Humor

A California winter turns the left coast into a brew of foaming festivities while landlubbers leap for joy in the spray of salty slurpings.

In The Great Mojado Invasion (The Second US - Mexico War), writer/performer Guillermo Gómez-Peña and filmmaker Gustavo Vazquez combine Chicano wit and political vision to create an ironic, post-millennial and postmodern look at the future of U.S./Mexican relations. Both artist and director generate a complex commentary on history, society, pop culture, the politics of language and the repercussions of ethnic dominance.

The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century. 

"Each disquieting image breaks down into a pixel, each pithy phrase into a word, and Reinke's stream of video-thought continues apace. The corpse won't stop talking."

— Jon Davies, Images Festival: Spotlight Essay, April 2018

This is sort of an Easter holiday affair as it has bunny images in it, plus the finale was shot on an Easter Sunday visit to a friend’s gallery. A springtime walk through a Pennsylvania landscape and a nautical section featuring an ex-student with X-rated ambitions helps this video to lay a colorful egg.

Walt Disney's re-imagineering of Martin Scorsese's classic film Taxi Driver follows Mickey Mouse-obsessed Travis Bickle as he looks for love in a rapidly transforming New York City. A 'fair use' parody by Bryan Boyce.

"A brilliant video essay."

-- Roger Ebert

“In The Girl Chewing Gum a commanding voiceover appears to direct the action in a busy London street. As the instructions become more absurd and fantasized, we realize that the supposed director (not the shot) is fictional; he only describes—not prescribes—the events that take place before him. Smith embraced the ‘spectre of narrative’ (suppressed by structural film) to play word against picture and chance against order.

In i am wise enough to die things go (2023), Syms explores the idea of psychosis through an unnamed protagonist reciting a monologue. Responding to the work of iconic animator Chuck Jones, Syms transfers the form and narrative structure of an animated short into live-action. Working with the inherent challenges and restrictions brought about by this sort of translation, she delves into both the breaking up of images and the breakdown of the psyche.

A high and low fidelity record of obsessions past and present. A hooded man named Cobra Commander (drawn naked) and a boy with black glasses. A fanged woman named Shadow-La and a girl in a rose colored wig. Belinda (Heaven on Earth), Madonna (Live to Tell), and headphones (worn naked). An airport terminal. Home. The Montgomery Ward catalog circa 1980. That orange bedspread, that red flowered couch.

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."

The Jersey Devil lives again in this work the students and I mounted (or disrobed) for skeptical scrutiny.

"Here is Everything presents itself as a message from The Future, as narrated by a cat and a rabbit, spirit guides who explain that they've decided to speak to us via a contemporary art video because they understand this to be our highest form of communication. Their cheeky introduction, however, belies the complex set of ideas that fill the remainder of the film. Death, God, and attaining and maintaining a state of Grace are among the thematic strokes winding their way through the piece, rapturously illustrated with animation, still and video imagery." 

(tell me why): The Epistemology of Disco is an often humorous, at times sarcastic and poignant look at the role that disco music has played in the formation of gay male identity.

A day in the life of a professional photographer (Wegman) and his eager student (Smith), this tape offers a humorous, at times surreal, how-to instructional course in photography. Filled with practical advice, the tape sardonically centers itself more on the need to cultivate an effective artistic persona than actually taking any photographs. Wegman asks: "Before you carve out your own niche, it’s important to ask yourself one tough question: do you have the aptitude?"

This wonderful and wide-ranging saga of New Age sensibilities in conflict with down-and-dirty urges takes the viewer on a roller coaster ride into the freak show world of actors and actresses in need of adequate direction. The cast is flamboyant and floundering in this tale of sickness and motherly love competing for the souls of the sexually ambiguous as they mature into mammals of desire and despair. Witness the majesty of digital wizardry as it attempts to zest up the zombie zeitgeist inherent in these fast-paced productions of desperate means.

Color Schemes was exhibited in its installation form (with a self-service washing machine) at the Whitney Museum in 1990. Using the washing machine as a metaphor for the great American “melting pot” of ethnicity, the video presents individuals from a variety of ethnic backgrounds “representing” their ethnicity — in one sense by being on camera, and also by acting out or speaking about ethnic divisions. Cheang plays with this “overdetermiNation” of ethnicity, creating a multi-layered discourse on racism and assimilation that condemns the former and refuses to condone the latter.

Spit Sandwich is a compilation of 19 comical and entertaining works from the master of deadpan. Experiments with the video signal combine with visual jokes and one-liners to hilarious effect. Includes: II got . .Spit Sandwich is a compilation of 19 comical and entertaining works from the master of deadpan. Experiments with the video signal combine with visual jokes and one-liners to hilarious effect. Includes: II got . .

In this interview, American cartoonist and author Lynda Barry (b. 1956) describes the philosophy of teaching that has inspired and mobilized her art since the 1970s. For Barry, the connection between gesture and thought collide in drawing and expose the therapeutic possibilities of art. Whether teaching undergraduate art students or prison inmates, her goal is to help others develop art making skills as an “external immune system” that will protect and monitor their emotional and mental health.

Animals debate the sticky subject of body dysmorphia and the merits of reconstructive surgery in this short animation.  

"Jessie Mott wrote the script for this, recorded the voices and made the drawings.  I constructed the soundtrack and animated her drawings."
--Steve Reinke

This flashy drama about theater life was made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute and follows the various personalities that make up the show-biz milieu of a fictitious city on a fog bound coast. The fog is thick and so is the plot as it plunges into a series of dramatic interludes which include musical numbers, war scenes, ballets, and erotic shenanigans involving the living and the animated dead.

A volcano self-destructs ages ago, leaving in its wake a great emptiness which is filled with all that is cold and blue. Into that blueness there gazes a horde of cellulite-laden damsels pursued by balding bullies with light meters unzipped, ready to specify F stops and G spots. A great and mythical beast lurks within and without, and below there spreads out, for all to see, the blue gaze of mount Mayama; once a vengeful bitch… now a magnificent ditch: a crater of unapproachable serenity and scorn: a crater lake.

After working in solitude at the studio, the artist leaves, uncomfortable with the idea of having to put on a face for the art world, where they expect you to say something articulate in order to grab the curator's attention.

In this interview, American artist, independent curator, writer, and experimental filmmaker, Vaginal Davis reflects on her initiation into the punk rock and art scenes of Los Angeles during the 1980s and 90s, her stylistic influences, and her ongoing efforts to theorize queerness and visuality. Caught between the opposing poles of Hollywood classicism and the rawness of punk, Davis defines her unapologetically gender-bending, campy, and at times aggressively critical performances as scenarios, rather than spectacles or entertainment.

A rockumentary about East Village club Pyramid star John Sex. The blonde, coifed performer exposes his penchant for padding his package with socks and explains that his last name is the result of his ancestors’ “Americanization” of his native name Sexton. Featuring Miss Maggie, Katy K, Tom Rubnitz, Kenny Scharf, and Kestutis Nakas.

This title is also available on Tom Rubnitz Videoworks: Sexy, Wiggy, Desserty.

If you lived here you’d be home by now occurs during the years of Williamsburg Brooklyn’s overheated real estate market, just before the 2008 financial bubble burst. Ligorano Reese’s video renders the New York luxury high rise market of the aughts into an extraterrestrial lunar landscape. The voiceover is cut up and collaged from actual real estate copy descriptions of luxury living amenities. The video played in a storefront installation on Bedford Avenue, ground zero for Brooklyn’s rabid transformation of the East River in New York City.

The waters run deep as massive jaws chomp and bubbles burst in a world gone mad with technological delusion and prehistoric puppetry.