In A Case for the Closet, Glennda Orgasm and Judy LaBruce host an episode of Closet Talk. They discuss why they are for people staying in the closet, and attribute coming out of the closet to the mediocrity, and thus downfall, of gay culture. Glennda and Judy establish their new movement, XXX Gay (replacing the postqueer movement), and explain its philosphies and values.
A compilation of five early short films made between 1966 to 1969.
Hand Movie 1966, 6:00, b&w, silent, 8mm
Close-up of a hand, the fingers of which enact a sensuous dance. Camerawork by William Davis.
Volleyball (Foot Film) 1967, 10:00 b&w, silent, 16mm
A volleyball is rolled into the frame and comes to rest. Two legs in sneakers, seen from the knees down, enter the frame and stand beside it. Cut to new angle, same characters and actions. Camerawork by Bud Wirtschafter.
The inverted camera catches Nauman standing at the end of the room, slowly spinning around on one foot, first head down in one direction, then head up in the other direction. The tape seems to be as much a trial of Nauman’s endurance as an exercise in becoming a human machine, some type of cog or mechanized weather vane.
Using performance as a means of personal transformation and catharsis, Mitchell’s Death mourns the death of Montano’s ex-husband. Every detail of her story, from the telephone call announcing the tragedy, to visiting the body, is chanted by Montano as her face, pierced by acupuncture needles, slowly comes into focus then goes out again. The chanting is reminiscent of Buddhist texts, while the needles signify the pain that is necessary for healing and understanding.
giroscopio is a short experimental film by two artists, one in Pennsylvania and one in Puerto Rico, each in pandemic lockdown, each disoriented. Objects seem to control them; their bodies are unbalanced, unwieldy, comical. The horizon spins; the ground falls away; and yet a strange wonder reigns. / giroscopio es un cortometraje experimental de dos artistas, uno en Pensilvania y otro en Puerto Rico, cada uno en confinamiento por la pandemia, cada uno desorientado. Los objetos parecen controlarlos; sus cuerpos son desequilibrados, difíciles de manejar, cómicos.
Made with Stanton Kaye, and the only Lynda Benglis video with a discernible plot, The Amazing Bow-Wow follows the adventures of a talking, hermaphroditic dog given to Rexina and Babu by a carnival barker. Rexina and Babu soon decide to make the dog a sideshow act hoping to earn their fortune. Babu eventually becomes jealous of Rexina's devotion to the dog and one night attempts to castrate it, accidentally cutting off its tongue. The dog's head becomes hideous and skeletal, ruining its sideshow career and the profits.
The Videofreex document a street intervention by Turkish artist Tosun Bayrak (b.1926). The performance was to become a notorious example of the element of "shock" in contemporary art. Within the work:
Circle's Short Circuit is an experimental feature-length work with neither a beginning nor an end—the film can be viewed from any random point. It moves through a circle of five interlocking episodes that describe the phenomenon of interruption in contemporary communication through various forms and modes, investigating causes, consequences, and side-effects. Genres shift along the episodic path of this circle, moving from documentary to essay, through collage, simulated live-coverage, and silent film.
An evening-length collaboration work with the celebrated avant-garde pianist Margaret Leng Tan. The stage set is by Eiko & Koma and the lighting is by David Ferri.
Commissioned by and premiered at Japan Society, New York, October 18-20, 2007, celebrating Kazuo Ohno's 101th Birthday and the 100th anniversary of Japan Society.
In The Girls at the Dock, Teramana features performers at The Dock, a popular LGBTQ+ bar and nightclub in Cincinnati, Ohio. Teramana engages in backstage banter with the performers before a Tuesday night show, especially with Sirrocco, who was a friend and neighbor of Teramana's, and whom Teramana interviewed for an earlier video piece (Sirrocco). The Dock closed in 2018.
"I never knew Tuesday night could be so much fun... but it sure didn't do much for Wednesday." –Diane Teramana
C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), Part 1 is a collaborative video and performance work by artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, with AJ Blandford and Seattle-based band Kinski. Inhabiting the intersection of human movement and architecture, A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs) present a full-spectrum video, set to a score by rock quartet Kinski.
