Video History

Pop-Pop Video: Kojak/Wang takes a shootout from Kojak and extends the shot and counter-shot into a potentially endless battle. In the original TV fragment, images, gestures and actions rebound off one another like the echoes of repeated bursts of gunfire. Birnbaum compares gunfire with the beams of laser light from a computer in a Wang commercial, connecting destruction and violence with the products of advancing technology.

Nancy Holt

Points of View: Clocktower

A circular image moves across a black background while two people attempt to describe what they are seeing. A prime example of Nancy Holt’s examination into the way we interpret what we see, Points of View features four couples (Lucy Lippard and Richard Serra, Liza Bear and Klaus Kertess, Carl Andre and Ruth Kligman and Bruce Brice and Tina Girouard) talking to each other while watching the moving ellipse. Each of the four sections takes in the “view” from a different direction, north, south, east and west.

Lawrence Weiner

Plowman's Lunch

Plowman's Lunch is called a documentary because its intent was to explore actual occurrences—be these the building of the work, or what befalls the players. It still uses an open form, but the characters are more developed; they have "names," and some of the scenes were truly dangerous for them to produce. As in the other films (with the exception of Done To) there is a nucleus of three characters—two women (Boris and Jamiee), and one man (Steentje, a tranvestite/hermaphrodite). The music, composed expressly for the piece, is harmonious with its developments.

Max Almy

Perfect Leader

A satire of the political television spot, Perfect Leader shows that ideology is the product and power is the payoff. The process of political imagemaking and the marketing of a candidate is revealed, as an omnipotent computer manufactures the perfect candidate, offering up three political types: Mr. Nice Guy, an evangelist, and an Orwellian Big Brother. Behind the candidates, symbols of political promises quickly degenerate into icons of oppression and nuclear war.

Vito Acconci

Undertone

In this now infamous tape, exemplary of his early transgressive performance style, Acconci sits and relates a masturbatory fantasy about a girl rubbing his legs under the table. Carrying on a rambling dialogue that shifts back and forth between the camera/spectator and himself, Acconci sexualizes the implicit contract between performer and viewer—the viewer serving as a voyeur who makes the performance possible by watching and completing the scene, believing the fantasy.

Nancy Holt

Underscan

Holt's terrain is her Aunt Ethel's home in New Bedford, Massachusetts, presented in still images and excerpts from letters to the artist from her aunt. Holt pays particular attention to her aunt's poignant story of aging, altering the images by "underscanning" them—a technical process that compresses the edges of the video image—building an intrinsic limitation into the tape: the compression of time and personal history represented by the images and narrative. This process echoes Holt's reading, slightly distorting and compressing the information in the letters as she presents them.

Vito Acconci

Two Track

Acconci sits with a man and a woman before a microphone. The man and the woman read from two different texts (novels by Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler), and Acconci repeats everything the man says. From time to time, an off-screen voice asks Acconci something about what the woman has been saying, and he tries to answer. The focus of the tape is the relationship between modes of attention, direct and peripheral, in a situation where simultaneous strands of information are being presented.

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

Hermine Freed

Two Faces

In her oft-cited essay “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” Rosalind Krauss says, “self-encapsulation—taking the body or psyche as its own surround—is everywhere to be found in the corpus of video art” (October 1, Spring 1976). This certainly applies to this early work of Hermine Freed. Utilizing a split and reversed screen, Freed faces herself, caressing and kissing her doubled image. Without narration, the tape shows Freed suspended between two images, existing as a doubled person.

TVTV

TVTV Goes to the Super Bowl

Bill Murray and Christopher Guest lead a behind-the-scenes tour of the 1976 showdown between the Dallas Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers. This irreverent view of football and America's number one sports event examines the "Woodstock of corporate America" from the viewpoint of the players, the wives, the fans and the media. The big business of sports, the high stakes, the pressures, the cost in health and happiness are all covered in this kaleidoscopic view of another American ritual.

TVTV

TVTV Looks at the Academy Awards

Mixing documentary reality with clever comic invention, TVTV decked itself out in tuxedos and ankle-length gowns to cover Hollywood's annual celebration. Following several nominees on the day of the event, TVTV takes the viewer behind the scenes, exposing the hazards and exhilaration of being a "star". Throughout, Lily Tomlin appears as a middle-American housewife watching the awards at home on TV, and her deadpan humor about the ephemeral nature of fame serves as a delightful counterpoint to all the serious ego-stroking going on.

Keith Sonnier

TV In and TV Out

In Sonnier’s video tape TV In and TV Out, two images are superimposed, one shot off network television and the other shot from a studio performance situation involving some of the materials and visual qualities of his sculptures. This live image is colorized by a device which adds color to a black and white image and in turn manipulates the color. Colorized color is more opaque and less three-dimensionally tactile than synthesized color, but it is tactile in its video scan-line texture. …

TVTV

Four More Years

TVTV's inside view of the 1972 Republican National Convention made broadcast history. While network cameras focused on the orchestrated renomination of Richard Nixon, TVTV's rag-tag army of guerrilla television activists turned their cameras on to the cocktail parties, anti-war demonstrations, hype and hoopla that accompanied the show.

Lawrence Weiner

Trailer for Plowman's Lunch

Zachte Berm (from Weiner’s film Plowman’s Lunch) sits with her back to the camera in front of a large mirror—her face, covered with shaving cream, is seen in its reflection. As the soundtrack begins, she tries to lip-sync to the spoken words, “Art is not a metaphor upon the relationship of human beings to objects and objects to objects in relation to human beings but a representation of an empirical existing fact,” while shaving.

Antonio Muntadas

Transfer

This tape is, in effect, a ready-made. Produced by the Pepsi Cola Company for its own use, it was accidentally substituted for one of my tapes in 1974. The mistake in the transfer was a communications mishap that involved a series of people and corporations... I wonder what accidents of this sort might reveal about secret channels of information. I see the material on this tape, innocuous as it may be, as a phenomenon that affects us without our being aware of its existence. —Antonio Muntadas

Liza Bear

Towards a New World Information Order

Addressing the imbalance of information flow between the wealthy and the destitute nations of the world, Towards A New World Information Order suggests means by which this imbalance might be rectified, including ways to control the press.

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