Performance

In conversation with David Getsy — an art historian focusing on queer and transgender methodologies in sculpture theory and performance history — Cassils discusses their monumental performance artworks and inspirations.

April 26, 1976. San Francisco. Doug Hall and Jody Procter of T.R. Uthco, a San Francisco art/performance group, sat 60 feet above the pavement in chairs bolted to the masonry wall outside the east windows of the third floor of La Mamelle Gallery on 12th Street. They sat from 9:00 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon, and during this time They talked continuously. The two performers were clearly visible to spectators on the street below. The sounds of their amplified voices and video images from two nearby cameras were fed into the gallery space.

From the performance by the same name, by Suzanne Lacy, Julio Morales and Unique Holland, with Kim Batiste, Raul Cabra, Patrick Toebe, David Goldberg, and Anne Maria Hardeman, Oakland, 1998-2000.

Identically dressed, and with sibling-like resemblance, performance artists Trevor Martin and Kym Olsen shift between spoken word and athletic dance choreography in a collection of 29 scenes. Set in various locations--including a gymnasium, an abandoned hospital, and a trailer park circus--Martin and Olsen slip between a ventriloquist and his dummy, a seducer and his surrogate, a doctor and his patient, and synchronized dance partners. The film examines a complex social psychology--questioning the colonization of the human body for various political, medical and religious agendas.

Acconci listens to his own recorded monologue of sexually intimate secrets and repeatedly tries to obscure these secrets by shouting over the tape, demonstrating the paradoxical situation of the artist confounded by two desires: to reveal oneself for the sake of pleasing the audience, and the conflicting desire to protect one’s own ego. As viewers, we are intrigued and tantalized by the confession we never hear.

A massive video drama made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute that chronicles a man and wife parting ways amid the clatter of dice in a gambling resort on a painted desert of painted women and panting men. A large cast of digitized divas and international inepts march across this corlorful canvas of romanticized rubbish and low-budget lushness.

Unlike other sectors of Romanian civil society who gained status after December 1989, the gay community struggled for many more years with a legal ban imposed by a conservative political class subservient to the Orthodox Church. Against this background, I planned to make a tactical video whose leitmotif was a pas de deux performed by two male dancers.

Parnes moves further into her interrogation of horror genres and the art world, with their sometimes over-lapping cults of personality. Grappling with the danger of beauty without criticality, Hollywood Inferno takes the viewer through the alienating world of a teenager named Sandy, a modern-day Dante, and follows where her aspirations toward stardom lead her.

In a series of 1992 performances, Coco Fusco and performance co-creator Guillermo Gómez-Peña decked themselves out in primitive costumes and appeared before the public as “undiscovered AmerIndians” locked in a golden cage — an exercise in faux anthropology based on racist images of natives. Presented eight times in four different countries, these simple performances evoked various responses, the most startling being the huge numbers of people who didn’t find the idea of “natives” locked in a cage objectionable.

They just flew in from New York, and boy, are their arms tired... Out in the Nevada desert, against the windblown backdrop of Air Force bomber training sites, artists Hajoe Moderegger and Franziska Lamprecht — better known as eteam — gathered testimonials of stranded passengers, crew members, and local residents to recall an episode in the lost annals of American aviation: the 2006 "unscheduled layover" at International Airport Montello (IAM). Truth in Transit reaches beyond simple documentation.

John Malpede is a performance artist and Director of the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), a performance art and theater group whose members include the city’s homeless. Through LAPD, Malpede provides an opportunity for homeless people to articulate the reality of their lives for themselves and audiences. Malpede was well known for his collaboration with performer Gill Gordh as Dead Dog and Lonely Horse. In one performance he took on the role of a street person, contrasting the wealth and excess of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles with the city’s struggle against homelessness.

Eiko performed unannounced in the Cathedral of St. John Divine, New York City as an artist in residence in 2016-2018.

Camera by Alexis Moh.

Steve Seid of Pacific Film Archive calls it, “An episodic adventure about extra-evolutionary transformation. Organized as 'lesson plans’, this unique work is an ambitious tutorial for the neo-nauts of inner space."

This title is only available on Soft Science.

