Julia Bryan-Wilson,
helper/supporter/friend/co-manager of sorts for a spell
March 21, 2013
How did you find out about Joanie 4 Jackie and how old were you at the time?
I found out about J4J when I met Miranda at a video show I was co-curating with my friend Jon Raymond at the Candyass Record warehouse in 1995. Miranda was there to spread the word about what was then called Big Miss Moviola. We were both 22 years old and living in Portland, Oregon. We became friends through our shared passions: feminism, image-making, politics, class and race critiques, poundcake with vanilla ice cream, and thrift-store fashion. I helped out with J4J until about 1997– the email address on some of those early posters is my email address, because I had a day job with a computer.
What interested you about the project?
Everything about this project was compelling to me, especially its inventive rethinking about how art might circulate, and about how that circulation might feed into larger conversations about gendered access, control, and power. It was so much more than an alternative video distribution system–though it was that, too–it was also a way to create an audience, to summon together communities of female makers and watchers.
At the time you participated in Joanie 4 Jackie did you consider yourself a filmmaker? What was your relationship to making movies?
Sort of yes and sort of no. I had made many short videos with friends in my public arts high school and beyond, but I never took myself very seriously in that regard; I was much more invested in being a writer. Increasingly I stopped identifying as an artist as I saw myself more as an advocate; I was starting to write art criticism and curate small shows, and at the time those felt like quite distinct positions. Today I might understand things more flexibly, but c. 1995-1997 my energy was focused on writing and organizing. But I was interested intellectually in what seemed to me to be the critically important questions raised by film and independent video, not least feminist theorizations of the gaze and the activist potential of HIV/AIDS video. I had studied queer film and video in college (under the guidance of faculty like Patricia White and Alex Juhasz), and I was excited to put theory into practice, so to speak, in my work with J4J and in my discussions with Miranda.
Do you have any specific anecdotes or memories associated with the project?
Oh so very many! Miranda and I spent so many hours talking about the videos that came in (slowly at first, and then in great inspiring rushes), and trying to scheme getting funding to sustain or even expand the project. I have very vivid memories of accompanying Miranda to a screening at a high school in Vancouver, Washington and having breakfast cereal as the official afternoon snack, which made perfect sense at the time.
What did you think/feel about the Joanie 4 Jackie at the time? And now, in retrospect?
At the time, J4J was my best friend’s totally amazing art project that had the potential to be a kind of activist tool. It felt very natural for me to participate in it when I lived in Portland, since it resonated with so many things I was already interested in. In retrospect I can see that J4J also played a crucial role in my own formation as a feminist scholar concerned with alternative modes of artistic production and distribution.
If you attended a screening, can you tell us where and when it was and anything else you remember about it?
I attended many screenings, in New York at the Clit Club (am I right that it was there?), in Olympia, WA, in Portland, and other places. Here my memory gets a little vague but I recall that Miranda would always make a participatory video “Nobody Every Told Me…”, in which audience members would complete that phrase, and then their confessions were shown as part of the screening. People consistently said such surprising and raw and moving things.
What institutions, groups, people, publications and movements were inspiring you at the time of your participation in J4J?
New queer cinema and HIV/AIDS documentaries was hugely inspiring to me, as were feminist artists like Ida Applebroog and Coco Fusco. I read a lot of novels by people such as Clarice Lispector which I’d check out from the Portland public library and carry home on the bus in huge tote bags. I was much less focused on the so-called riot grrrl scene than some others my age in Portland, but I did spend some time watching music performed by friends who were in bands.
What do you do now – professionally and otherwise? Are you still involved in filmmaking?
I am an associate professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of California, Berkeley. I still think about questions of feminist film and video— and independent practices and scrappy do-it-yourself projects— in my teaching and research.