10/21/21: Virtual Talks with Video Activists: Doug Hall

A screening/discussion with artist Doug Hall moderated by Steve Seid.

On Thursday, October 21, 2021, at 6 pm Central Time, Doug Hall, video artist, photographer, performer, and uncanny embodiment of a former president, will talk about his fifty years on the frontlines of cultural engagement. This occurs via an illustrated Zoom conversation with curator Steve Seid. Hall will talk about his early artist-president impersonations, the transition to ambitious videoworks that soon found themselves embedded in large-scale installations, a magnificent detour into photography, and then the final integration of all these elements into moving, expressive, and thought-provoking artistic ventures. To corral Hall’s complex career around a cohesive idea, we will foreground the many ways in which power and authority are embodied in gesture, language, media conventions, and even the streets we trod. This conversation will be generously illustrated with still images and clips from Doug Hall’s body of work.

Doug Hall is an internationally known artist who has worked for over 40 years in a wide range of media, including performance, installation, video, and large format photography. In the 1970s he became prominent for his collaborative work with the media art collective, T. R. Uthco, which, among many other works, created the video and installation, The Eternal Frame, 1976 (in collaboration with Ant Farm), a reenactment of the Kennedy assassination, filmed in Dealey Plaza, Dallas. Following the dissolution of the group in 1979, Hall continued to work in video, performance, and installation. In the late 1980’s his interests expanded to include large format photography. With Sally Jo Fifer, he edited and wrote the introduction to Illuminating Video (1991, Aperture Books, New York), a collection of writings on video by artists, critics, and scholars. He is Professor Emeritus at The San Francisco Art Institute where he taught from 1980 until 2008. From 2008 through 2015 he was Visiting Artist in Graduate Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. He lives and works in San Francisco. Read more at: https://www.doughallstudio.com/

Steve Seid was a media curator at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive for twenty-five years. During that time, he presented almost a thousand public programs, featuring experimental media, forgotten film genres, and a sampling of international cinema. He also helped build the PFA’s collection, particularly video art and personal cinemas from the Bay Area. Notable would be the restoration of Steven Arnold’s Luminous Procuress (1971) and poet ruth weiss’s only film effort, The Brink (1961). Seid has also been involved with several publications, most importantly, Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000, co-edited with Steve Anker and Kathy Geritz; Ant Farm 1968-1978, co-edited with Constance Lewallen; and his recent solo effort, Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of An Image.