Picturing a Pandemic Part 7: The Asshole Is A Tense Hole and Womb With A View

Bob Huff (b. 1952, Chula Vista, California, USA) has lived in L.A., New York, and now lives in his native suburban San Diego. He has worked as a musical instrument maker, a computer programmer, a video maker, and a medical writer. Huff began making video in 1985 and was part of the first wave of US AIDS video activists following the formation of ACT UP in 1987, in which he participated as part of the Treatment & Data Committee and Treatment Action Group between 1987 and 1996. As an editor and performer Huff has collaborated with fellow AIDS video activists Robert Hilferty and Gregg Bordowitz. His AIDS activist works have been presented at survey exhibitions that include, AIDS: The Artist’s Response, Group Material’s AIDS Timeline and as part of further exhibitions and screenings at Artists’ Space, ICA London, MoMA, PS 122, The Kitchen, White Columns, Whitney Museum and at San Francisco Gay & Lesbian Film Festival and Berlin Film Festival. His video work has featured in writing by Gregg Bordowitz, Paula Treichler and Roger Hallas. As a writer and editor, he specialized in covering HIV drug development issues for the AIDS advocacy organizations, AmfAR, GMHC, and TAG. Now retired, Huff remains active producing occasional art works and serving as a board member of the AIDS Treatment Activists Coalition (ATAC).

Sherry Millner (b.1950, Brooklyn, NY, USA) is an artist, film programmer and educator who lives and works in New York. With a stake in feminist self-organisation, Millner has been producing films, videos, and photomontages since the 1970s. Following studies at Cal Arts with Yvonne Rainer amongst others, she contributed to the first wave of feminist art practice that helped to establish women at the forefront of video practice. Her titles are remarkable for their mixture of humour, analysis, and personal insight that combine the languages of documentary, experimental film and art film. Embracing a wide range of issues in her work, from the mundane to the political, Millner portrays an acute sense of the sublime and the ridiculous — a necessary virtue when tackling U.S governmental policy. Often collaborating with her partner Ernie Larsen, their works critique domestic and foreign policies from within the family and everyday life as a site of radical, critical and cultural enquiry in ways that are funny, honest and atypically anarcho-political; foregrouding video-based practices as collective and non-hierarchical practices. Millner’s work has been exhibited in the international touring exhibition, ‘It’s the Political Economy, Stupid! and has featured in screenings and exhibitions at venues such as MoMA, ICA Philadelphia, The Kitchen, The New Museum, Whitney Museum and the Whitney Biennial. A former editor of Marxist film Journal Jump Cut, Millner teaches at CUNY New York and organises regular events and screenings.