Publication focusing on Cantor's final project
Pinochet Porn (2008–16)—an epic
experimental film taking the form of a soap opera about the intimate life of people under the military dictatorship of Chile. A dramatic, transgressive and explicitly
feminist work, embodying and radically extending Cantor's multifaceted artistic practice.
Ellen Cantor combined ready-made materials with diaristic notes and drawings to probe her perceptions and experiences of personal desire and institutional violence. This book is concerned with, and a document of, Cantor's work through the lens of Pinochet Porn (2008–16) and its making—an epic experimental film embodying and radically extending her multifaceted artistic practice. Taking the form of an episodic narrative about five children growing up under the regime of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and shot between her dual hometowns of London and New York, history is observed through Cantor's fictive speculations on private experience within a totalizing political order. A history of the world as it has become known to me brings together writings and archival materials of Cantor's, including a reproduction in full of her drawing-based script Circus Lives from Hell (2004), alongside contributions by writers, artists, collaborators, and friends reflecting on Cantor's practice, Pinochet Porn, and a singularly transgressive vision: explicitly feminist, remorselessly emotional, dramatic in tone, and, as Cantor herself liked to put it, adult in subject matter.
Published following the exhibitions “Cinderella Syndrome,” CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, from December 8, 2015, to February 13, 2016, and “Ellen Cantor,” Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, from April 2 to July 31, 2016.
A prolific artist who lived between New York and London, Ellen Cantor (1961-2013) combined ready-made materials with diaristic notes and
drawings to probe her perceptions and experiences of personal desire and institutional violence. In her drawings,
paintings,
collages, and
videos, Cantor lifted characters and sequences from iconic
films, reorienting the ideological transmissions of the source material. Fictional figures from Disney cartoons, cult horror films, New Wave cinema, and family movies provide a visual foil to Cantor's intimate disclosures. Magnetized by the doeful naivety of characters such as Snow White and Bambi, Cantor would, in her drawings, extend their narrative horizons to include vivid
sexual encounters and crisis-ridden relationships.
Edited by Lia Gangitano, Fatima Hellberg, Jamie Stevens
Contributions by Dodie Bellamy, Jonathan Berger, John Brattin, Ellen Cantor, Lia Gangitano, Cy Gavin,
Joseph Grigely, Clara López Menéndez, John Maybury.
Graphic design: Pedro Cid Proença.
published in October 2018
bilingual edition (English / German)
21 x 28,2 cm (softcover)
328 pages (color ill.)
ISBN : 978-3-95679-323-3
EAN : 9783956793233
sold out
