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Live in San Diego

Susan Mogul

1977 00:18:00 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:33/4" U-matic video
Tags:
Comedy, Conceptual Art, Feminism, Performance

Description

Live in San Diego is my first live performance. David Antin, my mentor when I was a graduate student at the University of California at San Diego, encouraged me to perform in front of an audience. Why? Since my videos directly addressed the camera- why not take the next step and address a live audience? I took on the persona of a stand-up comic because my most recent video at that time, Big Tip/Backup/Shut Out (1976) proposed that stand up comedy might be a potential back up career if I did not “make it” as an artist. My stand-up routine was comprised of jokes lifted from a joke book, and quasi-fictional anecdotes about my attempts to get into a New York gallery.

The performance took place in a black box space at UCSD in the theater department and had the “look” of a comedy club. The audience was composed of my professors and fellow grad students in the Visual Arts department. After my performance there was a critique. In hindsight, I should have also recorded the critique. A deconstruction of a stand up routine conducted by two conceptually inclined male professors was probably more entertaining than my own performance. This video is a document of the performance and is not edited. I do not have a record of the camerawoman’s name. My apologies.

- Susan Mogul

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.