Ellen Cantor

(2016)

Occupying two floors of the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, this exhibition encompasses works on paper, including porn photo collages, as well as films both short and long. It is the second part of an exhibition that began, with somewhat different content, at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco and will have an afterlife in Stuttgart this September in a screening of Pinochet Porn, the film that the late Ellen Cantor (1961–2013) spent the last eight years of her life working on. Final edits are being carried out by friends and collaborators according to the artist’s instructions. Ostensibly set against the backdrop of Augusto Pinochet’s US-backed Chilean dictatorship, the story—which focuses on the dictator’s imaginary twin daughters, Paloma and Pipa (both played by Lia Gagitano, founding director of the New York nonprofit Participant Inc.), and their love affairs with half a dozen men—somehow culminates with the collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. The exhibition features an edited trailer for the movie that Cantor completed herself, as well as a display of Circus Lives from Hell (2005), a set of her cartoon drawings whose sporadic scenes and actions were a primary source for the collagelike Pinochet Porn.

“Tragedy is a choice” is the mantra that runs throughout both the works on paper and the film. Actually, though, it’s presented as an inevitability, and one that pervades Cantor’s life and art. An obvious example is the brilliant video Within Heaven and Hell (1996), wherein Cantor cobbles together scenes from The Sound of Music and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to illustrate pendulum swings between pleasure and torment, as her voice narrates the tale of one of her relationships gone sour.