Vera Dika – författare

In this book, Vera Dika rewrites the story of the Pictures Generation from the perspective of the Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY. Her work is based on interviews with living artists, archival research, and personal collections, including films, videotapes, and sound recordings. At once aesthetic, cultural, and political, this renewed perspective asks new questions and rewrites past assumptions about the artists’ work.

The legendary members of the East Coast Pictures Generation emerged at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo in the mid-1970s. These young people had started Hallwalls, an artist-run organization that invited artists from a variety of mediums to show their work. It also featured productions by the founding members themselves: Robert Longo, Charles Clough, Cindy Sherman, Nancy Dwyer, and Michael Zwack. The works discussed in the volume include performance, video, films, painting, music, and literature, and have been chosen because of the way they foreground states of the body in relationship to conditions of their medium. As a distinguishing feature of Hallwalls artists’ work, the practice uses these traces to make metaphors on the process of mechanical reproduction itself. The Hallwalls artists’ work also gives testament to Buffalo and to New York City, the cities that formed their historical contexts.

This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, performance studies, film studies, and gender studies.

In this book, Vera Dika rewrites the story of the Pictures Generation from the perspective of the Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY. Her work is based on interviews with living artists, archival research, and personal collections, including films, videotapes, and sound recordings. At once aesthetic, cultural, and political, this renewed perspective asks new questions and rewrites past assumptions about the artists’ work.

The legendary members of the East Coast Pictures Generation emerged at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo in the mid-1970s. These young people had started Hallwalls, an artist-run organization that invited artists from a variety of mediums to show their work. It also featured productions by the founding members themselves: Robert Longo, Charles Clough, Cindy Sherman, Nancy Dwyer, and Michael Zwack. The works discussed in the volume include performance, video, films, painting, music, and literature, and have been chosen because of the way they foreground states of the body in relationship to conditions of their medium. As a distinguishing feature of Hallwalls artists’ work, the practice uses these traces to make metaphors on the process of mechanical reproduction itself. The Hallwalls artists’ work also gives testament to Buffalo and to New York City, the cities that formed their historical contexts.

This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, performance studies, film studies, and gender studies.

This is a historical and structural study of the Stalker Film. As a subcategory of the more general Slasher Film, the Stalker Film is often characterised by an off-screen presence that dominates the visual field, and by a recuring combination of character and plot functions. The Stalker Film responds to an ongoing cultural conflict narrativised as the fight to protect self and community, and does so within a specific 1978–81 historical period. As a postmodern work, the surface material of the Stalker Film alludes to past and ongoing cultural forms, to Alfred Hitchcock''s Psycho, for example, to the theories of Sigmund Freud, or even to Laura Mulvey on the male gaze. These forms are not used to enlighten but are exploited to maximum visceral effect. Positioned at the rise of the Reagan era, the Stalker Film questions the Horror Film genre and engages a mass audience response.