Humor

A promotional vehicle with lane-changing tendencies, but both hands kept on the wheel at all times.

First video in The Variations cycle.

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.

Lesser Apes tells the story of a love affair between a primatologist, Farrah, and a female bonobo ape, Meema. Bonobos are the species with which humans share the most DNA, but unlike our species, they are matriarchal, live without conflict, and are unabashedly sexual. A paean to perversion, the film combines animation, live action and song to challenge attitudes about sex, language and our relationship to nature.

A wide-ranging look at pictures I collect on my walls and in my head. A look at pictures I concoct with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute, and objects d’art collected by those whose picture is taken by my picture-taking machine.

“To master the one-minute time span requires considerable discipline, and few pieces, if any, had been shaped as genuine miniatures—most having the appearance of being extracts from larger works. The notable exception was John Smith’s Gargantuan, which was not only the right length for the idea, but actually incorporated a triple pun on the word ‘minute.’”

— Nicky Hamlyn, “One Minute TV 1992”, Vertigo (Spring 1993)

"A wonderfully witty example of how to conduct pillow talk with a small amphibian."

— Elaine Paterson, Time Out London

A leisurely meditation on East West interactions involving accidental Occidental mishaps and Oriental dental ingenuity. Throw in some parakeets and a squeamish socialite, mix with a dash of depression and then stir thoroughly with a dollop of docudrama. Voila: a gum-flapping snack of lip smacking goo with scented whiffs of wisdom to sniff!

Made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute, this video drama explores the thrills and terrors of the Big Top as a travelling circus comes to town bringing with it the promise of cotton candy, eternal youth, and high-flying beefcake. A mother and son become enmeshed in a web of sin and sawdust, licorice and lust, as a town confronts its own hideous image in a maze of mirrors at a carnival of lost and found souls. 

In Reel 1, newly re-mastered in 2005, a series of vignettes and jokes to camera take place, some starring Wegman’s droll and obliging canine partner Man Ray. Both the human body and props are employed to amusing effect: lamps talk, a microphone is dragged around, stomachs sing. At one point, Wegman dribbles milk on to the floor, to be lapped up by a thirsty dog.

Contents:

Microphone, 0:47

Pocketbook Man, 1:19

Anet and Abtu, 0:47

The Ring, 1:11

Randy’s Sick, 0:16

Milk/Floor, 1:02

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.

A nostalgic glazier shows off his knowledge and expounds his theories. Taking glassmaking processes and history as its central theme, Slow Glass explores ideas about memory, perception and change.

Linda Martinez stars in this sequel to the horror series, which relishes in colorful detail the misadventures of Sherry Frankenstein.  Made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute, the viewer is plunged into a world of young and old as they tackle the monsters within and without. Chock full of entergetic scenes filled with all the opulence that only $600 could purchase, this epic of good gone bad will stun you with its massive verbosity and visual voracity. The plot deals with Ms. Frankenstein's mission to save the body and souls of strumpets in heat.

An audience-interactive game of Mad Libs, with support from a linguistically challenged newcomer. We replace various parts of speech in newspaper articles to create new, customized meanings.

Prompted by Apple’s Siri to ask questions, Magenheimer takes the AI invitation seriously and invents a long list of queries. We see them appear one by one over scanned images from Architectural Digest magazine’s idealized interiors of 1981, the year Magenheimer was born and the year Ronald Reagan became president.

A young girl buys a weird toy from a charity shop. She forms such an intense relationship with it that it develops special ways of communicating and a strange connection to her that seems to defy the laws of physics. As the situation escalates, it seems that repression is the only way forward. First conceived of as a kind of fairy tale that goes wrong, this is a piece about learning the “rules” of grown-up reality and an extrapolation of the consequences of “over-identifying” with toys. A digital video with digital video effects, live-action, and model/object animation.

A brief trip to the Miami '09 art festival was the moving (or swimming) force to instigate this travelogue. There are some bathing sequences sprinkled about and lots of munching going on in this latest addition to my Christmas video series. There's even a Santa Claus figure trodding across sand instead of snow; but don't let that dismaying personage in shades of gray discolor an otherwise plentiful poo-poo platter of pulchritude.

One of my weather diary series out in Oklahoma. The tone is wistful, the surroundings wispy (with some puffs of pungency). The TV is on and the porcelain is smeared with some residue atrocity from a previous passion. But all is well as emptiness persists beyond the four walls of this prairie mausoleum.

Animal Attraction is a documentary about the relationship between people and animals that questions the way we project our hopes and desires onto our pets, and ascribe human qualities and attributes to their gestures. The video was inspired by the plight of the filmmaker who was frustrated by the obnoxious behavior of her cat, Ernie. As a last resort, she gave in to a friend's suggestion to contact an animal communicator. This is her journey with interspecies telepathic communicator, Dawn Hayman, from Spring Farm CARES, an animal sanctuary in upstate New York.

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

A massive video drama made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute that chronicles a man and wife parting ways amid the clatter of dice in a gambling resort on a painted desert of painted women and panting men. A large cast of digitized divas and international inepts march across this corlorful canvas of romanticized rubbish and low-budget lushness.

A thirty-three minute video odyssey documenting one woman's search for the miracle of the Virgin Mary. A must-see for recovering Catholics and their families and friends worldwide. From Italy to Portugal, from France to Georgia, from Iowa City to Peru, Miracle recovers a newly-minted set of the Seven Deadly Sins on the way to immortalizing the latest modern religious trend: "Spiritual Tourism." Rated S for satirical.

The filmmaker accepts the challenge of the philosopher and changes not only a table but also chairs, shoes, jugs, teapots and almost everything else lying around his house.

"What prevents me from supposing that this table either vanishes or alters its shape when no one is observing it and then when someone looks at it again changes back? But one feels like saying – who is going to suppose such a thing?"

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969)

Introduces the audience to the rockin' talkin' pony, who provides musical accompaniment for a series of Texas country-dance lessons.

This title is also available on Ben Coonley: Trick Pony Trilogy.

A chance to view the upper Bronx as a mantle of whiteness cloaks its natural splendor like icing on a cake and things all blubbery bob to the surface for air and a sniff of the "good life."

Between basement and stoop, PBRs and politics, two bros discuss rock music history, protest, incarcerated relatives, fine cheese, the book plot of Bridge to Terabithia, and lesbian girlfriends.

Accidental Confessions combines scenes from a demolition derby with statements taken from automobiles insurance claims. In these claims, drivers were instructed to summarize the details of their accidents in the fewest words possible, resulting in absurd and contradictory statements.