This video presents a history of alternative spaces in New York City during the late 1960s and early 1970s, focusing on two galleries that no longer exist. The work produced in these two spaces forms the basis of the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s 1981 exhibition Alternatives in Retrospect: An Overview 1969-1975. Curator Jacki Apple, who produced the video, assembled documentation from the galleries and reconstructed artworks for the exhibition.
THE DRESS: is a projection prop created for a performance piece at the Art Institute in 1984. It was installed in March 2021, suspended in front of a building on the Bowery as both a memorial to my grandmother, a Hungarian immigrant and master seamstress, and to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, of 1911, which occurred a few blocks north of this site.
-EJay Sims
A house covered with beer cans, a tribute to the orange; Eyeopeners features seven Houston, Texas, folk art environments, eye-opening creations that are monuments to the wonders of ingenuity and imagination. Expressions of profound instincts and powerful urges, the Eyeopeners sites remind us of the unselfconscious heights of expression that self-taught artists can attain. The video features the artists on-camera talking about these personal journeys and the forces that motivate their wo
Public Discourse is an in-depth study of illegal installation art. The primary focus is on the painting of street signs, advertising manipulation, metal welding, postering and guerrilla art, all performed illegally. Public Discourse is about passionate artists who want their work to be seen by a wide range of people rather than be confined to the systemic structures of galleries and museums.
Dennis Adams (b. 1948) is an American conceptual artist whose work includes photography, text, and installation. Adams is best known for his projects involving structures placed in urban bus shelters, uncompromisingly inserted into the public sphere. These politically charged photographs and their accompanying texts are not used to make overtly ideological statements, but are open-ended in ways that challenge viewers to test their own convictions.
Blood and Guts in High School features actress Stephanie Vella in a series of video installations* that re-imagine punk-feminist icon Kathy Acker's book of the same title. The book received noteriety from 1978-1982 during the rise of Reagan republicanism and the emergence of punk rock. In Parnes' interpretation, each video-chapter presents a typical scene in the life of Janie bracketed by U.S. news events from the time period in which the book was written.
A brief glimpse of a confessional detour during a pictorial drift.
Dachau 1974 was recorded on Korot’s visit to Dachau, Germany, the site of the former concentration camp, in the Fall of 1974. What she saw when she arrived was a sanitized former prisoner camp that was now a tourist site. Organizing the material she recorded at the camp for a four-channel work based on weaving structures, she created a non-verbal narrative work that moves the viewer from outside the camps walls, into barracks, past crematoria, to a quiet pastoral scene in its final images. This 24-minute work focuses on the architecture that remain
Public Discourse is an in-depth study of illegal installation art. The primary focus is on the painting of street signs, advertising manipulation, metal welding, postering and guerrilla art, all performed illegally. Public Discourse is about passionate artists who want their work to be seen by a wide range of people rather than be confined to the systemic structures of galleries and museums.
Dennis Oppenheim was a prominent figure in various art developments throughout the ’70s. Oppenheim moved through body/performance art and related video work to earthworks to his current large-scale “factories.” In all of his work, the transference of energy is an underlying concern.
A documentary about Holt’s public installation work Dark Star Park in Arlington, Virginia, this video is about the process of developing and building the park. It includes commentary from the architects, contractors, foremen, and engineers who worked on the project, as well as with people who frequent the park. Holt transforms a site of urban blight into an aesthetically stimulating spot that addresses environmental issues.
Copyright Holt/Smithson Foundation.
This extensive interview with California artist Doug Hall (b. 1944) provides unique insight into the culture and politics of experimental artistic production during the 1970s. Discussing the founding of the performance group TR Uthco, Hall offers context for his contribution to the field of video art, and shares stories of his collaborations with Ant Farm, Videofreex, and others. Ranging from his early years as an art student, to his romance with artist Diane Andrews Hall, to reflections on technology in art, this interview importantly extends the discourse surrounding topics of archive, performativity, and autobiography—subjects that have come to define the contours of video art today.
Private Parts is a document of a police raid on an alleged pornographic photography exhibition organized by Rhode Island School of Design students and hung in the Electron Movers* gallery at 128 North Main Street in Providence, Rhode Island. The intent of the photography show was humor, but the meaning of the exhibition was misconstrued by powerful Providence citizens – who hadn't seen the show – and a police raid was the result. The night before the opening, an officer was sent to evaluate the show and, finding nothing wrong with its content, info
Public Discourse is an in-depth study of illegal installation art. The primary focus is on the painting of street signs, advertising manipulation, metal welding, postering and guerrilla art, all performed illegally. Public Discourse is about passionate artists who want their work to be seen by a wide range of people rather than be confined to the systemic structures of galleries and museums.
