Performance / Myself (Or Video Identity)

This compilation is produced with "myself" as the sole object, as well as the material of the performance (except two videos with Akiko iimura).  The videos are not just documents of the performances, but works of video-art made specifically for utilizing the video system, including the camera and monitor, as part of the performances.  The collection also questions the identity of oneself in video, having tense relationships between words and images, and asks who is "I" and what "I" means.

DVD includes:

Self Identity, 1972, 1:00 excerpted

Double Identity, 1979, 2:00 excerpted

Double Portrait, 1973-1987, 5:00

I Love You, 1973-1987, 5:00

This is a Camera Which Shoots This, 1982-1995, 5:00

As I See You You See Me, 1990-1995, 7:00

I Am a Viewer, You Are a Viewer, 1981, 4:00

"iimura compares the dialectics of images and language, live video image and the viewer, as well as the "subject" and the "object" to the complex Yin/Yang principle."

-- Slava Kacunko, ZKM

"In a distinctly post-modern turn immura places his theoretical procedures through the self of the artist and the viewer in a dialectic of linguistic discovery."

-- John G. Hanhardt, Whitney Museum

"The aptly titled Performance / Myself, a seven part series of epistemologically complex excerpts and stand alone experiments,is fashioned from deceptively simple concepts: iimura simultaneously "lives" on screen and inside a television monitor pronouncing… The videos This Is a Camera which Shoots This and As I See You You See Me complicate, rather than mitigate, questions about knowing through seeing as they document and also comprise an original live performance."

-- Michael Joshua Rowin, City Arts, New York's Review of Culture, April 6, 2010