[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1x5rbqeakBarbara_Forever-Still_1-copy.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tOf all the retrospectives and surveys I\u2019ve seen, most have stimulated my eyes and my mind; a few have even involved using my ears. (There\u2019s a reason what\u2019s presented in museums is often called \u201cvisual art,\u201d after all.) But the Leslie-Lohman Museum\u2019s 2018 Barbara Hammer retrospective remains a standout because it demanded more of my body than a typical exhibition.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tI\u2019m thinking of Hammer\u2019s 1982 film Pond and Waterfall<\/em>, which mostly depicts a rippling pond and the submerged plants beneath its surface. At the Leslie-Lohman, the piece was presented alongside a stethoscope that viewers were invited to use. I remember placing it to my chest and hearing my heart thump as Hammer\u2019s camera sucked in green trees and sun-dappled water. It was the first time I\u2019d ever produced my own soundtrack to an artwork.\u00a0<\/p>\n Pond and Waterfall<\/em> is a wonderful, if underappreciated, work within Hammer\u2019s oeuvre. It contains no nudity or explicit depictions of erotic encounters, both staples of her films of the 1970s, which are now considered landmarks of experimental queer cinema. But I think it speaks to Hammer\u2019s career-long exploration of the body, which she provocatively showed could never be disentangled from one\u2019s experience of art.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAt the time Pond and Waterfall<\/em> was made, many artists and filmmakers would have disagreed with her on that count. She seemed not to care. In Barbara Forever<\/em>, an exquisite new documentary by Brydie O\u2019Connor, there\u2019s even old, grainy footage of Hammer essentially saying as much before a screening of her films. \u201cI want this screening to be tactile,\u201d she tells the audience. \u201cI want you to see and feel the images that are on the screen.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tYou can see and feel Hammer\u2019s images in Barbara Forever<\/em>, which begins its theatrical run this Friday. In fact, nearly all<\/em> of O\u2019Connor\u2019s film consists of Hammer\u2019s tactile images, accompanied by voiceover from the artist, who died in 2019: shots of labia superimposed over arid canyons (Multiple Orgasm<\/em>, 1976); images of naked women dancing and engaging in mysterious rituals (Dyketactics<\/em>, arguably Hammer\u2019s most famous work, 1974); Hammer suggestively sticking a finger in her mouth and gazing into a mirror as she and a lover look on (Nitrate Kisses<\/em>, 1992).\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tO\u2019Connor\u2019s portrait of Hammer is not a traditional documentary. Its telling of Hammer\u2019s life begins with her coming out as a lesbian in the \u201970s, rather than with her birth, which is not mentioned until more than halfway through the film. There are no talking-head interviews with curators, scholars, or artists, and minimal contextualization of Hammer\u2019s work within the broader narrative of 20th-century art history.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThat might make Barbara Forever<\/em> a difficult introduction for Hammer initiates. But O\u2019Connor\u2019s documentary compellingly reanimates Hammer, whose films always demonstrated a keen awareness of mortality\u2014especially in her later years, when her struggle with ovarian cancer began to inform her art.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tOne thread of Barbara Forever<\/em> is indeed devoted to the very notion of permanence. Hammer\u2019s legacy has been preserved at Yale University\u2019s Beinecke Library, which holds her archive. In the opening scenes, Hammer\u2019s partner, Florrie Burke, gazes into a vitrine at an outfit worn by Hammer: a jacket emblazoned with the words \u201cHOT FLASH.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s more than my life,\u201d Hammer says on screen in footage filmed before her death. She\u2019s shown putting her films and documents into boxes that threaten to take over a room in her New York apartment. \u201cIt\u2019s a history of queer art.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tHammer\u2019s contribution to that history started during the mid-\u201970s, not long after she embarked on a new life as a lesbian in the Bay Area. She had been married to a man beforehand, and had begun a career as an artist and a filmmaker during her union. She had never studied art or cinema before she made her first work, Schizy<\/em> (1968\u201372), a film featuring blurry visions of a cabin, its woodland surroundings, and cobwebs running across its windows. Hammer achieved the hazy effect by placing her bifocals in front of her camera, effectively drawing a comparison between her eye and her lens.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tShe officially came out in 1974. \u201cTouching another woman\u2019s body, it changed my life,\u201d Hammer says in voiceover in Barbara Forever<\/em>. \u201cIt had to be shown.\u201d And she did just that, portraying lesbian sex through montages of bodies tumbling across each other. Breasts are caressed and thighs crisscross; kisses are planted, and occasionally there\u2019s a glimpse of something more graphic. Hammer recalls in Barbara Forever<\/em> that her first lesbian experience \u201creinforced my own outline of my body.\u201d One imagines that making her early films offered similar revelations for the artist.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tHammer, who moved to New York during the \u201980s to be part of what she here calls \u201cthe art capital of the world,\u201d described these films as a reaction to what she did not see represented in structural filmmaking and Minimalism, two of the dominant artistic modes of the era. No surprise, then, that mainstream institutions showed little interest in her films and early performances.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe Museum of Modern Art rejected her films because of their depictions of lesbian lovemaking, Hammer claimed in an archival recording included by O\u2019Connor. (The museum now owns nine of her works, and recently used one of them to advertise an exhibition about the body and art.) Meanwhile the National Endowment for the Arts effectively shut her out, Hammer added, declining to give her funding. Her fortune evidently changed in 1987, when curator John Hanhardt included her in the Whitney Biennial.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tToday, her place within the art world is more secure: Her estate has two commercial representatives, Company Gallery and KOW; she appeared in three more Whitney Biennials; and the Whitney even included her in last year\u2019s \u201cSixties Surreal,\u201d which offered an alternate version of 1960s art history that wasn\u2019t centered around Pop and Minimalism. But Barbara Forever<\/em> is less concerned with her rise in museums and galleries than it is with tracing her influence on younger generations and other queer artists.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tIt features footage of Hammer screening one of her films\u2014one of the few kid-appropriate ones\u2014for a class of gleeful schoolchildren who find it \u201cstrange,\u201d as one student puts it. And it also features documentation of a workshop taught by Hammer in which she instructs attendees in how to hold a camera. \u201cIf you put your elbow into your hip,\u201d she says, pushing her Bolex into her body and bobbing up and down, \u201cyou\u2019re really located.\u201d The \u201cinto\u201d is telling: Her art was not just an extension of her body but a part of it, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/reviews\/barbara-forever-barbara-hammer-documentary-review-1234797068\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1x5rbqeakBarbara_Forever-Still_1-copy.jpg?w=1024″] Of all the retrospectives and surveys I\u2019ve seen, most have stimulated my eyes and my mind; a few have even involved using my ears. (There\u2019s a reason what\u2019s presented in museums is often called \u201cvisual art,\u201d after all.) But the Leslie-Lohman Museum\u2019s 2018 Barbara Hammer retrospective remains a standout because it demanded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2129125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2129125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2129125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2129125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2129125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2129125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2129125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}