Susan Mogul

Susan Mogul is a pioneer in the realm of feminist expression. Her work delves into provocative and bold spaces of the human experience. She has been working with video art since the early 70’s and her more recent work has shifted to gallery installations. With a DIY feminist ethos, her performance pieces tackle Hollywood stereotypes and body image. Her recent performance art, documentaries, and print work have challenged notions of older women, specifically offering poignant critiques of the idealized portrayals perpetuated in media. Her work blends humor with heart, and, through her lens, the quiet and untold stories of domesticity, sexuality, and the female experience become profound.

This interview was conducted over the phone from Santa Cruz, CA to Los Angeles, CA on May 14th, 2024.

Tieran Harvey

How did you begin making autobiographical works? What were your original inspirations?

Susan Mogul

You know, it came out of being in the Feminist Art Program at CalArts. I was there for six months in 1973. And Judy Chicago was my mentor. And the personal was political –you know, talking about personal topics, like mothers and different things like that. That's what got me going on working with autobiography, and I never stopped.

Tieran Harvey

I was wondering about your influences and your inspirations when it comes to feminists who are making humorous work that's meant to be laughed at.

Susan Mogul

Okay, so, first of all, I'm Jewish. You know, comedy and satire is just part of my cultural background. It doesn't have anything to do with the art scene or have to do with the feminist art movement, though the feminist art movement, at that time, certainly gave me a freedom to find my own voice and what came naturally to me as an individual. You know, what were my traits? And how could I exploit them? In my family growing up, on a variety show, like the Ed Sullivan Show, the family became silent when a stand up comic was on. Then you listen. Then you paid attention. Anything else that was going on in the variety show was half-viewed or half listened to. There was that reverence. And then also, at that time period, a large majority of comics were Jewish. So that's why I'm saying it's part of the culture. I was raised on Long Island, the suburbs of New York. Not that the comics were talking about Jewish issues, but they were talking about everyday life and looking at that from a humorous viewpoint. My parents weren't necessarily funny people. But I think that that had a big influence on seeing the humor and absurdity in the everyday, because that's what a lot of stand up comics point to.

And then being at Cal Arts in the Feminist Art Program, consciousness-raising just opened up this whole area—that you could make work about your everyday life, and that female everyday experience had value. I was at CalArts, which was probably one of the only art schools in the country that had video Portapaks. Other universities had video Portapaks, but they were in the medical department or in the science department, they were being used for psychology, or they were being used to document certain things. They weren't being used in art. So Cal Arts was one of the few schools in the country at that time—I'm talking about in the early 70s—here was the beginning of video art. And they had this visiting artist, Lynda Benglis from New York, who primarily is a sculptor, but was very engaged with doing videos at the time. And I did an independent study with her, and she told me that I should make videotapes. So it was a combination of telling stories about your life and access to the video equipment. Are you familiar with the Portapak?

Tieran Harvey

Yes, I am.

Susan Mogul

So, it wasn't very portable, CalArts had a room where you could set up lights and put the camera on a tripod, and that's where I started. That's where I made Dressing Up. It was just a combination of drawing on different things from my cultural heritage, combined with this blossoming feminist art movement about making work about the everyday.

I didn't really know that I was funny until after I made that tape and some other tapes that my peers in the program, and Judy, all thought were funny. But I think the key thing is the feminist art program at CalArts and the people around me there. There was this encouragement to find your own voice, or how I interpreted it—to exploit yourself — to find your own voice and not try to be like anybody else.

Then, of course, the next tape that follows, Take Off, I was seeing what a guy was doing—Vito Acconci, who was a very famous New York video artist. I watched his tape called Undertone, which I thought was really interesting. Is this guy dealing with his sexuality? And then I did a satire of his video, but you don't even have to know that it is a satire to appreciate the piece, where I talk about the vibrator and learning to masturbate in a very kind of cheerful and matter of fact way, making masturbation this matter of fact thing— it's very practical. It's basically about how many batteries are in the vibrator and how often I have to change the battery. So it's sort of broken down in this way. It's not about talking about sexual heights, or orgasms or whatever, it's about the vibrator. So that's another way of turning it over on its head.