Strip / Musrara is part of Assor's ongoing “Strip” series, set in Jerusalem’s Musrara neighborhood. It is an attempt to create a living map that is both collective and subjective – a plurality of combined perspectives. Not a map of the exact measurements of the neighborhood, but of the experience of moving through it, together and alone, locals and strangers, intersecting and drifting apart.
This project on family violence, spanned two years and several sites across the country, and involved wrecked cars in sculptural installations. The cars were reconfigured by women and children who suffered violence at the hands of loved ones. Linked to each other through common experience, women from a domestic violence shelter in Pittsburgh, a family violence program at Bedford Hills prison, children from shelters in Niagara Falls and Cleveland, teenage girls in Oakland, and politicians on Staten Island all collaborated in making the cars.
In collaboration with Ishmael Houston-Jones.
On September 1, 2022, Eiko and Ishmael Houston-Jones performed in Beverly McIver's painting exhibition Full Circle, curated by Kim Boganey.
The whole event took place in connected galleries of her show, but this excerpt is when Ishmael and Eiko danced a duet in front of the paintings that were also a duet of a sort.
Camera by Julie Ganas.
Edited by Eiko Otake.
Framing the solo exhibition Prophetic Memory, this video remediates images of the NYC nonprofit art gallery, Artists Space, with the filmmaker’s grandmother's descriptions of how she would use her interior design skills to design their exhibition. Because she couldn’t travel there because of disability and the risks posed by the Covid-19 pandemic (even as this show occurred during the first wave of NYC art spaces “returning to normal"), she relies on the images she’s watching and describing to visualize her ideas.
Mary Miss (b.1944) is an American environmental artist who works with concepts of illusion, distance, and perception. Her site-specific work frequently uses both ancient and modern architecture as references. Miss's 1977 installation Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys at the Nassau County Museum of Art, served as one of Rosalind Krauss's inspirations when she defined postmodern sculpture in her article, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field."
Videofreex documentation from October 9th, 1971 of a crowd celebrating the opening of the Yoko Ono retrospective exhibition, This Is Not Here, at the Everson Musem of Art in Syracuse, NY. The Videofreex document Yoko Ono’s plane landing and her getting on a bus to go to the exhibition at the Everson Museum. Once at the exhibition, we find a man inside bathing in a bathtub, who is then forced to exit by a museum official.
Danny Tisdale is a performance artist from New York City. His performances challenge prevailing ideas of race, assimilation, appropriation and success by offering passers-by the chance to racially change their appearance as a means to achieve greater financial success. The mimicry of museological practices of cataloguing and preservation, display and presentation provides one of a range of rhetorical frameworks upon which Danny Tisdale hangs his practice of social critique.
Two performers, Acconci and a young woman, occupy two wooden boxes in separate rooms, connected via monitor, camera, and microphone. The situation is symbolic of a vicarious and distended power relation, a relationship built through and reliant upon technological mediation. Watching her on a monitor, Acconci coaches the woman through tying herself up, urging her to pretend he is winding the rope around her legs and neck.
Text and Commentary is a work of several components. There are five finely woven weavings programmed with slight changes in pattern structure as you read from weave 1 to weave 5. Opposite these in the exhibition are five video monitors built into a wall.There are also five weavers’ notations of enlarged sections of each of the five weaves, and pictographic notations of the video portion of the work. All of these provide varying perspectives of virtually the same information but in a variety of scales, media, and contexts and translated into differe
Matthew Coolidge is a founder and director of The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), an organization dedicated to raising awareness about how land is apportioned, used and perceived by its inhabitants. Through exhibitions, publications, and guided tours, Coolidge and the CLUI seek to foster and encourage a heightened sense of awareness of natural surroundings. In this interview, Coolidge defines a ‘land art spillover effect,’ in which the perceived significance of the landscape seems to increase the closer people get to a piece of environmental art.
A wide-screen video diptych of scenes shot during two different periods in Moscow––old footage from 1990 and newer from 2009. There's no linear narrative as the "story" is told principally in the juxtaposition of the two images of the city with this almost 20yr gap. It runs 31 minutes as a single screening, but it is meant to be seen as an installation since its visual theme, from an American perspective, is the recurring cycle of Russian upheaval. It is also principally a "fractal" piece, meaning that its story is replicated in every scene.
–– Ken Kobland
