Performance

Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun's finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This black and white grainy quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, usually hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure.

A short story about new bodies, the power of denial, and a state of no sunshine. Two infantile bodies float in a cyberspace ball, connected by two subconscious bodies in the background. The attempt at unification and metamorphosis is interrupted by one part as the other is liberated. A glance over the shoulder means destruction.

The sources for the soundtrack are fragments of the childish voices of early Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder songs.

Performed by Bjørn and Roald Melhus.

Plowman's Lunch is called a documentary because its intent was to explore actual occurrences—be these the building of the work, or what befalls the players. It still uses an open form, but the characters are more developed; they have "names," and some of the scenes were truly dangerous for them to produce. As in the other films (with the exception of Done To) there is a nucleus of three characters—two women (Boris and Jamiee), and one man (Steentje, a tranvestite/hermaphrodite). The music, composed expressly for the piece, is harmonious with its developments.

Incense Sweaters & Ice is a new feature film inspired by the idea that anything one does while being watched is a performance. The film follows three protagonists — Mrs. Queen Esther Bernetta White, Girl, and WB (“whiteboy”) — as they navigate the dramas of surveillance, moving between looking, being looked at, and remaining unseen. How does the ever-present potential image affect the way we act and the way we see ourselves? By examining how cinema now happens in real time, Syms works between the documented and the live to find the lie.

Commissioned for the Ocularis curated Free to Be…You and Me Invitational compilation, which premiered at Brooklyn’s Galapagos Art Space and also screened at Chicago Filmmakers, where Mercedes Landazuri and I performed a banjo and synth rendition of “It’s Alright to Cry” (the song that followed Dudley Pippin on the compilation).

In this episode of the Whispering Pines series, Moulton's character Cynthia is confronted with a distorted mirror image that slips between the grotesque and the exotic, depending on her posture.

This crime drama made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute is a mixed bag of colorful misadventures featuring a wayward member of the clergy and a corrupting, femme fatale with bangs. The couple open a casino of ill repute with money acquired during their murderous rampage upon the population of a small community of churchgoers. The action is fast and cheap because of the $400 budget, and the cast attractive because youth itself is always beautiful.

Eiko & Koma titled all of their performances in Europe White Dance (1972-1974). Their presentations were always about one hour, performed without an intermission. In naming their program White Dance, Eiko and Koma were trying to create a new beginning for themselves, not bound to the butoh works of their teachers Hijikata and Ohno, which were often described by the artists themselves as “dances of darkness.”

The Duet Project: Distance is Malleable is a mutable and evolving series of experiments in collaboration. Negotiating differences of race, time, culture, ethnicity, religion and gender, the artists seek to maximize the potentials of their encounters.

A classic example of feminist performance videos of the 1970s, which often incorporated autobiography, expansion of self through personae, and assertions of a new identity for women. In Nun and Deviant the performers come to happier terms with their identities both as women and as artists.

The Jersey Devil lives again in this work the students and I mounted (or disrobed) for skeptical scrutiny.

A wonderfully witty work about nostalgia and desperation. Anne McGuire portrays a Kennedy-era singer performing in the space where theatre meets television. McGuire's Garland-esque gestures provide both a sense of tragedy and humor. I Am Crazy And You’re Not Wrong weaves narrative, performance, memory and history into an ironic and haunting work of singular proportions.

1933. Berlin. The last year of the Wiemar Republic. Through the lense of her personal "home movies", Leni Riefenstahl records a day in her life with a young Eva Braun.

Die Neue Frau is the third film in the The Surface Tension Trilogy, a three-part short film trilogy looking at queer artists living in Berlin during the 1920s. Shot on hand-processed 16mm film.

The discovery of a VHS tape of the artist’s films for sale on eBay triggers obsessive speculation about the seller’s identity.

A wonderful and humorous example of early image processing, Parry Teasdale and Carol Vontobel perform to camera as their faces are morphed together, forming an image of one person. 

On April 30, 2019, Eiko and Alexis Moh, one of Eiko's collaborators in The Duet Project, visited the Manzanar Historical Site. Manzanar was one of ten American internment camps where over 110,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during the World War II. At the peak (in September 1942), 10,046 Japanese Americans were forced to live in Manzanar.

This video was shot two days after Manzanar Pilgrimage commemorated its 50th anniversary on site.

Whether they inhabit the desert or are lost in it, three men are clearly confronted to the ruins of modern times. They are explorers or players or performers of times past. Their encounters, their moves, their assessment of location take the form of an acoustic sounding of space. Filmed in Shaabiyat al Ghurayfah in Sharjah, a repertoire of simple gestures playfully engages with structure, space, movement, threshold, surveillance and perspective.

Using highly-manipulated and over-processed images, Latham investigates the process of video as inherently fragmented. Weaving together various people’s impressions of the artist and her work, the work demonstrates important parallels between video, storytelling, and the formation of identity — all processes of active fabrication that blend “lies” and truth in the construction of a certain reality, history, or past. Labeling an image of herself talking as “her most recent explanation,” Latham addresses “the construction of her video personality” as an identity outside of herself.

La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo is a recreation of one day at the Canto Grande prison in Peru, following women guerrillas from the Maoist Shining Path movement, from their morning marches to their bedtime chants. Kept isolated in their own cellblocks, the guerrillas refused to acknowledge that they were imprisoned. Their cellblocks were just another front in the People’s War: “shining trenches of combat”. This film shows the intense indoctrination and belief system of the brutal Latin American insurgency.

Sphinxes Without Secrets is an energetic and transgressive acount of outstanding female performance artists, and an invaluable document of feminist avant-garde work of the 70s and 80s. No Mona Lisa smiles here, as performance artists spill their guts about what outrages and delights them. Performers, curators, and critics unravel the mysteries of a new art form and ponder the world women confront today. Since its inception, performance art has provided a forum for artists who create work that challenges the dominant aesthetic and cultural status quo.

Merce by Merce by Paik is a two-part tribute to choreographer Merce Cunningham and artist Marcel Duchamp. The first section, “Blue Studio: Five Segments,” is an innovative work of video-dance produced by Merce Cunningham and videomaker Charles Atlas. Cunningham choreographed the dance specifically for the two-dimensional video monitor screen. Atlas uses a variety of video imaging effects, including chromakey, to electronically transport Cunningham’s studio performance into a series of outdoor landscapes. The audio track includes the voices of John Cage and Jasper Johns.

Cheri Mcelligott performance documentation.

Male escorts and crytozoologists battle behemoths and bulemics in this student-teacher collaboration about undying evil and those that escape it via the LOVE CANAL.

In 1991 Montano met a Hindu couple at Ananda Ashram, the meditation center she attends in upstate New York. Since then, the three have become friends. Mr. and Mrs. Mehta are Ayruvedic doctors; both physically resemble another Indian couple—saints Sharada and Ramakrishna, who lived in Calcutta in the 1800s—and are both known for their incredible devotion to the mystical life. Montano made this postmodern documentary to honor the Mehtas, to present an idealized model for a spiritual relationship and to hold out the possibility for spiritual ecstasy in everyday life.

For the November 13, 2015 opening of the Hiroshima Panels by Iri and Toshi Maruki at Pioneer Works, Eiko performed her solo in honor of the Hiroshima Panels and their creators. Japanese-style painter Iri Maruki, born in Hiroshima, and Western-style painter Toshi Maruki, who went into Hiroshima city just three days after the bombing. The artists decided to paint the panels together, which illuminate the human experiences of the Atomic Bomb. They spent 30 years painting the fifteen Hiroshima Panels, six of which were on display at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn.