Performance

In this cooking demonstration/performance, Sobell wears a chicken carcass over her face while dressing (literally, in baby clothes) a chicken to be cooked for dinner. Cooing and breast feeding the chicken as she would an infant, Sobell brings two stereotypical female roles—that of care giver and that of cook—psychotically close, emphasizing the potential dark side of women’s intimate association with food in a way similar to Suzanne Lacy’s Learn Where the Meat Comes From.

Using imagery from a Japanese "creature feature" and a chewing gum commercial, Benglis's camera focuses on different parts of the screen to emphasize different messages. With dialogue and sound replaced by the sound of frogs croaking outside Benglis's studio, the absurdly comic visuals of the movie and commercial oddly begin to echo each other, raising questions about the nature of the absurdity beamed into our homes and uncritically accepted as entertainment.

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

**New single channel, split-screen version now available**

Gone is a two-channel installation based on the second episode of An American Family—the landmark PBS verité documentary about the Loud Family of Santa Barbara, California. Dougherty has created a free-form variation on the theme of parental visits to wayward queer children by mapping the dialogue and plot onto a contemporary community of artists and writers in New York today, paying homage to the art underground and the city itself.

Going Around In Circles continues Holt's interest in perception and point of view. A board with five circular holes is placed in front of the camera. The holes are covered and uncovered to reveal five people enacting a set of activities that involves walking between five spots and turning in circles.

This horror picture is a sequel to THE KISS OF FRANKENSTEIN (a one act play I wrote a few years ago which was performed by my graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute). This one was made on the main campus and features Linda Martinez reprising the role of Sherri Frankenstein who is MAD AS HELL AND NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE! The budget given us was $400 but the picture looks big and robust, thanks to the attractive and healthy looking cast of students and guest performers who bring this tale of family vengeance to a rousing and tuneful finale.

Cutting to the core of cinematic realism, Fountain presents the plot-less character of human encounters. In a string of moments with the people who have presented themselves to Cumming’s camera for over twenty years, Fountain allows the accidental and the absurd to dominate our impressions. Storytelling is evacuated in the process.

In a meditation on the sexuality of the readymade, an off-camera artist forces one object into another.

“The best evidence yet that obscenity is easier recognized than defined.”

—Anne Reecer, Cinematexas (Austin, 2003)

This title is also available on Sterling Ruby: Interventionist Works 2001-2002.