The Mom Tapes
A child of the 1950s, Segalove was slightly too young to identify fully with the countercultural revolutions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Mom Tapes is a brilliantly sharp, funny, and sad look at the generation of her parents through a set of quasi-anthropological interviews with her own mother (conducted using the newly available Porta-Pak video camera) as she wanders through and around their Beverly Hills home. This “Greatest Generation" was consigned to oblivion by their hippie children, and Segalove's subject seems a ghost wandering through the Escher-like house giving advice on which butcher to go to or where to buy a cocktail dress—the kinds of questions that would provoke contempt in up-to-date young people. But Segalove's tone is affectionate and melancholy, not mocking—perhaps because she knows that a culture that values only the new will ultimately consign her to the same fate.
Artwork Details
- Title: The Mom Tapes
- Artist: Ilene Segalove (American, born 1950)
- Date: 1974–78
- Medium: Single-channel digital video, transferred from U-Matic video tape, black-and-white and color, sound, 26 min., 52 sec.
- Dimensions: Variable
- Classification: Variable Media
- Credit Line: Purchase, Henry Nias Foundation Inc. Gift, 2013
- Object Number: 2013.228
- Rights and Reproduction: © Ilene Segalove, courtesy of Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Curatorial Department: Photographs
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Ilene Segalove
1973
Sadie Benning
1990
David Hammons
1995/1999
William Wegman
1972–73
William Wegman
1974–75
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