Performance

It Hurts

The repeatedly distorted, primate behaviour of an (ani)female carrying her baby, reflecting the pain and suffering provoked by the mother/child relationship.

Ximena Cuevas

Ximena Cuevas: Dormimundo Vol. 1 (Sleepworld Vol 1.)

"If there's something big, big that you want to reach for, you begin by dreaming." —Ivonne and Ivette

"The discomfort in Sleepworld Volume 1 is that of being oneself. The videos included here look at who we are and what we imagine we are. They are experiments in appearances, about the use of artifice to improve life or hide it. It is a reflection on moral displacement, hypocrisy, self-contained dreams, self-loathing, self-destruction in order to repeatedly kill our dreams.

Hester Scheurwater

Mama

"Mama mama mama...," a woman calls out again and again, over and over. Is it her child that she mimics, or is she calling for her own mother? A desperate video performance in the first person.

Jennet Thomas

Only Just Begun

Mr. Thomas is in the back garden, performing his new moves in the glorious sunlight, making things happen. Somewhere between ritual, a white suburban war dance and 1970's "keep fit" exercise to lovely music, Mr. Thomas tries to coordinate with the Black Blob, that persistently undermines the nature of his representational space...

And the song goes:

We've only just begun to live

White lace and promises

A kiss for luck and we're on our way...

Yvonne Rainer, Charles Atlas

A Woman Who...: Selected Works of Yvonne Rainer

This 2-DVD collection features five early films, a historically important dance and a recent work by media artist and choreographer Yvonne Rainer, and a documentary portrait by Charles Atlas. The collection includes a booklet featuring a detailed biography, bibliography and videography of Yvonne Rainer, and the following contextualizing essays:

After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid -- Bill Horrigan
Rainer Variations -- Carrie Lambert
Yvonne Rainer: The Aesthetics of Denial -- Sally Banes

Tom Rubnitz

Tom Rubnitz Videoworks: Sexy, Wiggy, Desserty

Until his untimely death from AIDS in 1992, Tom Rubnitz produced short, humourous videotapes featuring some of New York’s most outrageously talented musicians, artists and drag queens. Influenced by mass media entertainment, Rubnitz crafted hilarious videos which simultaneously celebrated and parodied pop culture’s bountiful energy and inventiveness. As Tom said, “I wanted to make things beautiful, funny and positive—escapes that you could just get into and laugh through. That was really important to me.

Călin Dan

Pas (de deux): A sofa piece

Unlike other sectors of Romanian civil society who gained status after December 1989, the gay community struggled for many more years with a legal ban imposed by a conservative political class subservient to the Orthodox Church. Against this background, I planned to make a tactical video whose leitmotif was a pas de deux performed by two male dancers.

Teddy Dibble

Teddy Dibble Videoworks: Volume 1

This compilation contains many of Teddy Dibble’s best comic vignettes. Everything is up for grabs in these visual and linguistic puns, including video dating, telephone operators, New Years Eve celebrations, fruit, and the theory of evolution.

Surveying the First Decade: Volume 1

This comprehensive anthology on the history of experimental and independent video is an essential tool for teachers, libraries, and researchers. Volumes 1 and 2 include over 16 hours of historic video on eight thematically curated programs, exploring conceptual, performance-based, image-processed, feminist, documentary and grassroots community-based genres.

Volume 1 includes:

Program 1: Explorations of Presence, Performance, and Audience

Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in the U.S. 1968-1980

Since its original release in 1995, this comprehensive two-volume, eight-program package on the history of experimental and independent video curated by Christine Hill was available only on VHS tape. The DVD launch brings this essential tool for the understanding of the development of media arts to a whole new generation of teachers, libraries, students and researchers.

Hester Scheurwater

Poster Girl

As if trapped inside a nightmare, the main protagonist of Poster Girl is haunted by disturbing visions, thoughts and fantasies, which the viewer is privy to. She is joined at various points in the video by another woman, whose role in the narrative remains unclear – is she meant to function as a guardian or a demon? The video further complicates the matter by representing both women as simultaneously wounded and wounding, inviting and threatening, vulnerable and menacing.

Călin Dan

Sample City

With sampled image and sound sequences referring to one another in a precisely calculated rhythmic alternation on four projection surfaces, Călin Dan draws a portrait of the city of Bucharest. Dilapidated tower blocks next to estates of terraced houses, Roma families camping with their horses and carts in the wastelands in the midst of the city, broken streets and new shopping paradises--today the formerly communist Bucharest is a city in upheaval, full of social contradictions and oppositions.

Vito Acconci

Sounding Board

Acconci literally feels the music in this tape as he lays down on speakers playing jazz. The sound pulses through his body while a collaborator massages his nude back in time with the music, occasionally striking Acconci like a rhythm instrument.

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

Peggy Ahwesh

Pistolary! Films and Videos by Peggy Ahwesh

This 3-disc DVD collection features nine works by maverick film and video maker Peggy Ahwesh. The set also includes title descriptions, a biography, film/videography, a selected bibliography, and the following texts:

Pistolary! Films and Videos by Peggy Ahwesh -- Eileen Myles
Film, Baby -- Peggy Ahwesh
Interview with Peggy Ahwesh -- Scott MacDonald

Jennet Thomas

The Man Who Went Outside

A distinguished looking man (performance artist Richard Layzell) is apparently trapped in an ever changing void of colour, locked in a power play with a perversely operated camera. A mute, caged, charismatic TV presenter he is by turns charming, menacing, educational, confused. At times he appears to have great powers. A voice over tells us extraordinary things - how this man is special - the first man to 'have a baby'. Hallucinogenic flash-frames punctuate the colour field to give us a view of his world's disturbing and alien futuristic logic.

Performance

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