There's humor in my work from the get go, through all the video art and the performance art. And then I started doing longer form films, [which] really starts with this travel diary I did in Poland [Driving Men] and [with] Everyday Echo Street, when I start filming other people and then there's a blend of both humor and poignancy. I'm interacting with other people. Exploring their lives and our lives—you know, how we interact.

Waiting For the Soda Fountain is a laugh riot. So, so entertaining. And then the films like Tell Me About Your Mother were definitely more hard-hitting for me, as a viewer. How does your experience as a creator differ when you're making work that is meant to be laughed at? Do you feel more vulnerable or less vulnerable?

I mean, the film Waiting at the Soda Fountain was a performance. Because the screen tests were given at the soda fountain, there was footage that I was also able to make into a video. That was in the late 70s. There were three hours of footage, and I edited it to a 29 minute tape. That was a period where all the work was humorous. Here, I'm satirizing the Hollywood myth and the position of women in Hollywood. Yes, I'm shooting other people in Waiting at the Soda Fountain, but it’s all basically role playing there. I'm not filming them as, you know, Cheri Gaulkeor, Wendy Markowitz, I'm shooting them playing a role as wannabe starlets, and I'm playing the role of a stereotypical director, like from the 1930s or something. Whereas, the other films that I made since 1990 are all real. It sounds kind of hokey to say, but, real. They're about people's life experiences. It's not role playing in the same sense that Waiting at the Soda Fountain is.

In the past few years, I've been also doing two dimensional work again, and I did a satire on Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Campaign. Again, you know, they did these male-centric ads. So I did a guerilla poster campaign in response to that. And then in 2022, I did What Becomes a Legend Most, which is a satire on an ad of fur coats that featured older female celebrities, about being an older female artist. I've recently been doing other satirical work, but it's not taking the form of a film, except for The Pencil Test. I just did a book called The Pencil Test and then I made a two minute film. Those are the recent things that are humorous and satirical. That's primarily what I did in the body of film work from 1992. Well, now I just finished Tell Me About Your Mother. I just finished it right before I went to Vienna. It hasn't even been screened anywhere.

What did you think of the film?

It was so touching to me. It really hit a personal spot for me. I related to the kitchen table always covered in messy projects, and just letting my creativity blossom as a child. I hadn't heard people talking about creative mothers and creative daughters and the dynamics that stem from that.

That's good. Yeah, I was thinking that, if and when I do a screening of it, I'd like to pair it with Mom's Move. And then I thought it would be interesting somehow, rather than have your typical Q&A, to have women, or you could have men too, sitting in a circle, hearing your story and hearing other people's stories. I think it would be a nice prompt to hear other people's stories.

Yeah, I was actually wondering more about the process of making Tell Me About Your Mother. I always hear that creating a project starts with questions. I was wondering if you set out to answer certain questions with your interviews?

I was commissioned to make a film called On the Woman's Building for the Pacific Standard Time exhibition about The Women's Building in 2011; they wanted it to be a short film, like nine or 10 minutes, because they were going to use it in part to promote the show. So I made a 10 minute film and it features 10 women, including myself. I was there for six months. I was then involved in the Woman's Building for two years. So I filmed women who I already knew from that time period. In other words, I had a very specific budget, I had a certain timeframe. So I focused on what it was like to be in an all female environment. The people who commissioned me loved the film. It’s called Susan Mogul's Woman's Building. And then they said, “you should really make a film about the LA feminist art movement.” So I thought, I will do young, feminine artists. I was starting to meet younger feminists and I started testing the waters filming the women. And somehow I must have had a question about mothers. And that's when I realized that's what I was more interested in. I haven't done films about covering a historical moment or something like that. And that's exactly why I called it Susan Mogul's Woman's Building—this was coming from a particular point of view.

