Ardele Lister
Ardele Lister is an artist working in time-based media.
From 1991 to the present, Lister has taught media production and critical studies at Rutgers University, where she is currently Graduate Director of Visual Arts. She has also taught at Montclair State University in New Jersey, School of the Visual Arts, and Center for Media Arts, both in New York City.
Lister's works have been shown internationally in festivals, galleries, museums, and on television, and are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Academie der Kunst (Berlin), and the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa). She also has written for and edited art and media publications and founded the magazines Criteria and The Independent.
Art
Ardele Lister has been making films and videotapes since the early 1970s when she co-founded ReelFeelings, a women's media collective, in Vancouver, Canada.
When her first film, "So Where's My Prince Already?" (1976), was selected for the International Festival of Women's Films, Ardele relocated to New York City, where she has since lived and worked.
The characters in many of Lister’s works, particularly the early films ("So Where’s My Prince Already? (1976)," and "Split" (1980)) feature ordinary people struggling to make sense of their lives as they wade through the media morass trying to decipher what myths they are attempting to live up to, stumbling sometimes very funnily in the process. They are characters that viewers can easily identify with: a runaway teenage girl living in her boyfriend's car; a young married woman, full of hope, confronting the realities of daily life with her husband, the perpetual PhD student. "Hell" is a relatively contemporary video interpretation of Dante's Inferno in which sinners are stored on disks and punished with digital effects.
"Behold the Promised Land" and "Conditional Love (See Under Nationalism-Canada)" utilize interviews with people in several American and Canadian cities in July 4th and July 1st, in combination with archival footage from the post-war period that told us how to be good Americans, or what it meant to be a Canadian. These works, in addition to an installation entitled "Canadian Cuisine," investigate more specifically how media contributes to our socio-political beliefs, our national identities, and our patriotism on both sides of the 49th parallel.
One of the first artists to work with digital technologies, Lister’s art (notably "Hell," 1984) led to her work on avant-garde television projects such as Pee-wee's Playhouse (CBS). For this innovative television show Lister produced all the Connect the Dots segments, in which live-action Pee Wee (played by Paul Ruebens) jumped into the computer generated Magic Screen, to be digitally layered and animated.
Publishing Work
Ardele Lister founded and edited the journal CRITERIA, a Quarterly Review of the Arts, in 1974 in Vancouver. It was initially published under the auspices of the Vancouver Art Gallery, where she produced a weekly television show on the gallery's events and exhibitions, but by 1977 had dis-affiliated. Volumes 1-4 were published until Fall 1978, Volume 4, Number 2. CRITERIA published art projects and writings by Lawrence Weiner, John Baldessari, Robin Blaser, and Ardele Lister; and interviews with Judy Chicago, Martha Wilson, and Dennis Wheeler.
In 1977, while working for the Associated of Independent Video and Film Makers, facilitating an innovative project funded by the National Endowment for the Arts entitled "Short Film Showcase," Ardele Lister created and edited "The Independent," the first magazine devoted to the needs of independent video and film makers. The magazine is still published by the Foundation for Independent Video and Film, in New York, today as a blog.
Additionally, Lister has written articles for AfterImage, Felix, Collapse, and Heresies.
Notes
References
- Tonkonow, Leslie, “Leslie Tonkonow Interviews Ardele Lister,” Collapse, Vol. 3, December 1997. pp. 154-169.
- McCoy, Pat, “A Brief Conversation Between Ardele Lister and Pat McCoy,” Felix, vol. 1, no. 3. 1997. pp. 79-83.
External Links