Skip to main content

Untitled (Menses)

Susan Mogul

1973 00:01:10 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:31/2" open reel video
Tags:
Body, Feminism, Gender, Video History

Description

I moved three thousand miles from the east coast to join the feminist art program at CAL ARTS in 1973.  I had only been in LA three weeks when Judy Chicago took us to a "Menstruation" art exhibition at Womanspace Gallery.  The exhibit included every conceivable medium about menstruation - paintings, weavings, sculpture.  I was amazed - nothing was taboo.  Being outrageous was normal in this LA feminist art environment.  Around the same time I read "Female Eunuch" by Germaine Greer.  She wrote, and I paraphrase, "If you taste your blood when you scratch your finger, why don't you taste your menstrual blood?"  All of that inspired my menstruation video Untitled.  Ironically, this one-minute video initially shocked my mentor Judy Chicago.  But she rebounded quickly and in response gave me her 1971 menstruation lithograph, entitled "Red Flag."

Although Untitled was embraced by my peers in the CAL ARTS feminist art program, it caused a bit of an uproar when I screened it in Doug Edge's art class at UC Santa Barbara.  I was taken aback by the student's reaction.  I was 23 and had never shown my videos outside CAL ARTS.  I decided never to show that piece again.  I did not want to be defined by this video.  I felt Dressing Up, not exactly a subdued video, which I also screened that day, was more definitive of who I was as a person and an artist.

Untitled screened in 2009 for the first time in public at my retrospective at Visions du Reel, the Nyon International Film Festival in Switzerland.  And perhaps the only one who was a bit uncomfortable was me.

— 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.