Performance

An experimental video for electro-feminist-performance-artists Le Tigre, the early eighties MTV aesthetic unpacks a thoroughly current obsession: the hidden erotics of office supplies.

Wegman's Selected Works

George Kuchar

Web of Vice

Shot with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute, this colorful drama with song and dance numbers (plus burlesque acts) follows the libidinous poisoning of Vatican personnel by an otherworldly intruder. The cast is mostly young and vibrant and the songs staged as opulently as possible on a $400 budget. Anyone interested in these collaborative productions will find a lot to gawk at in this backstage romance with pagan overtures galore.

John Baldessari

The Way We Do Art Now and Other Sacred Tales

“A spoof on current art attitudes [that] stretches the definition of what can be considered art. Because the late 1960s and early 1970s were periods of innovation, using the human body as art, making process equivalent to product... [etc.], Baldessari questions that very sense of originality and exploration by taking it to its (rather mundane) limits. By taping a stick at one end, then picking it up at the other, he is both questioning and spoofing what constitutes art.” —Marcia Tucker, “John Baldessari: Pursuing the Unpredictable,” John Baldessari (New York: New Museum, 1981)

George Kuchar

The Wayward Syllabus

I wander around empty halls of academic buildings carrying bags of Halloween atrocities for our latest class project: a horror movie that lives up to that classification on multiple levels. The viewer is given a front row seat to the directorial process as young and nubile film students submit to attacks by rubber props in a Frankenstein thriller big on chills (caused mainly by the lack of budget) and low on underwear paraphernalia.

Vito Acconci

Waterways: 4 Saliva Studies

Acconci explodes the notion of an artist’s creation, his creative act being the build-up and discharge of saliva, an activity more properly belonging to the realm of necessary and autonomic bodily functions than art. Positioning himself as a hyper self-conscious artistic subject, Acconci fuses the terrains of body art and process art, formulating the body as process, and art as a natural function of the body. This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

Bruce Nauman

Wall/Floor Positions

Making himself into a “minimalist” prop sculpture in the manner of Richard Serra, Nauman moves through various poses in realtion to the floor and wall. While other sculptors were using wood planks, pieces of lead, or sheets of steel, Nauman uses his body to explore the space of the room, turning it into a sort of yardstick to investigate and measure the dimensions of the space. This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

Anne McGuire

The Waltons

A deft and cunning re-examination of John Boy’s near-death experience at the sawmill. A homespun midnight deconstruction of an entire era of television mannerisms.

“One of the strengths of The Waltons, a video that records a session of TV viewing using a handheld camera, is its ability to convey how our surroundings inform our experience. The video doesn’t stray far from the images on the TV screen, but our attention is divided between the show’s action and the off-camera activity in the apartment.”

Blumenthal/Horsfield

Vito Acconci: An Interview

A poet of the New York School in the early- and mid-’60s, Vito Acconci moved toward performance, sound, and video work at the end of the decade. His work moved in a different direction in order to “define my body in space, find a ground for myself, an alternate ground from the page ground I had as a poet.” Acconci’s early performances, including Claim (1971) and Seedbed (1972), were extremely controversial, transgressing assumed boundaries between public and private space and between audience and performer.

Martha Rosler

Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained

Taking aim at the social standardization enforced particularly on women's bodies, Rosler critiques the politics of "objective" or scientific evaluation that result in the depersonalization, objectification, and colonization of women and Others. As Joseph Di Mattia has pointed out, "The title of the tape is ironic--just exactly to whom are these 'statistics' 'vital'?

Bruce Nauman

Violin Tuned D.E.A.D.

Nauman stands with his back to the camera, repeatetedly drawing the bow across the strings of a violin tuned D, E, A, D. Perhaps more than any other exercise, this tape demonstrates the sense of anticipation built up in the viewer, as we wait for Nauman to walk, to turn around, to play music ... to do something. This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

Joan Jonas

Vertical Roll

In this well-known early tape, Jonas manipulates the grammar of the camera to create the sense of a grossly disturbed physical space. The space functions as a metaphor for the unstable identity of the costumed and masked female figure roaming the screen, negotiating the rolling barrier of the screen’s bottom edge.

Joan Jonas

Upside Down and Backwards

“[This tape] gives a clear picture of the consistency of Jonas’s concerns. The performance was based upon the merging of two fairy tales—The Frog Prince told backward and The Boy Who Went Out To Learn Fear told forward. These two tales become intertwined into a single text whose transformations are effected through fragmentation, demonstrating a process “unhitched” from time, as free from the laws of physics as are the fairy-tale sources. “ —David Ross, “Joan Jonas’s Videotapes” in Joan Jonas: Scripts and Descriptions, 1968-1982, ed.

Martha Rosler

A Simple Case for Torture, or How to Sleep at Night

Rosler identifies the totalitarian implications of an argument for torture, under certain circumstances, as it appears as a guest editorial in Newsweek magazine in 1982. Her critique is presented as a voiceover and a dizzying assemblage of radio and print media--articles on subjects ranging from human rights to unemployment and global economics. Implicating the U.S.

Lawrence Weiner

A Second Quarter

A Second Quarter is decidedly European; the “place” (Berlin) is the catalyst for the “action” (the work). The works recited in the film are concerned with barriers and borders, physical and geophysical phenomena. The characters also translate, count, and recite the alphabet. They build a narrative that is not a story to be followed dogmatically but rather a pattern from which to extract one’s version of what is seen.

Performance

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