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Big Tip, Back Up, Shut Out

Susan Mogul

1976 00:10:00 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:31/2" open reel video
Tags:
Feminism, Humor, Performance

Description

“I may have to get a back up career.” I mull over what I might do if I don’t make it as an artist. What if I lose my eyes? I figure a career as a stand-up comic is a safe bet and try out a few jokes on an imagined audience — of course with my eyes shut tight.

Big Tip is my first work that grapples with the economics of being an artist and the anxiety that that produces. After the initial “success” of Take Off and Dressing Up colleagues in the art world suggested I become a stand-up comic because, ”Susan you’re so funny.” Although pleased to be “entertaining”, I thought the suggestion absurd.

—Susan Mogul

“I know of no way to reduce the fantastic density of Mogul’s chatter into a few lines of a review and still retain her hilarity… Her extroversion is so extreme that her story leaps out from the vacuum around her, and off the screen entirely.”

– Artforum, 1976

“… a portrayal of the disastrous failure of her (Mogul’s) personal fantasy of shining as a stand-up comedian — a metaphor for the solitude of the artist.”

— Visions du Reel Film Festival Catalog, 2009

 

 

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.