Humor

Summer and smoke (from pork chops) filters into every rip in my tee-shirt as legs and souls are bared for the infra-red-hot digital camera that's ON THE PROWL!

"I don't put myself into my movies because that would be too much--my pictures reflect my own feelings.  So hopefully it's entertaining.  Otherwise I can't bear looking at them, ha ha!"
–– Mike Kuchar

In this dream-portrait of Mike Kuchar, he floats through his memories as the sea, space and sky drift past. Wrapped in odd costumes, he frolics with the imaginary creatures surrounding him, and recalls the creatures of his own imagination.

This black and white drama of romance, adventure and outer space intervention was mounted at the San Francisco Art Institute. The plot concerns two groups of missionaries who depart for a tropical island inhabited by a population of attractive denizens who are ruled by a libido-fueled queen. She in turn is guided by the Star People who have their own carnal urges and the result is volcanic. The $400 budget guarantees cheap thrills and makes an explosive vehicle for the queen of these dime store dynamos: Linda Martinez (our Sharon Stone).

A month-long video workshop at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee results in a loud and action-packed drama. Layers of subplots revolve around the central theme of the violent and emotional body climax in redemption.

A photographer comes to my home to take pictures and gets a lensful. His mouth and his shutter snap away as I aim my finest attributes at his cold and hard equipment.

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.

Frisco anxiously awaits the pyrotechnic birth of a New Year while the remnants of holiday greenery still burn bright in all the right places. One of those places gives shelter to an Abyssinian animal of lethargic nature, while all about her the rumblings of tummies in turmoil foreshadow the gluttony of her bipedal guardian.

The Badger Series has issues and attempts, each episode, to resolve them. Recasting a glove puppet show through his own present day sensibilities, Paul assumes the role of kindly uncle mentor to a household of capersome woodland creatures. Mortality, self-sacrfice, depression, altered states of consciousness and transgressive art practices are all explored as part of their everyday lives together.

An intrepid academic travels the world, asking people if it is OK for someone to stab a friend in order to test the sharpness of a knife. If one person says it's OK and another says it's not OK, can both respondents be right? This video is an illustration of a multi-layered experiment designed to test the claims of several traditional philosophers that non-experts (folk) tend to hold rigidly absolutist views of morality.

Originally made during 1976-77 and re-mastered in March 2005, this selection contains a mix of visual jokes, conceptual humor and performance. Wegman "dialogs" with himself, close-ups of his mouth and teeth taking on different characteristics and voices; remakes of earlier black and white performances; and man and dog in focus, including a failed attempt to induce Man Ray to smoke.

Alarm Clock, 0:30

Doctor Patient, 2:20

Bad Movies, 2:00

Drop, 0:43

Fruit, 0:25

Smoking, 1:55

Horseshoes, 1:10

Fast, 0:15

Concerto, 1:20

With wit and humor, seven-year-old Kendra portrays ten female stereotypes, including an ingratiating Southern belle, a motorcycle-riding tough chick, and a simpering housewife. Under the rubric of playing dress-up, the video illustrates the pervasive, prescribed personalities available to women, and the early age at which girls recognize these choices. But, as outtakes reveal, spirited Kendra’s is infinitely more complex than the cardboard cut-outs she depicts.

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.

"Playing like a series of overheard conversations, Life and People grapples with communication, language, and recitation by staging common situations—a doctor’s prognosis, a teacher’s report to a parent—in the director’s signature deadpan, but replicating the awkward interactions of his animation to live-action performances."

-- BAMcinematek, Migrating Forms, 2014

In this early Tom Rubnitz, Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken collaboration, "Frieda" performs her rap song with a bevy of dolls as back-up singers and dancers. Features rock-bottom production values and song lyrics by Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken.

Visit a ghetto for the gifted in this Christmas tape that features painting, cooking, and a private tour of cubicles dedicated to culture. Revel in the un-whiteness of a Los Angeles holiday and bask in the heat of noshing newlyweds. Happy New Year!

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.

This episode includes: two more adverts, considerations of the future, a multiple projection spectacular in miniature, a riverine jaunt, much fog, and an ending x 2.

This is the fourth and final episode in The Variations cycle.

A glittering, Las Vegas-inspired music video for John Sex’s song "Bump and Grind It".  With an outrageous fountain hairdo (by stylist Danilo), Sex sings his catchy pop lyrics, “You gotta put your love behind it/Bump, bump, bump and grind it.”  Featuring the Bodacious Ta-Tas and inter-cut with Vegas showgirl footage.

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

At the 'Institute for Metaphysical Research and Spiritual Wellness', crackpots, perverts and guitar strumming UFO abductees struggle with the supernatural and their own carnal needs.

-- Mike Kuchar

Combining Rubnitz’s skillful manipulation of the familiar “look” of TV shows with an extraordinary range of characters, performer Ann Magnuson convincingly impersonates the array of female types seen on TV in a typical broadcast day. From glitzy to drab, from friendly housewife to desperate evangelist, Magnuson is a one-woman universe appearing on every channel, the star of every program—giving her all as the chameleon woman who is always on display.

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.

Amid the greenery of what should be a White Christmas, there sits the blackness close to my heart; and beyond that there bellows a legion of behemoths who know not shame nor guilt. A homeless herd of heaven on earth that smell of fish and exotic ports of call. A call I fail to heed.

John Smith, throughout his 40-year career, has approached the moving image from film, video and installations, generating a tremendous body of work that’s as diverse in its topics as it is in its methods. Weaving between early structuralist film and more personal, diaristic, documentary approaches to the places in which he lived, most notably London, his output is both broad and varied.