If television is truly the opiate of the masses, then Teddy Dibble is a living room crack dealer. This newly compiled series of television art comedy includes:
1. The Cough, 03:17
2. Secrets I’ll Never Tell, 01:02
3. The Shot Heard Around the World, 00:52
4. Rabbit Rabid Raw Bit, 00:18
5. The Man Who Made Faces, 01:11
6. 11:57 P.M. December 31st, 01:05
7. The Sound of Music, 02:25
Reading the billboards, the cars, the people, and the graffiti of the street as cultural signs, Rosler extracts the network of social power and domination that determines whose culture gets represented where, asking whose culture is reported in the press and whose is forced to exist in the street?
“In Baldessari’s wonderful Inventory, the artist presents to the camera for thirty minutes an accumulation of indiscriminate and not easily legible objects arranged in order of increasing size and accompanied by a deadpan description — only to have the sense of their relative size destroyed by the continual readjustment of the camera [in order to] keep them within the frame. Who can forget Adlai Stevenson’s solemn television demonstration of the ‘conclusive photographic evidence’ of the Cuban missile sites, discernible over the TV screen as only gray blurs?”
Illness, treatment, recovery, conversation. This experimental short presents stories of illness and disfunction, bringing together but also separating two performers, their stories, their bodies.
“Duet confronts illness with a caress; it takes us on a journey with two different people with two distinct conditions that present obstacles to very specific senses. A film that makes us address the way that we feel, hear, see, taste, and speak.” —Lynne Sachs
A performance about the artist’s experience in the aftermath of an accident.
Performed by my graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute, this one act play that I had written gets the best production values that $500 can afford. Shot in a large can company, we actually pre-recorded the dialogue in the "can" as the only quiet room in the facility was the toilet. The actors then went onstage to mouth the dialogue, which was piped into the P.A. system.
Hirsch’s most ambitious film to date and the pinnacle of his trilogy, Nothing New depicts the epic rescue mission of a man whose parachute is caught on electricity power lines. Involving hundreds of participants in a desolate field facing the Jordanian border in the Jordan Valley of Israel, this communal cinematic endeavor aims to re-unite, if only for a brief moment, the collective spirit of the socialist Kibbutz movement in Israel, a movement that has undergone significant ideological modifications.
A Body in Fukushima is a film created by dance artist Eiko Otake consisting of still photographs, inter-titles, and an original score. Photographs are selected from tens of thousands taken by historian/photographer William Johnston of Otake alone in the surreal landscapes of post-nuclear meltdown Fukushima, Japan. Otake edited the film and sound, which includes original music by Kronos Quartet’s David Harrington.
I once read a story about the Tibetan Buddhist Master, Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche in a book by death-teacher, Steven Levine. Trungpa went into his son's room and said to him, "I'm dying." And then he said to his son, "You are dying too." This story made a deep impression on me because death is the last taboo, the hidden boogey-man, the unspeakable. It was a beautiful lesson in impermanence this father gave his son.
The word-based art and performances crafted by world-renowned artist Alison Knowles (1933-2025) were central to the 1960s international Fluxus movement and its enduring legacy. Describing her experience as a student at Pratt University in the 1950s where she learned from Richard Lindner and Adolf Gottlieb, Knowles recalls her transition from Abstract Expressionist painting to the chance operations initiated by John Cage and Bertolt Brecht.
Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin deals primarily with monumentality, narcissism and the ways in which our heroes are embedded into our identities, and manifested through the body. Through a variety of gestures, the pervasiveness of this practice is highlighted alongside its ultimate, inevitable failure. The viewer moves through various stages of anxiety, idolization and actual touchdown with 1970s gay sex icon Peter Berlin himself, capturing both the apparent and the hidden.
Patti Smith asked if I would do a short film to accompany the release of her version of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. As neither of us are fans of the music video format or industry, we approached the project as a short film, with no lip sync, that would simply try to get at the heart of her version of the song. I shot in Super 8 film and pulled a few things from my archive. The film is a domestic portrait of Patti and her son, Jackson. William Blake was invited in the form of a plaster cast of his death mask.
"Mama mama mama...," a woman calls out again and again, over and over. Is it her child that she mimics, or is she calling for her own mother? A desperate video performance in the first person.
In a radical action like Nam June Paik destroying a violin, and rolling up in bandages the bodies of the players in in a concert by Yoko Ono, the international avant-garde group Fluxus changed not only art, but the concept of it.
