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The Walker Art Center Screening City Pages, March 18, 1998, pg. 41. by Rob Nelon The Female Closet continuing where Nitrate Kisses left off, director Barbara Hammer again earns her moniker as "the doyenne of dyke video" with this affectionate look at three variously closeted women artists: photographer Alice Austen, photomontage artist Hannah Höch and painter Nicole Eisenman. If Hammer's radical Kisses (1992) began by recounting the secret like of Willa Cather in order to affirm the importance of preserving queer histories, The Female Closet pays tribute to its subjects' stamina within a marketplace that has sought to squelch their identities. Ironically, it's the culture's very hostility that helped give rise to Austen's subtly playful portraits (e.g., "The Darned Club," pictured above), Höch's suggestive symbolism, and Eisenman's brazenly outgoing sexuality - which in turn inspires Hammer's own tender non-fictions, including Closet's talking-head community of women curators, cultural historians and activists. The costs and benefits of this transaction can be measured everywhere, not least in the MoMA's timid treatment of Höch's extracurricular activities, prompting Hammer to ask, "Is the museum a closet?" One interviewee suggests this closet hinges on gender as much as sexuality: "The market still hates women - that's the bottom line." And perhaps these words reiterate the affirmative-action principle behind the Walker Art Center's "Women in the Director's Chair" series, which, to extend the metaphor, creates a room of one's own within a limited space. |