Humor

“The tape ultimately addresses all the big questions — death, origin and family, religion — as well as the small discomforts of the body, only to reverse their order of importance.”

— Margaret Morse, Framework (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions)

Laurel Klick and I were members of the feminist art program at CalArts and became close lifelong friends. Laurel is behind the camera as I recount my one-sided flirtation with a guy who worked at CalArts in the equipment “cage” - the cage where I checked out the video Portapak - the Portapak we utilized to record my anecdote. My story about an everyday interaction would become a trademark of my work. “Laurel and Susan” was not edited or presented publicly until 2022.

The tenth episode in the ongoing Badger series. Themes? Living in the culture of the copy; originality and ownership; inexplicable illness; life on other planets. And wonder, times seven.

Prizewinner at FLEX festival.

“In her brilliant video Art Herstory, [Freed] has restaged art history, putting herself in the model’s role in numerous paintings.... Time dissolves under her humorous assault — one moment in the painting, then out of the canvas and into that period, then back in the studio."

— Jonathan Price, “Video Art: a Medium Discovering Itself,” Art News 76 (January 1977) 

An excerpt of this title (14:49) is also included on Surveying the First Decade: Volume 1.

Made in Germany, October 14th, 2004

While the Iraq war continues, a day's sightseeing and the features of a German hotel provoke a stream of thoughts about events large and small.

Museum Piece is the second 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.

Skating softly, but carrying a big stick, performer Kristin Elliott engages in an interlocking series of skits involving simple, slapstick activities performed by a pristine outdoor pool and in a venetian blind windowed corner of a room.  Bodies of water - an aquarium is transported into the interior space - become a major link between these two settings.  These containers of water end up functioning as both wombs and graves.

An electronic variety show featuring poetry, theatrics, dance, songs, and a plot concerning the cultivation of literary innocence and the preservation of Rondo Hatton's memory (a horror actor in 1940s B movies). A dense work made even denser by staged incompetence. Made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute.

The rivers are in flood stage during a scenic tour of Tulsa; while in El Reno, Oklahoma, it's as dry as a two-week old peach cobbler. The locals puff up on breaded catfish while an influx of British visitors seek in vain a vegetarian platter amid the thunder boom and hail clatter. 

Based on a Swedish folk tale, The Sausage tells the humorous story of two sisters, three wishes, and a calamitous obsession with a sausage. The Sausage is the first completed episode of Fairy Fantastic!, a fairy and folk tale series presenting gender fluid adaptations of classic tales.

"Weeks before the 2006 midterm elections in the U.S., Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez came to the United Nations and blew everyone's minds with his "smells of sulfur" speech about Bush. It was an emperor wears no clothes moment with perfect comic timing. Bush was officially a lame duck after that speech. No matter what nutty things Chávez ever did, our nation's children will always be grateful." 

– Jim Finn

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 first work in the HalfLifers' Action Series plunges into a world of frantic heroes trapped in a continual crisis of dissolution and reification. An ordinary domestic setting is recast as a psychoactive landscape in which the concept of function becomes situational and fluid. Only through the strategic application of organic and inorganic “devices” can this zone be successfully navigated and the mission be saved.

In this rare and humorous record of the art dialogue of the late 1960s, Holt and "guest" Robert Smithson assume opposing artistic viewpoints: the uptight, intellectual New Yorker versus the laid-back Californian. Their play-acting lays bare the cliches and stereotypes of a "bi-coastal" art world. While Holt stresses analytic, systematic thinking, Smithson represents the polar opposite, privileging visceral experience and instinct, saying, "I never read books; I just go out and look at the clouds." and "Why don't you stop thinking and start feeling?"

A newly re-mastered collection of 17 vignettes and performances to camera, produced during 1974-75. Some use props and sight gags to preposterous effect; others star Man Ray, lapping milk from a glass, stopping marbles and dropping balls. Many of the pieces feature off-screen dialogue, including a comparison of the differences between audio- and videotape, and video and film.

Contents:

Nocturne, 7:49

Stalking, 2:06

Audio Tape and Video Tape, 2:04

Dancing Tape, 5:27

A colorful and sinister tale of hypno-therapists delving into the quagmire of UFO abductions, and wallowing in the subconscious muck of their own primal urges. A sprawling saga of consuming passion performed by enrollees of the San Francisco Art Institute under the direction of Professor George Kuchar in Studio 8.

Aroma of Enchantment is a video essay investigating the fascination Japanese teenagers have for the America of the 1950s and '60s, sporting bobby socks and hair soaked with Brylcreem. Weaving together historical anecdotes about General Douglas MacArthur and his own feelings of alienation in the midst of Japanese culture, Lord focuses on stories told by collectors of American memorabilia in Japan and advocates of Americanization.

TV's invasion of viewers' domiciles gets turned upside down in the video as a fan's (Millner) domestic life is superimposed onto the set of Roseanne, driving home unexpected reverberations as the nuclear family teeters on the edge of dysfunction. A schmooze-fest between Millner and Roseanne ends by detonating the UNcommon desire that both fan and star articulate, to GO TOO FAR. Note: This tape is a director’s cut of the version originally telecast as part of the PBS mini-series, Signal to Noise, about the videomaker’s obsession with Roseanne.

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.

"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)

“Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.”

-- Graham Harvey, Animism

Trance dance and water implosion, a kino-line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena. Filmed in a single take at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of a Saramaccan animist's everyday are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new Trypps -- embodiment is our eternal everything.

Psychologically disturbed Professor Herville (Joe Gibbons) analyzes the literary classic Moby Dick. He gives a tour of the Herman Melville Museum and makes much ado about the book’s Oedipial themes. Breer mixes in footage of the Hollywood adaptation starring Gregory Peck and her own irrepressible animation.

This title is also available on Emily Breer: Classics Exposed.

The fourth collaboration between Jessie Mott and Steve Reinke continues its melancholic musings on desire and mourning, this time with more twerking. Hypnotic backgrounds and eccentric animals lend to its psychedelic children's cartoon vibe, and the signature Madonna and Stockhausen soundtrack enhances the desperation for paradise among those extra long tongues and snake-y bodies.

As recent state cut-backs force many mental patients out into the real world, Tony Oursler and Joe Gibbons team up to address psychiatric deinstitutionalization from a comic angle. After years of being cared for, Tony, Joe and their dog Woody leave the cuckoo’s nest and reluctantly face the prospect of finding jobs and cooking their own meals. Their darkly comic adventures include a comatose Tony tuning in to daytime TV, and Joe fantasizing about death while strolling in the park.

A distinguished looking man (performance artist Richard Layzell) is apparently trapped in an ever changing void of colour, locked in a power play with a perversely operated camera. A mute, caged, charismatic TV presenter he is by turns charming, menacing, educational, confused. At times he appears to have great powers. A voiceover tells us extraordinary things — how this man is special — the first man to 'have a baby'. Hallucinogenic flash-frames punctuate the colour field to give us a view of his world's disturbing and alien futuristic logic.

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.