American Psycho(drama): Sigmund Freud vs. Henry Ford
01:17:00
Collection: Curated Compilations
Tags: Animals, Culture Jamming, Humor, Mental Landscape, Performance
This humorous selection of performance-oriented videos maps a trajectory between consumer society and psychoanalytic confession. HalfLifers perform two rescue missions using colored snack food and everyday objects as means towards transcendence. In The Horror, Emily Breer and Joe Gibbons recuperate Coppola’s Apocalypse Now as a day at the beach. Gibbons’s solo work Multiple Barbie features the artist as a smooth-talking psychoanalyst, gently attempting to fuse the mute doll’s shattered plastic psyche. Three works by Anne McGuire all employ genre conventions derived from popular culture (the variety show, the talk show, and the rock video); McGuire’s presence as a performer amplifies the sense of strangeness that lies at the heart of the familiar, creating a vertigo between form and content. Animal Charm’s interventions in this program are homemade commercials and infomercials, sampled from a reservoir of neglected or useless images.
Curated by Nelson Henricks.
Included Titles
In this masterful example of video montage, a monkey is mesmerized as he watches two dolphins toss a woman from snout to snout. Go cross-eyed with cross-cutting. Sometimes, in order to prevent the insidious absorption of mass media, it is...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: chicago art, culture jamming, found footage, humor |
In a fictional conduit space, language and function are recontextualized as two navigators struggle to re-assess the nature of their mission while engaged in an eternal cycle of maintenance and communication routines. “Slipping freely in...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: humor |
Along with Pool Boy and The Horror, Caddy makes up The Phony Trilogy—a real-time video-meets-digital-animation trilogy of shorts featuring the highly excited and mildly delusional Joe Gibbons....
Collection: Single Titles Tags: |
In an exuberant mix of animation and live action, Joe Gibbons’ springboard becomes a surfboard as he fantasizes about his days as a lifeguard in 1963 when the young Brian Wilson would sit and jot down the songs he would sing while saving lives....
Collection: Single Titles Tags: animation, humor, performance |
Along with Caddy and Pool Boy, The Horror makes up The Phony Trilogy—a real-time video-meets-digital-animation trilogy of shorts featuring the highly excited and mildly delusional Joe Gibbons. As the phony,...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: humor, performance |
A wonderfully witty work about nostalgia and desperation. Anne McGuire portrays a Kennedy-era singer performing in the space where theatre meets television. McGuire's Garland-esque gestures provide both a sense of tragedy and humor. I Am...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: performance |
Ashley seems to develop a conventional story about a modern mother and wife with typically modern desires. But the insertion of incongruous soap opera scenes soon ensures that the seductive images take on an absurd and oppressive charge...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: chicago art, culture jamming, found footage, media analysis |
The first work in the Action series plunges into a world of frantic heroes trapped in a continual crisis of dissolution and reification. An ordinary domestic setting is recast as a psychoactive landscape in which the concept of function...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: expedition/travel, food, future/technology, humor |
The Telling (1994-98) shows McGuire telling two acquaintances a secret from her past using a three-camera set-up in the Desi Arnez style. The commodification of intimacy is not the strangest thing about this work. The fractured editing,...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: performance, television, tv production |
Shot in Pixelvision, Multiple Barbie features the artist as a smooth-talking psychoanlayst imploring the silent doll to explore her multiple personalities in order to purge their power from her psyche. This title is also available...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: humor, pixelvision, psychoanalysis |
In a world of Internet and high technology, there still remains something so arcane, so simple and extraordinary, so absolutely incredible as a circus of educated fleas. Marvel as the powerful Brutus (The Strongest Flea on Earth) pulls a...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: humor, performance |
A performance about the artist’s experience in the aftermath of an accident.
Collection: Single Titles Tags: body, performance |
Fuelled by lavish doses of disjointed hyper-editing, super-talented Jim Bailey dances with wild animals in this hot and exciting performance of "Fever." This title is also available on...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: chicago art, culture jamming, found footage |
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