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Sing, O Barren Woman

Susan Mogul

2000 00:10:35 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3
Tags:
Feminism, Music, Music Video, Sexuality, Video History

Description

Sing, O Barren Woman, part documentary part music video, satirizes and celebrates a taboo subject--voluntary childlessness. Susan Mogul gives voice to ten women who are childless by choice (or default) as they come out as non-mothers speaking and "singing" about the stereotypes of the "barren" woman. "Never mentioned in public or given a voice, we’re invisible women who made a provocative choice." These various refrains crescendo to Susan’s humorous song of sexual innuendo "Baby, I Still Can Conceive." This is the first U.S. film or video on voluntary childlessness.

"Giving voice to ten women who chose not to have children, Mogul's video simultaneously offers a hilarious and poignant meditation on all manner of life choices and the necessity of living with their consequences." --David Pagel, Los Angeles Times

"I was truly amazed at how much wit, insight, creativity, artistic imagination, spunk, beauty and fun you could wrap into 11 minutes! Bravo!” --Elaine T. May, author of “Barren in the Promised Land” 

Funded by a COLA Fellowship, a grant that honors mid-career artists.

About Susan Mogul

Having been involved with video since the early 1970s, Susan Mogul is a pioneer of the medium. Initially producing an important series of humorous and staunchly feminist performance videos, her practice quickly expanded to more complicated and experimental forms of narrative, including feature length work. Mogul has received grants including: Guggenheim Fellowship, ITVS commission, National
Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Getty Trust Fellowship, and Center for Cultural Innovation grant. 

A survey of Moguls video/films took place in Vienna at the Austrian Film Museum in 2024. Mogul’s video/film retrospective was presented at Visions du Reel Film Festival in Switzerland in 2009. Driving Men (2008), a feature length documentary, screened in international competitions in Japan, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, and India. Mogul’s first solo museum exhibition – a major survey of her work- opened August 2022 at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland.

Mogul’s work has been featured in historic exhibitions: California Video at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles: Birth of an Art Capital at the Pompidou in Paris, and Where Art Might Happen: The early years of CalArts at the Kunsthaus Graz in Austria. Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video devotes a chapter to Mogul’s work and career. Mogul was the keynote speaker at a national conference in Zurich on film and autobiography.

Less is Never More, a solo installation was presented at as-is-la gallery in Los Angeles in 2019. Less... garnered a full-page review in the LA Times. A major essay in the 2020 summer issue of the Los Angeles arts quarterly, X-TRA, titled, A Feminist’s Survival Index, not only reviewed Mogul’s current work, but positioned it in the context of the history of feminist art, and her legacy as a Los Angeles artist.