Artist Reviews

Tom Rubnitz / Dynasty Handbag

This group of short essays details the work of Tom Rubnitz and one of his frequent subjects Jibz Cameron.  Cameron’s performance as her alter-ego Dynasty Handbag is discussed in terms of its eschewing of the interiority of the performer and in performing the subject in favor of assuming what Lubin-Levy refers to as cyber-personalities.  It is these cyber-personalities that are at play in Rubnitz’s work as well, where his performers oscillate between absurdity and vulnerability while a

Ironic Nostalgia: an Interview with Nelson Henricks

In this interview Henricks and Hoolboom discuss the atmosphere of euphoria surrounding the early days of video media usage in the mid-1960s and the popular belief in its ability to bring about a utopia of representation in which alternative media could be used to articulate alternate subjectivities, and through this self-actualization and self-representation, video art would work towards the growing call for the materialization of genuine democracy.  Hoolboom pinpoints Nelson’s understanding of the political potential of video a

Radical Closure

Akram Zaatari considers the idea of closure, both physical and symbolic, in the Middle East as a product of the increasingly pervasive militarization of public life and its attendant mechanisms of segmentation and restriction via borders and checkpoints.  In an attempt to situate the videos in Radical Closure within a broader historical context, Zaatari references Jean-Luc Godard’s questioning of the theatricality commonly employed in the articulation of the discourse of resistance a

Two or three things I know about him

In this essay, Westmoreland discusses Zaatari’s upbringing in Lebanon, and how he came to filmmaking primarily through an early interest in photography, which he used to document the tumultuous world around him.  Westmoreland also addresses Zaatari’s early desire to examine and document the everyday, and how that impulse today shapes Zaatari’s approach to filmmaking and its examination of the act of image-making during times of war. 

Koken Ergun: Personal Works of Public Ceremonies.

This essay describes Ergun’s use of ritual, and his attempt to occupy a position between viewing them as either socially or spiritually significant or as merely empty.  Rather, Ergun examines the act itself, in opposition to the approach he feels most typified by Leni Riefenstahl, who similarly documented ritual, but in a way that adopted the ritual’s perceived sense of cultural significance, almost to the point of abstraction.  Ergun, on the other hand, attempts to maintain a more di

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