07:25:25 | 4 DVDs
Collection: Curated Compilations, DVD Box Sets
Tags: Feminism, Gender, Performance, Video History
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
Performer/Audience/Mirror, Dan Graham, 1975, 22:45
Selected Works (Dog Duet, Used Car Salesman, Dog Biscuit in Glass Jar), William Wegman, 1972, 08:44
Baldessari Sings LeWitt, John Baldessari,1972, 03:38 (excerpted from 12:50)
Undertone, Vito Acconci, 1972, 09:15 (excerpted from 37:20)
Vertical Roll, Joan Jonas, 1972, 19:37
My Father, Shigeko Kubota, 1975, 14:46
Exchange, Robert Morris, 1973, 36:02
Program 2: Investigations of the Phenomenal World: Space, Sound, and Light
Black and White Tapes, Paul McCarthy, 1970-75, 06:30 (excerpted from 33:00)
Stamping In The Studio, Bruce Nauman, 1968, 05:00, (excerpted from 1:01:35)
Double Vision, Peter Campus, 1971, 14:22
Boomerang, Richard Serra with Nancy Holt, 1974, 10:27
Island Song, Charlemagne Palestine, 1976, 16:02
Cycles of 3s and 7s, Tony Conrad, 1976, 02:51 (excerpted from 30:54)
The Children's Tapes, Terry Fox, 1974, 29:36
Soundings, Gary Hill, 1979, 17:41
Lightning, Paul and Marlene Kos, 1976, 01:17
Sweet Light, Bill Viola, 1977, 09:07
Program 3: Approaching Narrative: "There are Problems to be Solved"
The Red Tapes Part II, Vito Acconci, 1976, 57:55
Out of the Body Travel, Richard Foreman, 1976, 23:50 (excerpted from 42:00)
The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd, Arthur Ginsberg and Video Free America, 1972-75, 33:15 (excerpted from 1:00:00)
Program 4: Gendered Confrontations
Art Herstory, Hermine Freed, 1974, 14:49 (excerpted from 22:00)
Female Sensibility, Lynda Benglis, 1973, 13:05
Ama L'Uomo Tuo (Always Love Your Man), Cara DeVito, 1975, 18:52
The Mom Tapes, Ilene Segalove, 1974-78, 03:39 (excerpted from 26:52)
Primal Scenes, Linda Montano, 1980, 09:52
Nun and Deviant, Nancy Angelo, 1976, 14:08 (excerpted from 20:28)
Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, Martha Rosler, 1977, 39:16
See also Surveying the First Decade and Surveying the First Decade: Volume 2.
Included Titles
  In Performer/Audience/Mirror, Graham uses video to document an investigation into perception and real time informational "feedback." The performance is doubly reflected back to the audience by the artist's lecturing, and the...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: documentation, performance |
In the first tape, Two Dogs and Ball, Wegman uses the area framed by the camera as his performance space, employing a single, fixed camera to record the scenes as he, Man Ray and Fay Ray, his Weimeraners, act them out. In the second tape, Used...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: |
"One of Baldessari’s most ambitious and risky efforts. Seated and holding a sheaf of papers, he proceeds to sing each of Sol LeWitt’s 35 conceptual statements to a different pop tune, after the model of Ella Fitzgerald Sings Cole Porter. What...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: art criticism, conceptual art, humor, performance, video history |
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...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: conceptual art, gender, performance, sexuality, video history |
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...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: body, feminism, mental landscape, performance, sound, video history |
In this classic personal elegy, Kubota mourns her father's death and recounts the last days of his life. Reflecting on Kubota's use of the video medium, the television emerges as the link between Kubota and her father, with the melodramatic...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: death and dying, family, feminism, performance, post-colonialism, television, video history |
In 1972, Robert Morris and Lynda Benglis agreed to exchange videos in order to develop a dialogue between each other’s work. Morris’s video, Exchange, is a part of that process—a response to Benglis’s Mumble. At the beginning of...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: feminism, performance, video history |
Black and White Tapes derive from a series of performances Paul McCarthy undertook in his Los Angeles studio from 1970 to 1975. Conceived for the camera and performed alone or with only a few people present, these short performances use...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: performance, video history |
From an inverted position, high above the floor, the camera records Nauman’s trek back and forth and across the studio; his stamping creates a generative rhythm reminiscent of native drum beats or primitive dance rituals. However, Nauman is not...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: conceptual art, performance, video history |
Campus investigates the metaphoric overlap between properties of the video camera and processes of human perception, an area of great interest to many early videomakers.
