Performance

This three-DVD collection features 18 titles, 10 years of videography, and over six hours of material by Donigan Cumming.

"Cumming has said that it is his intention to question, "the myth of the innocent, invisible photographic witness." Borrowing from what he calls, "experimental ethnography," Cumming consciously positions himself not only as investigator, but also participant, caretaker and friend. Thus his examinations of human frailty are always tempered by a compassion that stems from his own involvement in the situations he records."

Donigan Cumming

Donigan Cumming Videoworks: Volume 3

Three short pieces highlighting how difficult it is to create images that make sense in a world where everything is flawed and everything has already been said.

Donigan Cumming

Donigan Cumming Videoworks: Volume 2

In these two videos, Cumming investigates the worlds of a pair of abject heroes, Colin and Pierre, one a recovering alcoholic, the other an addict. One talks angrily about his former addiction and of the sacrifices he made for the “romance” of a life on the street. The other has lost everything in the name of love, and now tells the tale in a manner both tragic and comedic.

Donigan Cumming

Donigan Cumming: Four Short Pieces

Four short pieces: three featuring anecdotes and conversations, the fourth an icy landscape.

Barbara Aronofsky Latham

Arbitrary Fragments

Using highly-manipulated and over-processed images, Latham investigates the process of video as inherently fragmented. Weaving together various people’s impressions of the artist and her work, the work demonstrates important parallels between video, storytelling, and the formation of identity—all processes of active fabrication that blend “lies” and truth in the construction of a certain reality, history, or past. Labeling an image of herself talking as “her most recent explanation,” Latham addresses “the construction of her video personality” as an identity outside of herself.

HalfLifers

Aquatics

Actions speed up, slow down, and run at regular speed. The usual props are there, as is a wet dog. Subtle nuances are revealed as the behavior of the anxiety-laden protagonists is rendered, for once, in real-time.

This title is also available on HalfLifers: Rescue Series and HalfLifers: The Complete History.

Linda Montano

Anorexia Nervosa

Through the testimonies of five women, this video lays out the complex problem of anorexia, detailing how the disease develops as a response to both personal and societal pressures. The common thread in these accounts is how the disease clusters around a need to control one’s body, and how not-eating becomes a way to gain that control, with anxieties and frustrations being displaced onto a negative obsession with food.

Mike Kuchar

Animal

Masked men prowling in the bushes and not touching anything but satin, dandelions and flesh.

Steve Reinke

Anal Masturbation and Object Loss

"Ever on the lookout for learning opportunities, Reinke envisions an art institute where you don’t have to make anything, and with a library full of books glued together. All the information’s there—you just don’t have to bother reading it!"
—New York Video Festival (2002)

Lynda Benglis

The Amazing Bow Wow

The only Benglis video with a discernable plot, The Amazing Bow-Wow follows the adventures of a talking, hermaphroditic dog given to Rexina and Babu by a carnival barker. Rexina and Babu soon decide to make the dog a sideshow act hoping to earn their fortune. Babu eventually becomes jealous of Rexina's devotion to the dog and one night attempts to castrate it, accidentally cutting off its tongue. The dog's head becomes hideous and skeletal, ruining its sideshow career and the profits.

Anne McGuire

All Smiles and Sadness

McGuire constructs a murky black and white soap-opera world of endless, timeless, and placeless limbo, where the characters talk to each other entirely in cliches, bad poetry, and other contrite forms of speech—a short TV show in which nothing is resolved. The video culminates in an absolutely stunning monologue performance by legendary underground film and videomaker George Kuchar.

Blumenthal/Horsfield

Allan Kaprow: An Interview

In 1952, Allan Kaprow wrote an article on Abstract Expressionism entitled The Legacy of Jackson Pollock in which he suggested the separation of the art-making activity from the art itself. Kaprow’s concept was most famously realized through Happenings, during which the traditional role of artist-creator was replaced by what he called “the social occasion.” In these events, divisions between artist and audience—and between the artwork and the perception of it—were dissolved.

Sterling Ruby

Agoraphobic

Agoraphobic is a portrayal of a specific case of New-Age impotence. The agoraphobic's pathology manifests itself as a need to drink his victim's blood in order to move from place to place. Set in an office interior, Agoraphobic becomes a play on the patient / therapist relationship, suggesting an imbalance in the transfer of baggage.

Anne McGuire

After Wegman

An homage to early videoworks by William Wegman, starring Man and Fay Ray's stand-ins.

"Anne McGuire shows that men are dogs."

--Ed Halter, New York Underground Film Festival (2003)

HalfLifers

Afterlifers: Walking and Talking

The HalfLifers exhume cinema’s favorite incarnation of mindless, decaying mortality, the Zombie, in the hopes of breathing new life into this misunderstood figure. From a panel discussion in an old TV studio to a quarantined helicopter high above California’s rolling hills, these life-challenged entities walk, talk, and chew over some of the more difficult questions of this “whole linear birth-death system."

This title is also available on HalfLifers: The Complete History.

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