Performance

Interrupting the nightly news in an act of guerrilla television, Gómez-Peña returns to the persona of a Chicano-Aztec veejay—"The Mexican who talks back, the illegal Mexican performance artist with state of the art technology"—to elaborate the complications of American identity. This post-NAFTA Cyber Aztec pirate commandeers the television signal from his underground "Vato bunker", where virtual reality meets Aztec ritual. Gómez-Peña embodies the doubly radical Chicano performance artist, delivering radical ideas through a radical form of entertainment.

Why Not A Sparrow is about a girl who enters a fairy tale land where the distinction between human and other animal species is blurred. In this kingdom, survival and extinction are on the tip of every birds’ tongue.

"An Eco-Fable about a girl, a rare bird, who experiences the pleasures and perils of another animal kingdom."

— Big Muddy Film Festival, 2002

This horror picture is a sequel to THE KISS OF FRANKENSTEIN (a one act play I wrote a few years ago which was performed by my graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute). This one was made on the main campus and features Linda Martinez reprising the role of Sherri Frankenstein who is MAD AS HELL AND NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE! The budget given us was $400 but the picture looks big and robust, thanks to the attractive and healthy looking cast of students and guest performers who bring this tale of family vengeance to a rousing and tuneful finale.

Taste the delicious colors of "SWEET NOTHINGS" and observe the dice of desire being tossed on a gambler’s bed like yesterday’s candy. See tomorrow’s chocolate bunny melt into a brown puddle and feel a sticky, rainbow colored lolly-pop thats stuck to six feet of skin that secrets pent up passions... It’s all here for you to eat and is guaranteed to fatten your eyes!!

Sounds in the Distance is a video adaptation of David Wojnarowicz's 1982 book Sounds in the Distance: Thirty-five Monologues from the Road.

Cast in order of appearance: Allen Frame, Tara Kelly, Nan Goldin, Kirsten Bates, Elisabeth Walker, Bill Rice, Brian Burchill, Suzanne Fletcher, Frank Franca.

Directed by Kirsten Bates and Allen Frame, Produced by Peggy Bates

“This melodrama, staged by me and produced with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute, follows the turbulent journey of an aspiring singer as she flees a frigid environment to heat up a tepid career. Hauling along her decrepit mom and an equally cadaverous aunt, our heroine falls prey to a variety of libido-inspired stresses and also has a tragic debut at a disco club populated by repressed, trailer trash and ousted meteorologists. It’s a fast moving trip from north to south with many odd detours for the viewer to relish.”

--George Kuchar

As two heavily made-up women take turns directing each other and submitting to each other's kisses and caresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that the camera is their main point of focus. Read against feminist film theory of the "male gaze", the action becomes a highly charged statement of the sexual politics of viewing and role-playing; and, as such, is a crucial text in the development of early feminist video.

Shot during an NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) seminar in Berlin, a group fluxuates between guided meditation and discussion on consciousness and self-acceptance. Neuro-linguistic programming is a set of techniques and beliefs that are used primarily towards personal development. NLP is based on the idea that mind, body, and language create an individual's perception of the world, and an individuals behaviors can be changed by "perceiving and feeling yourself". Rapport focuses on the staging of the self that takes place during this kind of group therapy.

The body as a percussive instrument.

Performers: Ellen Krueger & Monica Wilson

In this cooking demonstration/performance, Sobell wears a chicken carcass over her face while dressing (literally, in baby clothes) a chicken to be cooked for dinner. Cooing and breast feeding the chicken as she would an infant, Sobell brings two stereotypical female roles—that of care giver and that of cook—psychotically close, emphasizing the potential dark side of women’s intimate association with food in a way similar to Suzanne Lacy’s Learn Where the Meat Comes From.

In The Body Parlor, both man and sheep as combined sacrificial bodies become subjects of biological investigation. As symbols of ritual sacrifice, they are bodies that give of themselves. In discovering new forms of health-care (regenerative medicine) and tissue engineering (such as stem cell research), the body becomes sacrificial material for the greater purpose of a social good. The performers employ the material objects, either as products of or as extensions of the body as a way of exploring giving from one's self in sacrifice.

Performers throw themselves into an underground passageway. They exit through the mirror, a symmetrical mirror world which exists because of the placement and angle of the mirror as an upside-down place.

Performers: Ellen Krueger and Monica Wilson

A 12-year-old Olympic swimmer and her mother (both played by July) speak to the public about going for the gold.

“As the film progresses through subtle editing-in-reverse, July reveals the world around the televised facade. ... [T]he 23-year-old performer convincingly plays both Dawn Schnavel and her mom, or rather, vanishes into them. What’s noticeable isn’t so much the ease with which July transforms herself into a pre-teen girl and an older woman but the similarities and differences between the daughter and the mother July becomes.”

