It was 1990 and, although the iron curtain was falling, Soviet official control was still iron-fisted. Camcorder reporter Skip Blumberg went along with a group of art aficionados on a tour of the Moscow studios of the unofficial artists, an underground community of talented, courageous and often wacky conceptual artists. His report reveals an insider’s view of the art world and, at the same time, is a video about making a video.
Hokey Sapp Does SPEW features Kate Schechter performing her invented media personality Hokey Sapp interviewing some of the luminaries at SPEW: The Homographic Convergence, a queer zine convention hosted by Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago in May, 1991. SPEW brought together artists, writers, editors of zines, performers, video-makers, activists, and bands from throughout the US and Canada, and marked the explosion of queercore subcultures through unabashed fashion, outrageous politics, humor, and joy.
A cactus-strewn desert becomes the backdrop for this series of filmic stopovers that focuses on the living quarters assigned the assignee of this adventurous arrangement. Great natural beauty clashes with manufactured outdoorsmanship, as a tired body and sluggish mind seek the oblivion of hotel hospitality in an arid region of artistic aspirations. The viewer is introduced to a world of prickly plants and satin-skinned succubi who prowl the alleys of western decay to staple their fig leaflets on the vertical shafts that poke unsheathed at the virgin skies of southern Arizona.
A film about haircuts, clothes, and image/sound relationships.
"This four-minute film explores our response to stereotypes—aural, visual and ideological. Smith signals these stereotypes to the viewer through a chiefly associational system, which deftly manipulates the path of our expectations. The structure is stunningly simple and deceptively subtle. We are taken on a journey from one concrete stereotype to its diametric opposite, as images transform and juxtapose to, ultimately, invert our interpretation of what we see and hear."
—Gary Davis
The Rudnick family run amok with unleashed talent in San Francisco and display a wide girth of creative curvature for all to admire over a hot cup of java. The fluidity of artistic endeavors spills over the borders of the Pacific Rim to highlight not only aquatic animals, but also desert-bound creatures etched in the thirst-quenching magnificence of kitchenware crystal.
One of the earlier video diaries where George vacations in Colorado, reflects on scenery and animal life and visits people. "
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.
Most of TVTV’s work takes place in the city, at the center of some pop culture event. “The Good Times Are Killing Me” takes place in the country – Southwest Louisiana, around the towns of Mamou and Eunice, the heart of Cajun country. This is an indigenous culture of food, music, language, and bawdy French-language jokes – something you don’t see much anymore in America. The event is rural Mardi Gras, where beer-drinking, boudin-eating men and boys on horseback capture and behead chickens for a big gumbo and town dance.
In this classic example of the Kuchar style, George travels to the Bronx to visit his mother and to see old classmates from art school. “We see what they have become or are becoming or already became.”
This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.
Segalove relates a tale from her childhood of a man's exposure with text (“the painter wagged it at me right here”), while an arrow blinks over a shot of the house where she grew up. Segalove narrates: “I looked down and expected to see a can of green paint. I saw a pink penis instead, peeking out of the fly of his pants... I wondered how it had got so pink; had he painted it too?” This and four other memorable stories are humorously presented in a series of video one-liners.
The threat of disaster heightens the shallow into prominence, making their eventual fall all the more poignant as we see through their protective garments to view an eager beaver on the prowl. But beavers build and rebuild, damming back the catastrophes that threaten us all with their sinister seepage.
You never thought that Franco-American relations could be so fun! A French thriller in the tradition of the Marquis de Sade, getting it on with Roger Corman's from-the-hip philosophy.
This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 3, Computer Smarts.
In this humorous short, Astrid Hadad, dressed in traditional folkloric costumes and religious garments, sings and performs to a Chilean love ballad before a painterly background of fantastic landscapes. Her hyperbolic posturings enact the song’s tale of a woman’s heartbreak. This satirical presentation of femininity references pathos and the role of the victim. Cuevas’s use of animation and video montage adds a playful tone to the heartfelt melodrama of love songs, familiar touchstones in all cultures.
