American Psycho(drama): Sigmund Freud vs. Henry Ford

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.