Images at Work is a offshoot film screening program presented by MIT List Visual Arts Center that accompanies their current exhibition Performing Conditions. Comprising nonfiction and experimental works made over the last half-century, the program sketches an unruly history of labor and its refusal. It also contends with recurrent debates around the image’s use-value—particularly the social documentary and militant cinema traditions that haunt the representation of labor. Across these works, “the worker” and the “working class” are not unified or historically stable entities. Instead, they flicker in and out of view, revealing their elusive nature. Mike Henderson's 1970/73 film Dufus (aka Art) will be included in the thematic section examining the figure of the cultural worker and their possibilities of refusal, Non/performance for the Camera.
Dufus (aka Art) is from a selection of experimental films that Henderson created in the mid-1960s to the 1980s, around the time he received his MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. Self-taught as a filmmaker, Henderson’s 16mm performance-driven short films are politically charged and often wickedly funny, ranging from improvisational compositions to powerful explorations of African American identity and experience. These films were restored and digitized by the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles.
Learn more at listart.mit.edu.