A love letter to the Internet from a feral cat in Brooklyn.
Anonymously published to the web in 2006, Valentine for Perfect Strangers was an early example of an art video that "went viral," amassing over a half-million views and landing on the front page of YouTube.
Images from magazines and color supplements accompany a spoken text taken from Herbert H. Clark’s “Word Associations and Linguistic Theory” (in New Horizons in Linguistics, ed. John Lyons,1970). By using the ambiguities inherent in the English language, Associations sets language against itself. Image and word work together and against each other to destroy and create meaning.
This science fiction adventure centers on the interaction between a crew of Earthmen and their seduction by the love-hungry Amazons of the red planet, Mars. The tale is brought to life with all the opulence that an $800 budget can produce and the young cast of non-actors live up to their fullest foibles as the plot thickens with a mix of romance and wartime action intertwined with a musical number or two. The ambitions were high and the necklines low in this effects-laden tribute to pulp fiction fantasy and intergalactic intercourse.
This rapid-montage music video for John Sex’s song “Hustle with My Muscle” portrays the singer as a ladies’ man with ample endowment to share. “Can you handle all the man below my belt?” he provocatively asks.
This title is only available on Tom Rubnitz Videoworks: Sexy, Wiggy, Desserty.
Something primitive projects into the present to upset the lives of a group of people delving into past-life regression techniques. The hairy intrusion is both attractive and repellent as he strips bare a suburban carcass composed of Christian pretensions and pagan proclivities.
As the camera looks out through a barred window and the clock strikes four in a Swiss city, the death of Yasser Arafat provides the starting point for a journey back in time.
Throwing Stones is the third episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world’s hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.
Pastures filled with the bounty of a meateater's fantasy fill the screen with bellows of bovine origin as testosterone-driven madness runs rampant on 20,000 acres of Oklahoma soil. A lone female turkey stuffer prepares the goodies that will nourish the sunburned as they rocket skyward on the scales of numerical poundage to come crashing earthward in time for marinated hamburgers. A trip to the garden of Eden and its sanctuary for snakes with an appetite for dog meat.
A video I made with students at the California College of Arts and Crafts. It brings to life the terror and romance of cryptozoology as the hero and heroine (both played by young women) go south to bumpkin land on a search for the notorious and monstorous MOTHMAN. A fun journey in video-making desperation (the whole thing had to be shot and edited in 5 days).
Taped in Normal, Illinois, during the height of autumn, a snapshot of a young girl triggers a meditation on dying innocence and sizzling sausages as a low, winter sun ignites the smoke of greasy longings and meat-eating hunger.
This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.
Colors swirl and shift amid pulsating blobs of light as a voice from the past takes us on an antiquated journey to the future and beyond. Revel in the mysteries of gizmo-channeled visuals and contactee gibberish as the geometric unknown gyrates before thine own eyes.
The genius and mystique of Edward D. Wood, filmmaker, actor, and author, permeates this excursion into the exposed underbelly of cookie-contaminated corruption and moral bankruptcy. Come along for the ride and experience the black and white world of bagged confectionary and bruised libidos as the 1940s meets the 1990s in a head-on collision of balding Bozos and blubbery bimbos. Fasten your girdles and seatbelts for the gut-expanding excursion to excitement.
Once again a seaside serenade of sloshing oils and simmering scallops fills the crannies of Cape Cod with dingle-berries of dubious delight! Join a crew of crustacean craving civilians as they shuck their shells of inhibitions to become the truly truculent trespassers of a salty sanctuary. Visit the chefs of chivalry as they skewer the squeamish with talons of titillating tidbits, each one a calorie crunching course in obese obtrusiveness and opulent oddness. Come one, come all, and sample a smorgasbord of simple pleasures in this vacation video of vicarious vacillations.
