Begun as a consideration of the upgrading from manual to digital film editing techniques, Transitional Objects explores the anxiety and loss inevitable in such a transition while also suggesting the consequences of other life transitions. The video takes its title from D.W. Winnicott's theory of children's use of transitional objects to negotiate the gaps between internal reality and the shared reality of people and things.
This tape was originally an installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, part of which included the video collaboration Channels of Desire. Recreating coin-operated porno booths, Channels aired one photo image on seven TVs, interrupted only by the viewer inserting a coin and choosing a segment. The concept behind it was the construction of desire in categorical ways, the form of the piece speaking to sexual desire as something that is constantly evading the viewer. The images present women’s experiences with interracial, lesbian, and heterosexual encounters.
A stutter-step progression of "extended moments" unmasks the technological "miracle" of Wonder Woman's transformation, playing psychological transformation off of television product.
"I made Take Off in my studio apartment on Myra Avenue during my second year living in Los Angeles. As a member of the Feminist Studio Workshop, I was writing an essay at the time comparing male artists’ representations of their sexuality with female artists’. Vito Acconci was my model for a male perspective. I had been captivated by his videotapes; particularly Undertone, where he was supposed to be masturbating while seated at a table. The videotape was my ultimate response and commentary on Acconci as well as an expression of my own sexuality."
Child uses the soap opera format to play with the structure and expectations of the family melodrama. Following the melodramatic format that “if it can happen, it will happen,” coincidence and unlikely events abound in Swamp’s gleeful send-up of lurid intrigue, threatened morality, and endless double-crosses. With looped and repeated edits, fast-paced action, and aggressively funky video effects, Child layers on artifice and excess in an overdone remake of the TV serial.
Based on accounts of girlhood anorexia, Swallow unravels the masked and shifting symptoms that define clinical depression. With a densely layered soundtrack, humorous and painful scenes of potential psychological breakdown reveal a critical loss of meaning, and the failure to diagnose mental illness. Weaving narrative, documentary, and experimental strategies, Swallow intimately traces the awkward steps from unacknowledged depression to self-recognition.
This classic feminist tape deviates from David Byrne’s and Jonathan Demme’s popular 1980s versions of suburban life, True Stories. Rather than poking sarcastic fun at the woman locked in the split-level, Suburban Queen poignantly evokes a daughter’s longings. Portraying the relationship of a mother and daughter inextricably bound yet puzzled by each other’s lives, Faber recounts her frustration with her mother’s depression and passivity, and her fantasy of how her mother might transcend these conditions.
Thinking of herself as a spy assigned by the female sex, Green reinterprets baseball’s symbolism—its womblike landscape, its cycles and rituals—and constructs an iconography that pays homage to the female. In one magnificent montage, numerous phallic symbols pass by as Green sees the real purpose of the game: baseball is the only sport about returning home—and where is home...? In a mother’s belly. With humor and irony, Green creates a tape that is both a personal revelation and a heretical portrait.
Continuing Silver’s interest in combining performance and video, A Spy is a gender-bending and thought-provoking mixture of pure visual pleasure with disturbing undercurrents. As Reeves lip-syncs to a Doors’ song (“I am a spy in the house of love. I know the dream that you’re dreaming of, I know your deepest secret fear...”), we see a new manifestation of Jesus walking in a video field of pulsing rainbows, amoebic forms, and B-movie girls in black panties—suggesting the desires we try to hide from ourselves and others.
Sphinxes Without Secrets is an energetic and transgressive acount of outstanding female performance artists, and an invaluable document of feminist avant-garde work of the 70s and 80s. No Mona Lisa smiles here, as performance artists spill their guts about what outrages and delights them. Performers, curators, and critics unravel the mysteries of a new art form and ponder the world women confront today. Since its inception, performance art has provided a forum for artists who create work that challenges the dominant aesthetic and cultural status quo.
In Spank an eight-second film clip has been re-edited, frame by frame, into a 7 1/2-minute video, tranforming discreet gestures into suggestive, pulsating sequences. This deconstruction of narrative Hollywood cinema exposes and intensifies the authoritative relationship between a man and a young girl.
Employing the 'case studies' of Helen Keller, Genie the 'wild child' and Angel at My Table author Janet Frame, Goss's extraordinary video contemplates the struggle to be heard, to break free from the prison of the incommunicable self. '[A] tour of the house and grounds of language,' constructed with beguiling visual spaces and surfaces, startling edits, and insinuatingly layered sound design. —New York Video Festival (2000)
Horizontes incorporates scenes from a popular Cuban soap opera with running commentary in the form of a propagandistic advertising text. Blumenthal examines media programming as presenting, through the filter of a generalized moralism, a reconstructed history that mirrors the values of the dominant class. The media both "collects and corrects public memory."