The soundtrack begins with the artist stating the conditions: “An artist may construct a work and/or a work may be fabricated and/or a work need not be built. I elected five possibilities for videotape.” These possibilities are the actions executed in Beached. They are shot in five sequences and consist of throwing, pulling, lifting, dragging, and using leverage.

This video has been remastered, though traces of historical picture loss remain.

Sixteen-year-old guru Marahaj Ji attempts to levitate the Houston Astrodome in this 1973 DuPont award winning documentary. Follow the guru from his New York mansion to limousines in Houston and listen to his followers—celebrities and non-celebrities alike—extol his virtues. TVTV's creative use of graphics, live music, and wide-angle-lens shots to conveys the desperate efforts of these lost children to find a leader.

"If this guy is God, then this is the God the United States of America deserves." —Abbie Hoffman

Originally made during 1976-77 and re-mastered in March 2005, this selection contains a mix of visual jokes, conceptual humor and performance. Wegman "dialogs" with himself, close-ups of his mouth and teeth taking on different characteristics and voices; remakes of earlier black and white performances; and man and dog in focus, including a failed attempt to induce Man Ray to smoke.

Alarm Clock, 0:30

Doctor Patient, 2:20

Bad Movies, 2:00

Drop, 0:43

Fruit, 0:25

Smoking, 1:55

Horseshoes, 1:10

Fast, 0:15

Concerto, 1:20

Karen Finley is well known for her confrontational monologues, often performed in clubs and bars, which exploit the stereotype of the hysterical woman to address the sexual and political taboos associated with femininity. Using a variety of unusual props, such as Jello, chocolate syrup, stuffed animals, and glitter, Finley provokes her audience into thinking about a range of repressions and contradictions in contemporary society. She gained mainstream attention when Congress questioned her NEA funding in the early 1990s.

Interview by Tom Jaremba.

Between 1892 and 1927, almost 16 million people came to Ellis Island attempting to immigrate to the United States.

You will never be a woman. You must live the rest of your days entirely as a man and you will only grow more masculine with every passing year. There is no way out.

The tension arising between the demands of AIDS activism and Bordowitz's increasing desire to explore aspects of his own life outside the framework of AIDS resulted in the appropriation of a work from the Soviet avant-garde: Nikolai Erdman's play The Suicide. The protagonist, Semyon, as he tries to unyoke himself from the enforced optimism of a bureaucratic order that prohibits any discussion of disappointment and despair following the revolution.

Featuring Lothaire Bluteau as Semyon.

Hatsune Miku is a co-creation platform, personified by a cute and oddly seductive animated character. Fans bring her to life by creating content that she “delivers”. Her entire persona: lyrics, music and animation – is fan created, and that's her charm. Cosplaying Hatsune Miku, Ann Oren goes to Tokyo for a performative journey among these fans and explores the Miku phenomenon as an expression of collective fantasy. The habits of Miku's fans is a familiar exaggeration of our social media habits, that flood us with crowd creativity.

Untitled (shaving performance 2010) is a document of a privately held performance, in which Hubbard used a straight razor to remove the hair from the lower half of Burns’ body. The work looks at how desire, intimacy and fetish operate for queer woman through a re-staging of images found at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco of a shaving fetish shot in a dungeon in the 1970’s.

There are times when concurrent multiple realities demand an attempt to determine who has this "place in the sun" and where, exactly, it is located. Hearts and Helicopters occurs at that moment in the lives of four people.

This title is also available on Lawrence Weiner: Hearts and Helicopters - A Trilogy.

A Second Quarter is decidedly European; the “place” (Berlin) is the catalyst for the “action” (the work). The works recited in the film are concerned with barriers and borders, physical and geophysical phenomena. The characters also translate, count, and recite the alphabet. They build a narrative that is not a story to be followed dogmatically but rather a pattern from which to extract one’s version of what is seen.

In 1972, Robert Morris and Lynda Benglis agreed to exchange videos in order to develop a dialogue between each other’s work. Morris’s video, Exchange, is a part of that process—a response to Benglis’s Mumble. At the beginning of the piece, Morris comments on the nature of the collaboration, their interaction, and what they represent to each other. Morris’s speculations about work, travel, and relationships are juxtaposed with frozen images of race cars, Benglis herself, images from Benglis's video, and Manet’s Olympia.