Pre 1996 Films

In 1995, artists Catherine Lord and Millie Wilson committed what they called "an act of anthropology", and they intended it to be doomed from the start. For a large mixed-media exhibition on lesbian culture at the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts, they asked 83 individuals from around the state of New Mexico to lend one small object of personal significance to the museum for display. Not just lesbians. Women willing to be identified as lesbians. Women who were once lesbians. Women who prefer not to describe themselves as lesbians. Women who entertain the idea of being a lesbian. And men wishing to commemorate a lesbian. The objects arrived. The show opened. And the category dissolved on contact.

Object Lessons is fast-paced, humorous, textured, shot through New Mexico's high desert light on a Hi-8 video camera, and uses the creation of that exhibition as its engine and its alibi. Interviews with Catherine (Senior) and Millie, driving through the landscape, with lenders at their homes and jobs, with members of the public at the opening, are cut against montages of the objects themselves: small, private, stubbornly singular things that refuse to cohere into a thesis. In the process, the film unravels any fixed notion of lesbian community, identity, appearance, or culture, not with argument but by filling those categories so full of contradiction, specificity, and life, that the walls simply give way.

The title is the provocation. A lesson about objects. Objects as lessons. What do these things mean, excavated from someone's drawer, mounted in a gallery, labeled and lit? What would an archaeologist make of them in a hundred years? What story could the collection of objects possibly tell about the collection of people who owned them? What fixed truth could be extracted, what essence recovered? Nothing stable. Nothing essential. Nothing that wouldn't immediately betray the poverty of the question.

The exhibit's (and the film's) great political insight connects directly to Aubin's film Meanwhile, a docu-poem in six verses that demonstrates identity is not a thing you possess but an experience you move through, shaped by the particular weather of a given moment. Object Lessons arrives at the same conviction from a different angle, not through language and music and archive, but through 83 objects and the people who couldn't quite explain why they'd chosen them, or why they'd been chosen to choose. Identity, both Meanwhile and Object Lessons understand, isn't a fixed object to be placed in a vitrine. It's a process, argued over, revised, made and unmade in relation to power, desire, and time.

That insistence is aesthetically sophisticated and politically urgent. Now we live in a moment of ferocious backlash against LGBTQ+ visibility and safety, in schools, in libraries, in state legislatures, in the rhetoric of a cultural right that treats the mere representation of queer existence as inherently aggressive. But Object Lessons refuses the terms of that fight. It won't offer a stable, defensible, legible "lesbian identity" to be protected or attacked, because it knows that any such object, however lovingly constructed, is already a kind of capture. Who gets to define us, on whose terms, under whose gaze, who curates and who is curated, have always been questions with material consequences. Visibility is not safety. But erasure is violence. The space between those two truths is where this film lives.

Object Lessons is radical in its refusal to be simple. It stages the frictions and slippages, the internal negotiations and differences, that constitute a community trying to represent itself, and discovers that the community, looked at closely enough, keeps exceeding the frame. It insists on complexity, contrariness, and the irreducible fullness of people who won't be made into symbols of anything but themselves.

Object Lessons is sharp, quick, alive to humor and argument and beauty, and necessary because it was always going to fail.

Produced by Catherine Gund, Polly Thistlethwaite, Dolores Perez, Jean Carlomusto. Inspiring four-part documentary about constructions of lesbian history, community and culture. Funded in part by NY State Council on the Arts and Astraea Foundation.

WATCH

https://vimeo.com/147508628

Based on Jacqueline Woodson's humorous essay about growing up as a Black, lesbian Jehovah's Witness.

Documents the emergence of a problematic city-sponsored needle exchange program to combat the spread of HIV. Video. Produced for the Gay Men's Health Crisis, "Living With AIDS" cable TV series.