A reverse striptease, non-stop comedic monologue about shopping for clothes, while eating corn nuts. Dressing Up was inspired by the artist’s mother’s penchant for bargain hunting. Mogul produced Dressing Up as a student in the feminist art program at the California Institute of the Arts in 1973.
Prime Time is a video collage of violent imagery appropriated from American commercial network television. The work features rapid-fire editing (i.e., for analog 3/4" video technology) often used by network producers to create a sense of action or tension, and violence from all genres of television programming – cartoons, news broadcasts, commercials, made-for-TV movies – is juxtaposed to create humorous effects and absurd situations.
Sections 31-60 of an incomplete extended poem describing the artist's connection to the radical black tradition. The completed poem will be formed of 180 sections.
"Lessons are all about constraints; they are thirty seconds, must feature a black figure, and I have rules about where to make cuts, how to edit sound, etc."
— Martine Syms in conversation with Aram Moshayedi, Mousse Magazine
Imagining future Deep Time, Post-extinction, using dark humor to speculate on the defiant vitality of matter to evolve life again. Two billion years from now, the oceans are beyond understanding. A soup of plastics, cloth and string, song and dance, collaborate to find new ways of moving in bleak time. The ghost of an oyster holds memories of what happened. It sings to a scrap of waste that fell to the bottom of the sea, trying to form new life, trying to get a face. With help from Stevie Wonder, undersea karaoke may still be possible.
pulse pharma phantasm is a frame by frame weaving of nine different pharmaceutical television commercials into a pulsating hallucination of worry and relief.
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!"
Shot in video-8 at the 1988 Chicago Auto Show, this work examines the artist's personal history with automobiles against the back-drop of an auto plant closing in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The personal stories of real life relationships between people and their cars is dramatically counterposed to the glaring commercialism of the automobile industry and the economic crisis that industry has imposed on the American union workers.
Displaying a broad range of Golden Age Hollywood animation, Manifestoon is an homage to the latent subversiveness of cartoons. Though U.S. cartoons are usually thought of as conveyors of capitalist ideologies of consumerism and individualism, Drew observes: "Somehow as an avid childhood fan of cartoons, these ideas were secondary to a more important lesson—that of the 'trickster' nature of many characters as they mocked, outwitted and defeated their more powerful adversaries.
Tugging the Worm is an allegorical film that takes place in a utopian society which has faced the prospect that complete annihilation is an ever present possibility. Cork, an innocent bird-like creature, in a militaristic world that is dominated by high fashion and flashy billboards is befriended by the not too trustworthy bad boy named Vouku. Vouku’s tendency toward violent entertainment and vehicular homicide only serve to increase Cork’s angst. After a trip to the game their attitudes are changed by a vision of angels dancing at a ho-down on the head of a needle.
"Ad Vice consists of a succession of colored projection surfaces with segments of text from the worlds of advertising, sport and popular culture. These projection surfaces in turn alternate with images of a rock band whose music continuously frames the whole. As regards form and content, the video looks like a commercial, an advertising spot for SWIPE country. The fast changing images, the continual music, and the starting and ending credits refer to it. The viewer is greeted with the words: welcome to SWIPE country... enjoy the sound... make contact...
This tape is, in effect, a ready-made. Produced by the Pepsi Cola Company for its own use, it was accidentally substituted for one of my tapes in 1974. The mistake in the transfer was a communications mishap that involved a series of people and corporations... I wonder what accidents of this sort might reveal about secret channels of information. I see the material on this tape, innocuous as it may be, as a phenomenon that affects us without our being aware of its existence.
—Antonio Muntadas
The language and imagery related to celebrity perfumes (both descriptive and visual) are a starting point to think about consumer desires and the corruptness of branding. Give us your songs, your smells and we will give you everything. The rich get richer, everyone smells poorer.
Androgina is a stand-alone work excerpted from Generic Video Art. "Generics" is the name applied to no-name foods and household items that began appearing in grocery stores during the recession of the 1970s. When novels were added to the collection of genre products, entitled "Western," "Romance," "Adventure," etc., it was from this phenomenon that the initial idea for Generic Video Art arose.
