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When I Was a Monster

Anne McGuire

1996 00:05:25 United StatesEnglishColorMono4:3Video
Tags:
Body, Performance

Description

A performance about the artist’s experience in the aftermath of an accident.

“While When I Was a Monster conveys McGuire’s feelings about her own body after falling off a cliff, it also articulates the universal lack of satisfaction women feel when contemplating their physical selves, and encapsulates another part of McGuire’s project: the demonstration of the performative, grotesque aspects of femininity. … Though she appears to be in pain, our sympathy hasn’t been solicited, and the fact that we can observe such a private examination feels like an intrusion … McGuire confronts the audience with her weakened, disfigured body and reminds us of our own fragility.”

—Nicole Armour, “Alternate States,” Film Comment (July/August 2000)

This title is also available on Anne McGuire Videoworks: Volume 1 and American Psycho(drama): Sigmund Freud vs. Henry Ford.

About Anne McGuire

Anne McGuire was born in the Valley of the Jolly Green Giant, and has lived in San Francisco since 1990. She began making videos in the late 1980s while she was a student. She has taught at various institutions in California including the San Francisco Art Institute, University of California Santa Cruz, and Stanford University, as well as KyungSung University in Busan, South Korea. 

Through her single-channel works, McGuire translates traditions of personal and poetic performances to camera, playing off of conventions of television. She has explored the personal through formal narrative, particularly in Strain Andromeda, The, her 1993 end-to-beginning re-edit of Robert Wise's The Andromeda Strain. Strain was her first foray into disaster deconstruction. In 2006 Anne completed Adventure Poseiden, The (The Unsinking of My Ship), which celebrates the 20-year anniversary of her very own real-life shipwreck experience. She also writes poems and sings them as songs, and has performed as Freddy McGuire with San Francisco-based electronic musician Wobbly, live and on radio.