In the course of seeing if I could expand it, that's when, somehow, I realized that [I was really interested in] the mother-daughter thing, which is what my first work Dressing Up is about—my relationship to my mother. So I started focusing on that. And in 2012, my mother decided to sell the house and move. I had been making rough cuts for what I was calling, at that point, The Artist and Her Mother. And I had filmed my mother in 2011 on a visit back East. So, I switched gears, and I decided: that's what I want to do. I want to make a film about mom and me, Mom's Move. And that's very different from most of my films, just the way it's made. And the use of photographs, because none of my other films use photographs in that way, with the slow dissolves and creating a third image from two images. I've never done that before. It was almost like, okay, I can identify with all these different women that I filmed: we talked about her mother going to needlepoint because she could take it anywhere, And I thought, “oh, that's like my mom with her camera, she can take the camera anywhere, so she can make her work.” Monica talks about her mother painting her all the time. In my family, we were all subjects of my mother's photographs for many years. So with each woman, there was something I could identify with. It gave me a certain sense of validation, in terms of doing this film about my mother. I had already done a performance in the 80s based on 20 years of correspondence from her and her clothes. You see a portion of that that's woven into Mom's Move. So that's how that led to doing this project about my mother and me, which you could say was based on the sense of loss I felt with her selling her home. Because she is my mother, and everyone identifies with their home, it was sort of the sense of my mother really, truly aging. You know, this is kind of the beginning of my mother's demise. I mean, she lived to be 96. So she was 88 when I started working on the film in 2012. And then this fall, I decided I'm going to look back at the material I have. And I still liked it. I thought it was really interesting. And I was ready to make that film.

In Mom's Moves, the moment that really stuck out to me is when your mother says, “You went further than me,” and you questioned her intention behind this statement. I was wondering, now it's been, I believe, six years since Mom's Moves was created, and with putting out Tell Me About Your Mother, have you revisited that moment? Do you feel any differently? How have your feelings about your mother's career and her life choices compared to your own evolved?

Well, she did not have a career as an artist. And I did. I mean, that's a fact. She certainly created a body of work. I mean, for the most part, she wasn't in the public eye. Sometimes she would win newspaper contests with her photographs. She belonged to a camera club. She got awards—you'd often get prizes in the camera club. That wasn't also wasn't her goal.

The women in Tell Me About Your Mother, six out of the seven women’s moms are of my mother's generation. The Australian mom, she's my age, but I think she comes from a small town in Australia. She comes from a working class background. So she didn't have the second wave feminist movement or things opened up for women of my generation. She clearly wasn't part of an environment where those kinds of things were nurtured. Nor did she come from the economic background where she probably could afford to go to college and explore her interests. You know, they’re from a generation where opportunities weren't open to them as women, as they were for women of my generation. Wendy Clarke talks about her mother, Shirley Clarke. She's a famous avant-garde filmmaker. So, of all the moms of all these people, she’s the one who had a career, but she's also the one who abandoned her daughter. I'm not criticizing her. I mean, one could, but that was the way that she found that she could have a career. It was to leave her husband and let him finish raising the daughter. So, it's very much of that generation where there wasn't the expectation to have a career. Renee, who's at the end, talks about, well, her mother got a master's in business, but then became a teacher. But she was the first one to get a master's at UCLA in business. But then, because she became a single mom, she became a teacher, so she would be more accessible, she would be on the same schedule as her kids. Right? You see variety. And then Susan Silverton, the one who whistles? We don't know her mother. We don't know about her mother's aspirations, except that she could do the whistle. There's variations on women of that generation. Some women, obviously, have had careers, but they were more unusual. And then there's women of that generation who might have wanted to, and then women who never considered having a career, because they were just following what they were supposed to do.

My mother says, “Oh, of course, I didn't care if there were only men in the camera club. I was just interested in photography.” So, she was very, if you think about it, just very single-minded. She was like, what they call a proto-feminist. In a way she was doing the activities that she wanted to do. And she was able to do them, because she was adamant, but I don't think she thought about having a public career.

During this class, something we've done is discuss our definition of feminist art and feminist filmmaking. And I was wondering, what would you define as feminist art?

I can't answer that question. All I can do is tell you what I already said about the Los Angeles feminist art movement at CalArts. And what the Woman's Building gave me—this anything-goes freedom to be myself, to make work—that no subject matter was taboo. You could explore yourself in these two environments that I was in. There was no PC about what was feminist and what wasn't feminist. I mean, that's changed over the years. And that's what was so liberating about making these [works] in these very specific environments— that I just got to be totally myself.