Collection: Single Titles Tags: video history |
This is a tape which analyzes its own discourse and processes as it is being formulated. The language of Boomerang, and the relation between the description and what is being described, is not arbitrary. Language and image are being...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: language, sound, video history |
Strapping a video camera to himself as he drives a motorcycle around an island, Palestine harmonizes with the engine, maniacally repeating the phrase, "Gotta get outta here...gotta get outta here..." His chanting voice merges with the vibrations...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: |
Cycles of 3's and 7's is a performance in which the harmonic intervals that would ordinarily be performed by a musical instrument are represented through the computation of their arithmetic relationships or frequency ratios. Conrad and...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: |
Phenomenolgocial dramas involving household objects like candles, spoons, and matches, unfold with an extreme economy of gesture. Fox balances a spoon and a piece of ice on top of a bent fork. We watch as the ice melts and the spoon is thrown off...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: |
"Soundings is a meditation on the phenomenology of sound, the translation of image into sound and sound into image through a series of experiments on an audio speaker. The speaker delivers sound both audibly and visibly, with the camera...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: |
When I look for the lightning, it never strikes. When I look away, it does. Filmed inside a car, this tape focuses on observation of natural phenomena, presenting the obverse of the "If a tree falls in the woods..." conundrum. Does observation...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: environment, video history |
Viola has referred to Sweet Light and other tapes from this period as “songs”—personal, lyrical statements. Articulated through precise editing, Sweet Light incorporates symbolic imagery, changes of scale, and a radically mobile...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: |
The Red Tapes is a three-part epic that features the diary musings of a committed outsider: revolutionary, prisoner, artist. The series offers a fragmented mythic narrative and a poetic reassessment of the radical social and aesthetic...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: performance, politics, video history |
A "young woman who finds herself surrounded by the relics of Western culture" is the subject of Richard Foreman's formal tableaux. The narration centers on a young woman's struggle to find a relation between her body and her self as mediated by...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: body, dance, documentation, feminism, gender, language, mental landscape, performance |
From 1970 to 1972, Arthur Ginsberg and Video Free America recorded the private life of a not-so-average American couple-Carel Row and Ferd Eggan. She is a porn actress and filmmaker; he is a bisexual junkie. The video verite camera captures the...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: documentary, family, lgbt, portrait |
“In her brilliant video Art Herstory, [Freed] has restaged art history, putting herself in the model’s role in numerous paintings.... Time dissolves under her humorous assault—one moment in the painting, then out of the canvas and into...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: art history, feminism, humor, video history |
As two heavily made-up women take turns directing each other and submitting to each other's kisses and caresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that the camera is their main point of focus. Read against feminist film theory of the "male gaze",...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: feminism, gender, performance, video history |
Segalove takes her mom as subject in these short pieces, recording her stories, her advice, and her daily routine. What results is a portrait of a contemporary mother-daughter relationship, touchingly devoid of drama and full of whimsical humor....
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: autobiography, family, feminism, performance, video history |
Over grainy, black and white images of a woman giving birth, Montano reads the story of a nun’s sexual self-discovery—recounting Sister Joan’s growing awareness of her body’s sensuousness and sexuality. Primal Scenes is an excellent...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: body, feminism, performance, sexuality, video history |
A classic example of feminist performance videos of the 1970s, which often incorporated autobiography, expansion of self through personae, and assertions of a new identity for women. In Nun and Deviant the performers come to happier...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: feminism, gender, performance, video history |
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....
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: body, feminism, performance, science |