Body

At the heart of Alone With You is the notion of impassioned avarice, i.e. the kind of motivated acquisitiveness that drives both erotic desire and obsessive collecting.

Prefaces is composed of wild sounds constructed along entropic lines, placed tensely beside bebop rhythms, and a resurfacing narrative cut from a dialogue with poet Hannah Weiner. Child tells us, “The tracks are placed in precise and asynchronous relation to images of workers, the gestures of the marketplace, colonial Africa, and abstractions, to pose questions of social force, gender relations and subordination.” This tape serves as a pre-conscious preface to the parts that follow, whose scope and image bank are more narrowly defined.

This classic feminist tape deviates from David Byrne’s and Jonathan Demme’s popular 1980s versions of suburban life, True Stories. Rather than poking sarcastic fun at the woman locked in the split-level, Suburban Queen poignantly evokes a daughter’s longings. Portraying the relationship of a mother and daughter inextricably bound yet puzzled by each other’s lives, Faber recounts her frustration with her mother’s depression and passivity, and her fantasy of how her mother might transcend these conditions.

Woman, monster, animal? A portrait of a woman's face, the movement slowed down and reversed, the grotesquely made-up face examined in close-up.

A dreamlike journey, a disintegration into a fluid human-animal-plant-machine consciousness, Pirouette follows a sound artist who records horse sounds using her own body, while a cellist on the street invades her imaginary. It is the psychedelic conclusion of the horse-foley trilogy: Passage (2020) - Piaffe (2022) - Pirouette (2024).

Sixteen-year-old guru Marahaj Ji attempts to levitate the Houston Astrodome in this 1973 DuPont award winning documentary. Follow the guru from his New York mansion to limousines in Houston and listen to his followers—celebrities and non-celebrities alike—extol his virtues. TVTV's creative use of graphics, live music, and wide-angle-lens shots to conveys the desperate efforts of these lost children to find a leader.

"If this guy is God, then this is the God the United States of America deserves." —Abbie Hoffman

Shot in Portland International Airport. Animation by Jalal Jemison.

"In Haysha Royko, three people sit nonchalantly in airport chairs, while their different-colored auras, or something much like auras, shape shift, overlap, and compete."

— Emily Hall, The Stranger, July 17th, 2003 

A collage piece. Oppositions of agony and ecstasy are explored. Morticia trims yet another rose stem, while Bugs Bunny takes up Zen. Guilt-wracked, a nun tries furtively to cleans herself of imagined sin. Or attain spiritual release. Various divas flail to no avail. Lips, lipstick, frozen lips. Shakuhachi music by Chris Moran sets the mood, when there isn’t a thunderstorm raging.

Performance artist/sculptor Ana Mendieta used the raw materials of nature: water, mud, fire, rock, and grass. The consciousness of her politics and the poetics of her expression fill her work with an emotionally charged vision that is powerfully conveyed in this posthumous video profile. Drawing upon the raw spiritual power of Afro-Cuban religion, Mendieta used her art as a ritualistic and symbolic activity to celebrate the forces of life and the continuum of change.

Inspired by a riff on a popular joke “Everybody wanna be a black woman but nobody wanna be a black woman,” Notes On Gesture is a video comparing authentic and dramatic gestures. The piece uses the 17th Century text Chirologia: Or the Natural Language of the Hand as a guide to create an inventory of gestures for performance. The piece alternates between title cards proposing hypothetical situations and short, looping clips that respond. The actor uses her body to quote famous, infamous, and unknown women.

This arresting early work conveys a tension that emanates from what Tanaka posits as life's basic dualities: male/female, past/present, known/unknown. By focusing issues of identity, doubt, wonder, and awareness through the body, and the bodies of her ancestors, Tanaka succeeds in creating a work with both personal and political power. Tanaka creates a unique voice that speaks of her experience of maturing into womanhood, repeating the refrain, "I my mother." An experimental video, this work contains one of the first examples of flicker editing.

