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Project Website: http://slought.org/content/11174/
Without You I'm Nothing gives us the rundown, our being run down, on the links and channels of mass identification. The other can never name himself as other. In a culture of diversity and commodity that means that we're all always passing, passing as spectator, passing as spectacle, passing through the metabolism of identification, in particular the mutual identification or admiration (or rage) found in groups.
--Laurence Rickels, "North by North," artext #77
Please join us for this casual evening of film screenings featuring "Without You I'm Nothing" by John Boskovich and "Paris is Burning" by Jennie Livingston on February 5, 2004 from 6:30-8:30pm. The films will be simultaneously screened in different rooms at Slought.
Boskovich's first film, Without You I’m Nothing (1990), remained his singular film credit for almost eleven years until North (2001). In November 2002, Slought Foundation premiered "North" (2001), a short film by Los Angeles-based conceptual artist and filmmaker John Boskovich, that featured Gary Indiana reading from Louis-Ferdinand Céline's novel "North" (1960). Critics Laurence Rickels, Catherine Liu, Gary Indiana, and John Boskovich were all present at the premier and engaged in public conversation, also online: http://Slought.org/content/11086/
As Boskovich wrote in the notes to North, "the film... is not about obsolete politics; the language and political ideas in North are painfully current and have an uncanny timeliness." Before Without You I’m Nothing and since then he has done a considerable body of work in other media such as installation, photo and text, painting, sculpture, design and writing. This work relates to his film work formally or thematically.
Without You I'm Nothing stars Sandra Bernhard. Mixing stand-up comedy, lounge act and a sly satire of the debased celebrity culture and the unverifiable ways in which we go about constructing our identities, Sandra Bernhard won acclaim for this 1988 New York stage show captured on film. Gender-buster Bernhard fascinates even while her aggressive, confrontational act leaves viewers uneasy. She sings, tells outrageous stories about her upbringing and bares herself, emotionally and physically, amidst an edgy and uncomfortable atmosphere that was an essential part of her live performance and the larger milieu of which she was a part, but is now past. 90 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.
Without You I'm Nothing will be screened alongside Paris is Burning (1990), a documentary that examines the young men of Harlem who originated "voguing," and turned these stylized dance competitions into expressions of fierce personal pride. It is a story of urban survival and gay self-affirmation amidst a fantasy world of high fashion, status and acceptance. Slought Foundation selected this film to accompany the Without You I'm Nothing screening in part for its portrayal of a complementary social milieu joining intimate, even outrageous, gender-busting performance in an uncomfortable and aggressive atmostphere, now also past. 76 minutes.
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