Art Collective

A political composition on natural resistance. These images are an expiring breath in danger of extinction. These images become extinguished, consumed: a drop, a pure intensity which only appears when falling. In the presence of the image these audiovisual crowds become an affected body, assaulted by entropy. A face exhausted and reanimated by the continuous sound trance that traverses the battlefield. Faces for an eye that would not need to see.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

The Dresden Codex is a prehispanic book that was kidnapped and was rediscovered in the city of Dresden, Germany. It keeps a presage of a destruction to come.

The performance artist Stephen Varble spent the last five years of his life working on an epic, unfinished performance-turned-video titled Journey to the Sun (1978-1983). Only partially complete and under constant revision, this complex work combined Varble’s history of making costumes for performances with his fantastic stories involving metamorphosis and martyrdom. In 1982, Varble decided to make a “prelude” to Journey to the Sun, combining existing footage with new video taken in Riverside Park in New York City.

This is the common audiovisual system that interconnects the body of the workers and the industrial machinery of the actual system.

A barricade is built inside the Main Temple of the Aztecs. Testimony of the contemporary battles against the governmental aggressions.

The Videofreex tape a group of young people working on a farm run by Chris Locke and his wife in Shandaken, NY.  After learning how to take care of the chickens, they are taught how to kill and pluck one.  Later they sit down for a communal dinner, and one of the group exclaims "Mmmmm, tastes good!"

This is the howl, gaze, and agitation of the Coyote into the mountain. The Path of the Coyote.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

An attempt to explore the metamorphic drama of expanding entomological entities. Sparkles of the screen-membrane in erosion.

In 1975, the Feminist Studio Workshop (I was a member) at the Woman’s Building in LA, the Women’s Interart Center in New York City, and another feminist organization in Washington DC, attempted to set up a video exchange among feminist art organizations. This was the first videoletter on our end. I don’t know if another one was ever made.

The videoletter is a tour of the Woman’s Building. Pam McDonald, with microphone in hand, another workshop member, and myself, served as guides through the building. It was shot with a black and white video portopack.

This is the ritual consecration to the moon, on whose eroded surface the colorful blood of the fruits is poured, which is also our pulsating blood disseminated in the celestial body of the moon. Sparkling bleeding body that crosses the dark space of our present times. Part of the Lunar Films series.

This waltz is a set of circular and fragmented compositions, in which a rhythmic and haunted dance hides an eroded lunar landscape. The microscopic rubble of our contemporary civilization. Part of the Lunar Films series.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

A look at the town of Rome N.Y., including an arts panel visit to the Art and Community Center.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

The Sun Quartet is a solar composition in four movements, a political composition in four natural elements, an audiovisual composition in four bodily mutations: a sun stone where youth blooms in protest, a river overflowing the streets, the burning plain rising in the city. And, finally, the clamor of the people that shook Mexico after the night of September 26, 2014. The disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa opened a breach in the Mexican political body.

Scratch of image. As a consequence of a global quarantine, an entire device emerged. With much of humanity locked up and eager for communication, a pandemic exhibitionism went viral. Covid-19 mobilizes an audiovisual pandemic. The result: a plague of viralized images.

These are the western lands of the mind. The western tracks in the land. The western landscapes of our time. The wasted times of our lives. So is the rest of the Capitalocene civilization.

Less than two minutes long, this short tape makes playful and surreal use of video’s editing capabilities. Set to a sped-up version of The Band’s “The Weight” – complete with the falsetto vocals, and accelerated tempo that come with time manipulation on records – is a series of rapid, alternating washes and split-image cuts overlaying and juxtaposing the faces of the freex upon one another. Male faces and female faces fuse, the exact identity of the individuals becoming dissolving into ambiguity.

We came into the world under the sign of Saturn, the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays. Saturn pulls the word down into its vortex and turns the flow of events into rings, lines and particles. There we are all invisible. There we have no face. There we have no name. There our present seems suspended. There we are all limbo.

This are the scattered fragments, the scattered mineral fragments in its oceanic evolution, an intermittent becoming of geological massiveness. The mineral geology under the spell of an scattered dance. This is the mobilized fossil. Part of the Scattered Geology Audiovisual series.

Stephen Varble began Journey to the Sun as a series of performances with projected slides in 1978. After becoming notorious for unauthorized costume performances on Soho streets in the mid 1970s, Varble receded from his public persona at this time. Deriving from his identification with his idol, the reclusive actress Greta Garbo, and informed by the spiritual practice of Subud, Varble began writing an allegorical epic about a musician, the Grey Crowned Warbler, who undergoes tribulation and metamorphosis on a journey to transcendence.