MARGET
LONG
Mathew Brady’s Skylight
Artist Books
Hunting Blinds
Nature Valley
Film + Video
MARGET
Mathew Brady’s Skylight
Artist Books
Hunting Blinds
Nature Valley
Film + Video
Film + Video, 1997-present
Homo Museum, Exit Art
Wall mounted CD player with voice of Mercedes McCambridge from The Exorcist
”Around the time of Mercedes McCambridge’s death, I learned that she had performed uncredited the voice of Regan, the possessed girl in The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973). I rented the movie again just to listen to McCambridge, then fifty-seven years old, inventing the voice of the devil.
McCambridge belongs to a long line of Hollywood misfits (Agnes Moorehead, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr, among others) who provide pleasure, fantasy, and history for queers. Throughout her career she played many fine deviants, including a creepy butch opposite Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar (1954) and a dyke-y gang rapist in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958). On TV, as queer film theorist Patricia White observes, McCambridge made many weirdo guest appearances: she played the wife of a girly warlock on Bewitched as well as the woman who wanted to marry the (big fag) Dr. Smith on Lost in Space.
But Linda Blair and Mercedes McCambridge were a match made in heaven! Blair’s fleshy teen-devil body synched up perfectly with McCambridge’s grizzled, butch-devil voice.”
-Marget Long
“My Anger,” video, 3 minutes, 2002
A feminist homage to Keneth Anger’s underground film Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965).
“Making a Crop Circle in the Catskills,” video, 5 min 30 secs, 2004
Playing with the masculine energy and monumentalism of the earthworks of the 1960s and 70s, Long mows a feminist symbol into a field in upstate New York. Before the widespread availability of drones, Long appropriates aerial footage from the crypto-Christian movie Signs (2002) and combines it with the disco anthem Body Strong (1979) by Sylvester. “Houdiniana,” 9 minutes, 16mm with sound, 1997
A queer homage to the late 19th century Hungarian-American escape artist and illusionist Harry Houdini.
“Empire Lake,” 3 channel video installation, 2002
Long photographed garden hoses, Jiffy Pop packaging, and a pool of white paint frame-by-frame to create a landscape of perpetual production and depletion. Preoccupied with the aesthetics of progress, Empire Lake draws from Western movies; 19th century landscape painting; and B-movie special effects.“Empire Lake,” 3 channel video installation, 2002
Original music by Carolyn Dinshaw.