A combination of experimental and narrative approaches which explore the commodification of rebellion as it is marketed to youth culture, through the eyes of two drug-dealing, teenage girls from Brooklyn who "accidentally" kill and mutilate their favorite alternative rock star. Their obsession with murders and makeovers and their confusion between fashion and transgression lead these girls into a world where nihilism is bought and sold, and rebellion is impossible.
This music video for the band Julie Ruin, fronted by Kathleen Hanna, formerly of Bikini Kill, critiques the cynical music marketeers of corporate America. Criticism particularly targets campaigns aimed at women, which Benning and Hanna refer to here as the "Girls Rule (kind of) Strategy."
A man explains global currency markets without the help of his formerly trusty rockin’ talkin’ pony, who is missing. Without the pony, the world is as disorientating as it is depressing. The audience is invited to help make order of the chaos.
This title is also available on Ben Coonley: Post Pony Trilogy.
As regional character disappears and corporate culture homogenizes our surroundings, it's increasingly hard to tell where you are. In Chain, malls, theme parks, hotels and corporate centers worldwide are joined into one monolithic contemporary "superlandscape" that shapes the lives of two women caught within it. One is a corporate businesswoman set adrift by her corporation while she researches the international theme park industry. The other is a young drifter, living and working illegally on the fringes of a shopping mall.
Take a joyride through comfortable suburbia—a landscape molded by seductive television and corporate America (and keep in mind: disaster is another logo for your consumption...). This is the age of the "culture jammed" consumer preened with Friends hair, Survivor courage, and CNN awareness. A generation emptying their wallets for the most important corporate product of all: lifestyle. The psychological road trip across a slightly battered America travels at One Mile per Minute.
Sections 1-30 of an incomplete extended poem describing the artist's connection to the radical black tradition. The completed poem will be formed of 180 sections.
"Lessons are all about constraints; they are thirty seconds, must feature a black figure, and I have rules about where to make cuts, how to edit sound, etc."
— Martine Syms in conversation with Aram Moshayedi, Mousse Magazine
Three factories. Three radically different modes of production. One of the world's largest prosthetics factory, far removed in the mountains of Germany; a small haute-couture glove atelier in southern France, where each glove is made by hand; and a distressed jeans factory in central Turkey, where about 2000 pairs of jeans are produced daily, reveal paradigms of contemporary production, organization, and labor.
A Perfect Pair posits the idea that individual consumers are walking billboards for the products they use; product slogans and brand names peeking out from every crevice and cranny of the actors’ bodies. Export demonstrates how the body of the consumer, especially that of the female consumer, is co-opted by commercialism. In tongue-in-cheek fashion, A Perfect Pair celebrates the modern-day co-mingling of fetish objects, as a body builder seduces a prostitute at a bar saying, “Your eyes are the most beautiful blue ad-space. Your cheek could promote a Mercedes.
Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth installment of the Transformers movie franchise directed by Michael Bay, was released June 27 2014. But for months ahead of the release, on YouTube one could already access an immense trove of production footage recorded by amateurs in locations where the film was shot, such as Utah, Texas, Detroit, Chicago, Hong Kong and mainland China. Transformers: the Premake turns 355 YouTube videos into a critical investigation of the global big budget film industry, amateur video making, and the political economy of images.
A specific period of late-night TV channel surfing is dissected and manipulated through fast forward and freeze frame. Cultural icons (Roseanne, Mary Tyler Moore, The Golden Girls) can occasionally be glimpsed amongst the detritus, while the echoing and ghostly soundtrack pays homage to the cultural isolation of solitary viewing.
"Generics" is the name applied to no-name foods and household items that began appearing in grocery stores during the recession of the 1970s. When novels were added to the collection of genre products, entitled "Western," "Romance," "Adventure," etc., it was from this phenomenon that the initial idea for Generic Video Art was derived. Between the mid-seventies and the time of GVA's creation, video art had developed and evolved in ways that could be categorized by specific genre groups, and
Using a pulsing rock soundtrack and music video-style editing, X-PRZ combines archival footage of Malcolm X, advertisements, and corporate logos in No Sell Out to provide a scathing commentary on commodity culture.