Made from silent black and white tube camera footage of the artist taken by her father in the early 70s, this series of loops—through the examination of particular moments and gestures— is evocative for what it reveals and conceals about their relationship.

This title is also available on Helen Mirra Videoworks: Volume 1.

With sampled image and sound sequences referring to one another in a precisely calculated rhythmic alternation on four projection surfaces, Călin Dan draws a portrait of the city of Bucharest. Dilapidated tower blocks next to estates of terraced houses, Roma families camping with their horses and carts in the wastelands in the midst of the city, broken streets and new shopping paradises--today the formerly communist Bucharest is a city in upheaval, full of social contradictions and oppositions.

Mike Builds a Shelter is a performance comedy with apocalyptic overtones, a narrative extension of Smith's installation Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter/Snack Bar. In this darkly humorous morality play, Smith contrasts Mike's rural adventures in a pastoral landscape with his home fallout shelter. Throughout, the dual narratives are intercut with episodes of Mike's Show on cable, in which Mike's banal domestic activities are eagerly if passively received by living-room TV viewers.

In this video, Glennda Orgasm and Chris Teen travel to Washington, DC to attend a feminist art exhibition titled Walk the Goddess Walk at the District of Columbia Arts Center. The pair talk to the owner of the gallery, artists included in the show, and attendees, including Francy Caprino, Teena Cromwell, Andrew Melon, Camille Paglia, and Joseph Virgilio.

An episode of Glennda and Friends, hosted by Glennda Orgasm and Chris Teen.

In Takeover of the Empire State Building, Brenda and Glennda visit the top of the Empire State Building as it is lit up in lavender for Gay Pride. They interview both tourists visiting the building, and activists who have come to see the lights. Ultimately, they question whether this gesture is adequate, or if there is still a way to go until equality is achieved.

Interspersed with clips of Judy Garland films and televised concerts, Glennda Orgasm and Judy LaBruce (Bruce LaBruce's Garland inspired drag persona) travel to the West Village to "discover their gay roots". They discuss the current state of queer culture with people attending gay bars and patroning queer businesses, with a cameo from Sadie Benning. They discuss the idea of the post-queer movement, and give guests a "post-queer quiz". 

An episode of Glennda and Friends, hosted by Glennda Orgasm and Judy LaBruce.

Filmed in June 1998 at the Whitney Museum of American Art and produced by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts/Dance Collection. Breath is a creative archive project of Eiko & Koma’s living installation of the same title commissioned by the Whitney Museum. For the living installation Breath, Eiko or Koma was in the installation during all hours that the museum was open.

Event Fission is an outdoor performance on the Hudson River landfill, produced by Creative Time. Eiko & Koma danced with a huge white flag billowing on top of a sand dune as the audience watched from below. The white flag was used to symbolically attack the newly developed downtown buildings. On a lower level of the landfill, to which Eiko & Koma tumbled down, there were fires on four corners of the performing area. At the end of the performance of 50 minutes, Eiko & Koma were swallowed into a deep hole they had dug and hid, disappearing with a blast of sand.

Grace + Gravity is a choreographed performance that reflects on Simone Weil’s poetic and profound writing entitled Gravity and Grace.

Director: Cynthia Madansky
Dancer: Idil Kemer
Voice: Lara Baladi
Cinematographer: Meryem Yavus
Sound: Zeena Parkins

In this video the artist states that a public work demonstrates what qualifies as art within his conception. Like Beached, it was also shot in a marshy area near the sea and in sequences separated by dissolves. One sees five different actions related to Broken Off. The artist breaks a tree branch, scrapes and kicks the ground with his foot, snaps a stick in two on a fence, scrapes a stone with his fingernail. At the end he pulls the line plug from the video, drawing attention to the mechanics of the medium.

In New Report, Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy are reporters at WKRH - the feminist news station that is "pregnant with information." As Henry Irigaray (Hardy) and Henry Stein-Acker-Hill (Greenwood), these two lesbian feminist artists stage reports on and with their friends, their social herstories, their nerves, and their bodies. It is urgently broadcast live to the newsroom and out to their studio audience.

This extraordinary performance carries a wealth of associative meanings in the sexual dynamics of privacy and power -- man and woman pitted against each other in a struggle for mental and physical control.

 "In Pryings, one of his earliest and least verbal tapes, the artist is seen trying to force open and gain entry into any and all of the orifices of a woman's face. His persistence outlasts the running time of the tape, as does the persistence of the woman under attack, who manages to persevere in her attempt to guard her metaphysical privacy."