Joan Logue’s Newly Rediscovered and Digitized Words, 1–5

Abstract

Abstract This essay examines Joan Logue’s newly rediscovered and digitized video, Words, 1-5 (1971-4). While providing a close formal reading of Logue’s piece, this note resituates the work within the context of video art in the 1970s, arguing that the tape illustrates Logue’s nascent interests in marrying video’s capacity for portraiture with commercial pop culture, and marries those interests with her own emerging feminist consciousness. As such, the tape provides new context for an early experimental period of Logue’s oeuvre, before she would merge the video’s capacity for intimacy and mass-media broadcast in some of her most famous works in the 1980s. Finally, this essay argues that Logue’s Words, 1-5 serves as a reminder of the need to preserve the significant, yet often neglected contributions of female artists to the early histories of video art which are increasingly on the verge of disappearing as analog tapes are lost or disintegrate.