Chic Point was shot in a fictional location: the occupied catwalk. Employing all the elements of a fashion show, models reveal their abdomens in outfits designed especially to suit Israeli checkpoints. For Israelis in the present time, the individual Palestinian body is the most dangerous weapon there is, and it is therefore the subject of ongoing and humiliating surveillance.

This title is only available on Radical Closure.

"A chamber drama set in the confines of an apartment’s sun room, this video further explores visual themes and obsessions found in my earlier works and adds in a few new ones for good measure. Earlier motifs seen here are lightbulbs in pendulum movement, tabletop antics with simple household objects, Christo-like fleshy textures, sketchbook pages torn from their binders, book pages, bookshelves, and flowers. I play a vaguely Walter Mitty-ish figure, who imagines himself as a conductor, as Orpheus, and as conflicted characters in a Greta Garbo movie.

Repeating the same activity as featured in Bouncing in the Corner, No. 1—leaning back and bouncing forward from the corner—this time the camera is positioned just above Nauman’s head. This gives his body the sense of constantly rising and falling, his chin just crossing the bottom edge of the screen before sinking back.

This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

"Mama mama mama...," a woman calls out again and again, over and over. Is it her child that she mimics, or is she calling for her own mother? A desperate video performance in the first person.

A man is shot inside an empty room and he moves and takes on positions continuously out of center. The nature of the lack of balance is invisible and his ability to stand up in spite of unnatural postures is inexplicable: this videowork has been realized without special effects but is simply the result of a real shooting of an artificial condition.

Lament is a collaboration with video artist James Byrne. Movement material is adapted from Eiko & Koma's 1984 performance work Elegy. Sound mix by Eiko & Koma.

Commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN and made possible with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Jerome Foundation, St. Paul, MN. 1986, Eiko & Koma, James Byrne, Walker Art Center. Videographed July, 1985 at the Triplex Theatre, New York, NY. Edited in 1986. 

Identically dressed, and with sibling-like resemblance, performance artists Trevor Martin and Kym Olsen shift between spoken word and athletic dance choreography in a collection of 29 scenes. Set in various locations--including a gymnasium, an abandoned hospital, and a trailer park circus--Martin and Olsen slip between a ventriloquist and his dummy, a seducer and his surrogate, a doctor and his patient, and synchronized dance partners. The film examines a complex social psychology--questioning the colonization of the human body for various political, medical and religious agendas.

Standing on the brink of elimination, the suspense threatening to fracture their composure, contestants wait and see if they will be going home. The audience at home is also waiting... Part two of Bearing Witness Trilogy.

Compromise is Episode 1 of the video art trilogy, This is More Than Love I Feel Inside, in which Jillian Peña traces a queer relationship from inception to demise.

The raw facts and naked truths behind hedonistic rascals and obsessive artists is boldly uncovered and revealed to you.

This title comprises Blue Vibrations (2014), Museum of Damaged Art (2015), and Moods for Moderns (2016) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

An instructional road trip clarifies how to prevent a baby from choking. The giver of said instructions communes with stray dogs along the ocean front. She builds seaside graveyards, petit and monumental sand mountains. She nourishes the sand graves with fresh breast milk.

A compilation of five early short films made between 1966 to 1969.

Hand Movie 1966, 6:00, b&w, silent, 8mm

Close-up of a hand, the fingers of which enact a sensuous dance. Camerawork by William Davis.

Volleyball (Foot Film) 1967, 10:00 b&w, silent, 16mm

A volleyball is rolled into the frame and comes to rest. Two legs in sneakers, seen from the knees down, enter the frame and stand beside it. Cut to new angle, same characters and actions. Camerawork by Bud Wirtschafter.

The title gives a bitter meaning to the uneasy image of a woman who is brushing her hair over her face with fierce movements. Mostly the face remains impersonally hidden under her hair; when it is uncovered, we see how the rough scratches of the brush against the skin have smeared her lipstick.

This title is also available on Hester Scheurwater Videoworks: Volume 1.

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 screen, negotiating the rolling barrier of the screen’s bottom edge.