Dressing Up

Susan Mogul

1973 | 00:07:06 | United States | English | B&W | Mono | 4:3 | 1/2" open reel video

Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles

Tags: Body, Consumer culture, Performance, Video History

A reverse striptease, non-stop comedic monologue about shopping for clothes, while eating corn nuts. Dressing Up was inspired by the artist’s mother’s penchant for bargain hunting. Mogul produced Dressing Up as a student in the feminist art program at the California Institute of the Arts in 1973.

This now classic video was shown in Southland Video Anthology in 1975 at the Long Beach Museum of Art. Curated by David Ross, it was one of the first museum surveys of video art in the United States. Thirty years later Dressing Up has been exhibited internationally, and was exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, in 2008.

"On mother-daughter relationships and clothes that make the woman. Turning her barbed wit both inwards and outwards, this pioneering video artist reflects on women’s private and public lives."

— Josh Siegel, Curator, Museum of Modern Art, New York City

"One of the great things about Dressing Up is that it totally just undoes every notion of how in society at the time you might be expecting a woman to act, and then the fact that Mogul is naked eating corn nuts, which is the most unglamorous type of image, just puts it over the top."

— Glenn Phillips, Curator, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

"Susan Mogul's very funny video stories, in one of which (Dressing Up) she proceeds from disrobed to robed, reminiscing about the history of each item of clothing."

— Lucy Lippard, MS Magazine

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Exhibitions + Festivals

State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970, Orange County Museum of Art, October 2011 / Berkeley Art Museum, 2012 / Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2013 / SITE Santa Fe, 2013 / Smart Museum of Art, 2013

California Video, Getty Museum, Los Angeles 2008

Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2006

Museum of Modern Art, New York City,2006

Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy,1998

Le Magasin Centre National d'art Contemporain de Grenoble, France,1997

Louisiana Museum for moderne kunst, Humleboek, Denmark,1997

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany,1997

"Scratching the Belly of the Beast: Cutting Edge Media in Los Angeles 1922-94",1994
 

Lost and Found: Twenty Years of Video Art, Long Beach Museum of Art,1994

David Zwirner Gallery, New York City,1993

Studio Guenzani, Milan, Italy,1993

Anthology Film Archive, New York City,1976
 

Southland Video Anthology, Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach,CA.,1975

The Kitchen, New York City,1973