Despite assurances from local municipalities, a fact of life is that Manholes blow sky high more frequently than most people realize. Manhole 452 directs the viewer’s attention to the shapes, sizes and patterns of manhole covers on Geary Street in San Francisco, and then plunges deep below into the manholes themselves to explore the hidden threat that lies below.
In this faux-recreation of a home-shopping network, Al Gore and George W. Bush offer you a 'super-premium' collectible lamp commemorating the 2000 presidential election.
"The gerbil has long been associated with New World capitalism because of its incessant energy. The Golden Age of Hollywood takes on the history and evolution of this delightful household pet."
— International Film Festival Rotterdam (2003)
— "Jim Finn's Wüstenspringmaus, a well-sprung, rear-screened account of a gerbil's life in the '70s."
— Guy Maddin, Film Comment, January (2004)
This title is also available on Jim Finn Videoworks: Volume 1.
Shutters click in this clothes-dropping exhibition of photographic exposures sure to quicken the pulse of those in need of extremity expansion. The voice of artistic reason rises above orgiastic visuals that splash across the pages of glue-bound volumes oozing with sticky subjects of a carnal persuasion. Come and rejoice in the mayhem and frivolity that only Eros unchained can deliver. The soiled and the damned live again on the glossy pages of glue-bound tabloids ticketed for hell and beyond.
Rosie Cutler, a middle school lunch lady, and TJ Fortune, a outcast student, have an unusual relationship. Mystically-minded and gender ambiguous, TJ recoils into an abandoned warehouse where he builds a massive sculptural shrine from discarded objects and trash. Through a dream Rosie makes intimate contact with a trans-worldly being who she hopes will bridge the gap between real and imagined to reveal truths about our world.
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George spends a week in Los Angeles on business and at eating engagements. “I eat in Beverly Hills and do my business behind closed doors for a change....”
Originally recorded during 1975-76 and re-mastered in March 2005, this selection of 11 skits mostly focuses on Man Ray. Wegman appears to test his faithful friend, continually throwing a ball for him to catch even after the dog loses enthusiasm; playing with a cardboard tube which intermittently emits a loud sound recording, alternately attracting and repelling the dog; pulling a cord attached to his leg while making him “stay”. Wegman also take a leap into the world of color with special effects and a monolog about furniture. Includes:
The season sweeps through in a blur of glitches, gulps and sweetened goo, as chimes wring out the old and ring in the new.
Brave new shopping worlds are being created. What have mall owners, architects, surveillance technicians, and supermarket workers done to turn human subjects into pure streams of consumers, into the perfect inhabitants of shopping mall paradise?
It's the season of joy once again and this video depicts the tasty and the troublesome in big, heaping spoonfuls. Witness a social whirlpool of whipped confections and stripped confessions tastefully prepared in soupy symbolism. See man and domesticated mammals share in the bounty of a cosmopolitan cornucopia. Feast your eyes and ears on the snap-crackle-and-pop culture of a city simmering in smut. Swallow it all in the 4:3 format and good luck in the digestive department.
A journey that begins in a Kansas City hotel and ends up in New Mexico. The bumpy ride is fuelled with libidinous juices as it lurches through college dormitories and sun-baked ghost towns. Rocks are lifted and things crawl out for all to see.
"One of Baldessari’s most ambitious and risky efforts. Seated and holding a sheaf of papers, he proceeds to sing each of Sol LeWitt’s 35 conceptual statements to a different pop tune, after the model of Ella Fitzgerald Sings Cole Porter. What initially presents itself as humorous gradually becomes a struggle to convey Lewitt’s statements through this arbitrary means."
—Helene Winer, “Scenarios/Documents/Images,” Art in America 61 (March 1973)
Video artist meets a handsome and enigmatic Marlboro Man; video artist gets a sexually transmitted disease. In a wry and pointed work that’s part Ibsen and part Danielle Steele, Vanalyne Green reworks the sex-education film to take a critical look at cherished stereotypes about romance, the American West, and cowboys. Expanding on a body of work that investigates the idea that public spaces are gendered, Green revisits the myth of the rugged outdoors, and the West will never be the same.
This humorous video begins with two women—one white, the other Asian—attempting to fit into a Japanese bathtub. The awkward fitting of bodies into a small space is just one of the allegorical scenarios dramatized in a pressing appeal for lesbian rights. In a game of hanafuda (flower cards), the terms of lesbian domesticity are cleverly played out according to such legalities as joint property, social security, and pensions.
Script/Performance Izumo Marou and Claire Maree, Superdyke Inc. Japan.
Song by Chu.
The story of a matron and a midget in the heat of an unbridled passion. The colors run thick and heavy for paint and prurient pleasures as the electronic canvas unscrolls to reveal a bevy of beasties and beauties of nature and the unnatural. A non-stop melodrama of a patron of the arts shot by real art students in a real art school! A collaborative project I worked on with my class at the San Francisco Art Institute.
A series of abrupt vignettes and transitional montages paint a torrid portrait of a tropical isle in the grip of terror. Linda Martinez stars in this latest atrocity from studio 8 in the San Francisco Art Institute and her co-stars don’t find her too hot to handle! She plays a travel agent booking honeymoon holidays to a sex-infested island haunted by lascivious cadavers and voodoo hi-jinks. Lots of color and rubberized hot action!
This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.
A big colorful rendering of the monster now terrorizing Puerto Rico and the hot-blooded people who have to deal with its deeper mysteries. Made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute, the video takes the viewer to our never-never land of constructed fantasy, loaded with visiting personnel who dropped by the class and got sucked into the venture. Lots of torrid, tropical mayhem and monsters.
George Barber doffs his cap to the 20th anniversary of Scratch Video with What’s That Sound?, a mesmerizing montage of questions, answers, and the cries and screams of people caught in a disaster movie. The work uses as its starting point, the film Airport '77 where, improbably, a jumbo jet sinks to the bottom of the sea. What follows is a clever amalgamation of absurd linguistics, cries and shouts, highlighting the artist’s permanent fascination with speech, and human reaction to out-of-the-ordinary situations.
In the second part of the Classics Exposed series, a neurotic scholar (Gibbons) leads a "buggy" ride tour through historic Charleston where, according to the professor, Franz Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis after taking a wrong turn on his way to Hollywood. Live-action with six-legged animation.
This title is also available on Emily Breer: Classics Exposed.
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.
Two gardens of plenty sprout with the seeds of bitter fruit made sweeter by the touch of summer, which rushes in with the scent of floral flatulence. Made heady by the gorgeous gas, the subjects of this video open both heart and mouth to nature's bounty which is served in microwaveable platters of convenient disposability to protect the environment from caustic suds. A touch of poison does escape the purity of these proceedings, but the general mood is one of gregarious grimness amid the plentitudes of paradise."
Tension between a man and his handsome young rival (a Ken doll) erupts into violence. Their interaction devolves from a series of tussles to a spanking.
This title is also available on Joe Gibbons Videoworks: Volume 1.
With various trips to the seashore, this summer travelette becomes an inner journey through mythical realms populated by rubberized horrors. The viewer is transported into a caregiver’s nightmare where mother and son share the fruits and bones of undigested demands. These figments of fermented atrocities pile up in a barrage of bestial assaults inflamed into hellish reality by reading material of unwholesome content. Fantasy lumbers into reality with an unrelenting menu of severed ties and familial knots that tighten around the neck of he who dabbles with dementia.
The rocks are red, the mood is blue, the sky is big, and the scars on the earth run deep as a man and woman shop incessantly for nature's bounty and the trinkets of a vanishing culture.
