full-length, feature narrative shot in black-and-white video. Bowes’s early films have an insouciant style and a liberating experimental freedom. Developing a distinctive performance style (he referred to his actors as “presenters”), his video narratives are reminiscent of the plays of Sam Shepard or the films of John Cassavetes, while also incorporating literary influences (Bowes’s partner, the renowned poet Anne Waldman, has observed that his movies are like “an amalgam of Jane Austen, Henry James, and Gertrude Stein”). His later works are intimate poetic visions that, in his own words, “experiment with the relationships between word and image, idea and feeling.” In recent years, Bowes, who was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010, has collaborated with prominent poets such as Waldman, Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, Laird Hunt, Steven Taylor, Eleni Sikelianos, and Akilah Oliver, to make HD video works that, as Waldman puts it, are “like being inside consciousness in an astonishingly visceral and provocative way. One enters an alternative world that gets in your ear, your imagination, and under your skin.”
Anthology’s series encompasses ROMANCE (newly restored in a complete version which has not been seen since its initial presentation at The Kitchen in 1976), the early video works that followed in the late 1970s-80s, and his more recent experimental videos, including the premiere of his latest, A PUNCH IN THE GUT OF A STAR (2024).
“His scripts go against expectations of plot and yet provide coherent narratives, resembling experimental prose-poems. The attention to language is obsessive as he explores cognitive states and self-reflective layers of thinking, narration, temperament, as well as spatial, pictorial and emotional relationships between people themselves and between people and objects and landscapes.” –Anne Waldman
“Bowes’s work has been called visually gorgeous and enigmatic, qualities that are aided and abetted by his predilection for using video as the medium for his explorations into the ways humans negotiate language and light.” –Laird Hunt
Organized in collaboration with Anne Waldman and Alystyre Julian, who wrote the introduction above.
Special thanks to Ed Bowes; Anne Waldman; Alystyre Julian; Amy Taubin; Rebecca Cleman & Karl McCool (EAI); HR Hegnauer; Nicholas Martin (Fales Collection at NYU); Cory Reynolds (Artbook/D.A.P.); Charles Ruas; Tracey Schuster (Getty Research Institute); and Katie Trainor (MoMA).
