Conceptual Art

On Screen

"Benglis manipulates generations of video footage to confound our sense of time; she implies an infinite regression of time and space—Benglis making faces in front of a monitor of her making faces in front of a monitor of her... ad infinitum. The viewer retains a sense of the images sequentiality, although the sequence of creation is not revealed in a logical, orderly fashion, and is heavily obscured by the random layering and continual repetition of aural and visual components."

Lynda Benglis

Noise

The earliest of Benglis's videoworks, Noise calls attention to the assemblage element of video by allowing the image to disintegrate into static between edits. Benglis also plays back several generations of image and soundtrack to introduce increasing amounts of distortion. Conversation is reduced to unintelligible noise, resulting in the disassociation of sound and image that to some extent characterizes her later work. This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

Lynda Benglis

Mumble

Part of an ongoing video correspondence with sculptor Robert Morris, Mumble brings together repeated scenes and gestures, featuring Morris and Jim Benglis (the artist's brother), and a narrative of irrelevant, confusing, and often purposefully untrue, statements. Although the viewer is inclined to accept Benglis's narrative as true, such trust is called into question by her statements about actions taking place off camera—actions that cannot be verified.

John Baldessari

The Meaning of Various Photographs to Ed Henderson--1

Baldessari presents photographs to his friend Ed Henderson and asks him to reconstruct the meaning of the image. In each case, Baldessari's strategy is to appropriate an existing image and remove it from its context in order to deconstruct the process of interpretation, and call the supposed objectivity of interpretation into question. The tape implicates the viewer in Ed Henderson's groundless exegesis, as he hypothesizes about the meaning of several photographs, speculating on their actual or staged reality.

Hermine Freed

Show and Tell

"There are three scenes in this work, all reflecting a changing sense of time. Each has a voiceover soundtrack with a similar structure, but with different information. Some of the comments presume that the viewer is privy to information which is never given..."

William Wegman

Selected Works: Reel 3

The works on Reel 3 were produced during 1972-73, and re-mastered in 2005 when several newly available titles were added. The focus here is on social relationships and attaining the perfect life, be it through making the right decision, getting something for nothing, or just having it all. Many of the comic skits parody television ads and infomercials, and Man Ray has to make some consumer choices.

Contents:

Stick and Tooth, 1:00

Emperor and Dish, 1:09

Lucky T-Shirt, 1:04

Paul Kos

Ramp

On a gradually inclined plane, attempts are made to scale the rise, and rubber shoe marks leave evidence of the point where all of humanity fails.

Vito Acconci

Pryings

This extraordinary performance carries a wealth of associative meanings in the sexual dynamics of privacy and power-man and woman pitted against each other in a struggle for mental and physical control.

Nancy Holt

Points of View: Clocktower

A circular image moves across a black background while two people attempt to describe what they are seeing. A prime example of Nancy Holt’s examination into the way we interpret what we see, Points of View features four couples (Lucy Lippard and Richard Serra, Liza Bear and Klaus Kertess, Carl Andre and Ruth Kligman and Bruce Brice and Tina Girouard) talking to each other while watching the moving ellipse. Each of the four sections takes in the “view” from a different direction, north, south, east and west.

Paul Kos

Pilot Butte/ Pilot Light

Produced 1974-2004 near Pilot Butte in southwestern Wyoming.

The artist makes a pilot light using ice, which he has fashioned into a magnifying lens to start a small fire.

Vito Acconci

Undertone

In this now infamous tape, exemplary of his early transgressive performance style, Acconci sits and relates a masturbatory fantasy about a girl rubbing his legs under the table. Carrying on a rambling dialogue that shifts back and forth between the camera/spectator and himself, Acconci sexualizes the implicit contract between performer and viewer—the viewer serving as a voyeur who makes the performance possible by watching and completing the scene, believing the fantasy.

Vito Acconci

Two Track

Acconci sits with a man and a woman before a microphone. The man and the woman read from two different texts (novels by Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler), and Acconci repeats everything the man says. From time to time, an off-screen voice asks Acconci something about what the woman has been saying, and he tries to answer. The focus of the tape is the relationship between modes of attention, direct and peripheral, in a situation where simultaneous strands of information are being presented.

This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

Vito Acconci

Turn-On

Acconci again confronts both the viewer’s and his own expectations of his performance, saying, "I've waited for the perfect time, for the perfect piece, I'm tired of waiting... but no, you want me to have something ready for you, something prepared." Acconci addresses the artist's perpetual wait for both inspiration and appreciation. He pulls apart the relationship of the artist to the audience, which for Acconci constitutes a mixture of independence and co-dependence, relying on the viewer to both validate and motivate his work.

Paul Kos

A Trophy/Atrophy

A two-headed calf died when one head atrophied. It became a trophy that the artist used as a source for this 16mm film transferred to video.

eteam

Truth in Transit

They just flew in from New York, and boy, are their arms tired... Out in the Nevada desert, against the windblown backdrop of Air Force bomber training sites, artists Hajoe Moderegger and Franziska Lamprecht - better known as eteam - gathered testimonials of stranded passengers, crew members, and local residents to recall an episode in the lost annals of American aviation: the 2006 "unscheduled layover" at International Airport Montello (IAM). Truth in Transit reaches beyond simple documentation.

Conceptual Art

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