I'll give you a few examples of Judy Chicago's teaching methods at CalArts. Judy was invited to UC Santa Barbara for a week to be an artist in residence. And she said, “I'll only do it if you bring up three of my students and they'll present their work in one of the art classes.” So that was my first visiting artist gig, and they put us up in a motel, and Judy took us out to dinner. She treated us as professionals in this environment. She said, “I want you to do a collaborative performance. I booked a date at the Women's Space gallery.” This was a kind of a cooperative gallery that existed at the time in Culver City. “I already have dates for you, get it together.” She also made a point of bringing us to other female artists’ studios in LA.

You know about the Womanhouse project, right?

I came post-Womanhouse project. So it was all these field trips. And so I was being exposed. There was a show with a theme of menstruation. There were weavings about menstruation, paintings about menstruation. All kinds of stuff. And it was just like—whoa. I was shocked and thrilled because, you know, you don't even mention the word menstruation in the house growing up, and then here it’s in the public realm. So Judy really influenced me in terms of that subject matter and then also putting yourself out in a public space and not waiting till you have the perfect project—just keep moving forward. And then the Woman's Building was a building that we renovated. Who had ever renovated a building before that was going to be open to the public?

I don't define feminist art. I can just talk about my experience, and how formative it was, in terms of also promoting other women. I don't have a definition of feminist art, because I think not making definitions is what my experience of the LA feminist art movement in the 70s was about. A sense of expansiveness, not narrowing down. And I think if you define something too narrowly, it's about leaving people out and leaving things out. This is for the art historians and the gatekeepers to do. That's not my role as an artist.

Absolutely. On the topic of being given titles, I had a question for you, which is do you consider yourself an experimental filmmaker?

Oh, boy, that's tricky. I don't know, what do you think?

I definitely agree that your work is groundbreaking and not what I am used to seeing. I love that this class has exposed us to many different types of video art. But what is experimental?

You could say, there's video art, which, certainly the work from the 70s is experimental and it was a whole new era of work that was being made. I think my nonfiction or documentary films, they're kind of in between. They're not mainstream. What I would say about my work in general, and even the early work, [is that it] has always been very accessible. It's very straightforward, it's very down to earth. A lot of it has humor, a lot of it has pace, there's a lot of pathos in the nonfiction or first person documentary work. So it's very accessible, but it's not mainstream fare that you would see on...I did a documentary film called Driving Men, which is the only feature length film I've made. And that film was in a number of international competitions. Yet, even in those festivals, it was very different, because most of the documentaries in the documentary festival weren't personal. Maybe they would be on hard-hitting topics. [My work is] well received and people have no problem connecting to the work. What do you think of experimental film?

As you said, it's not in the mainstream, but it's still very accessible. I don't think that it should be cut out of the experimental term of filmmaking.

It's like the film isn't experimental enough, but then it's not mainstream enough. Well, okay, let's have this question: Tell Me About Your Mother. It's pretty straightforward, a series of interviews. I cut it to the length that it is, because I wanted it to be a good piece of work. I didn't want it to be an hour just to make it an hour and then maybe have more potential of getting it shown as a feature. I wanted it to be a good piece. But, why not? Why couldn't that be shown on HBO, for example? Or Netflix? What would prevent it? It's a topic you could show on Mother's Day, right? But what would make it different from another film that was about mothers and daughters? I was making something that was interesting to me. It doesn't have a beginning, a middle and an end, really. I mean, I've structured it in a way that I thought, you know, it has a conscious certain kind of structure to it, the order is very intentional. It's very personal, but you see personal things now.

I think these categories aren't really useful. My films all come out of curiosity. I'm curious about other people, and the ways that we’re similar and different. I think you can see that in the films I've made.

My name is Tieran Harvey, I am a Film and Digital Media student at UCSC. Through my course, Feminist Filmmaking, I had the opportunity to interview the artist, Susan Mogul. I was born and raised in Southern California by two deeply creative and talented parents that encouraged my creativity and love of film and television. I am interested in writing and comedy through a feminist lens. As a writer and filmmaker I am deeply inspired by the DIY movement in feminist filmmaking. My conversation with Susan Mogul has inspired me to create work about and with my mother.