Performance

At the age of twenty-four, Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh (b.1950), moved to New York, where he has created and documented time-specific, conceptual art performances since the 1970s. In this interview, Hsieh discusses his formative years and philosophical moorings. This dialogue includes description of the artist’s early period of painting, his military service in Taiwan, and the cultural atmosphere of a country then undergoing massive political change. Much of the discussion focuses specifically on Hsieh’s understanding of the relationship of art and life, his investment in “free thinking,” and the politics of documentation. For Hsieh, the ability to think freely is art’s bottom line—he believes the essence of his work lies in human communication. To this end, Hsieh insists that his work, though incredibly personal, is not autobiographical, but philosophical.

In this episode of The Glennda and Brenda Show, Glennda and Brenda take over a public bus to protest discrimination and violence against queer people who are "out and outrageous". They pick up many other out and proud friends to stage this queer sit-in.

Commissioned by Boston Dance Umbrella, this work was created during a month-long residency in Boston. Clayton Campbell painted a mythological scene of the river that a dying person crosses to reach the world of the dead. The piece was first titled as Eye Below but later changed to By The River.

Created at Eiko & Koma's home in the Catskills and set to Gamelan music, Grain was first presented during a month-long season in an East Village loft. Charles and Stephanie Reinhart were among the ten audience members one night and invited Eiko & Koma to the American Dance Festival that year. Since then, the work toured widely. 

KG ruminates through performance and a portrait of Athens, on excerpts from poems in a book of poetry by Katerina Gogou entitled Three Clicks Left.

Performer: Kleoni Manousakis Music, Zeena Parkins

This strange, lyrical performance video diary is a millennial reflection on the impossibility to "reveal" one’s self in stormy times such as ours. The piece is also about the intricate connections between performance and everyday life; about language, identity, love, nostalgia and activism amidst the California apocalypse.

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.

Produced in 1974, and restaged in 2002, near Pilot Butte in southwestern Wyoming.

The artist makes a pilot light using ice, which he has fashioned into a magnifying lens to start a small fire.

This piece was originally shot using 1/2" open reel video and later incorporates edits from DV video.

In a fusion of text and image, Rosler re-presents the NBC Nightly News and other broadcast reports to analyze their deceptive syntax and capture the confusion intentionally inserted into the news script. The artist addresses the fallibility of electronic transmission by emphasizing the distortion and absurdities that occur as a result of technical interference. Stressing the fact that there's never a straight story, Rosler asserts her presence in a character-generated text that rolls over the randomly erased images, isolating excerpts from the broadcast sources.

This structurally simple video, shot through Benglis's apartment window, contains a, "distinct disjuncture between the visual and aural components of the work. The viewer, initially presented with a contemplative view of nature, is frequently distracted by the chatter of a radio. As the camera zooms in and out, it establishes a dichotomy: indoors and outdoors, the man-made and the natural.

Using the first color video camera, the artist questions where the devil might be hiding, and then takes a nighttime swim.

Ponies discover an equine Shangri-La. The audience is introduced to a classic dance step. Chubby Checker provides the musical accompaniment.

This title is also available on Ben Coonley: Post Pony Trilogy.

This is an edited excerpt of Eiko and Iris McCloughan's experiment working over Zoom on May 5, 2020 as a part of Eiko's Virtual Creative Residency hosted by Wesleyan University. 

Iris is both a dramaturg and a collaborator in Eiko's The Duet Project: Distance is Malleable. Iris is in their studio in Brooklyn, New York and Eiko is in a suburb of Tokyo, Japan, 6761 miles away. Both are restricted under the emergency order due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Pochonovela is a bilingual, bicultural blend of Latin America’s and the United States’ most popular television genres—the telenovela and the sitcom, respectively. The humor and madness of life in East Los Angeles are captured here in performances by members of the Los Angeles-based comedy troupe, Chicano Secret Service, and other U.S. Latino actors. This provocative comedy touches on political, social, cultural, linguistic, and family issues attendent to the cross cultural life of Mexican Americans living near or on the border—both psychologically and geographically.

Commissioned to be a "promo" for a loud punk rock band, Mr. Kuchar feared that the noise the band made would spoil the mood of his visuals, so he used the sound of a lush orchestra to score the picture and the antics.

Laura Mulvey published her seminal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in 1975; it has subsequently become one of the most influential work in film theory. Using a psychoanalytic methodology to discuss spectatorship, it was groundbreaking in its feminist critique of the sadistic, misogynistic mode of classical Hollywood cinema in which women were objects of fetishistic display for male viewers’ pleasure. She has also written extensively on melodrama, published three books, and co-directed six films, including Riddles of the Sphinx with Peter Wollen (1974).

The story of a matron and a midget in the heat of an unbridled passion. The colors run thick and heavy for paint and prurient pleasures as the electronic canvas unscrolls to reveal a bevy of beasties and beauties of nature and the unnatural. A non-stop melodrama of a patron of the arts shot by real art students in a real art school! A collaborative project I worked on with my class at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Combining Rubnitz’s skillful manipulation of the familiar “look” of TV shows with an extraordinary range of characters, performer Ann Magnuson convincingly impersonates the array of female types seen on TV in a typical broadcast day. From glitzy to drab, from friendly housewife to desperate evangelist, Magnuson is a one-woman universe appearing on every channel, the star of every program—giving her all as the chameleon woman who is always on display.

This first "Frieda" collaboration between performance artists Barbara Lipp and Tom Koden and video artist Tom Rubnitz chronicles Frieda's rise from assembly-line worker in a box factory to singing superstar. Featuring rock-bottom production values and a sound track which includes the Brady Bunch kids' tune "Gonna Find a Rainbow".

In One Man Ladies, Glennda Orgasm is joined by Vaginal Davis as they meet women on the streets of New York City to discuss Laura Schlessinger's book Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives. The pair humorously explore the best ways modern women can find and secure a husband. 

An episode of Glennda and Friends, hosted by Glennda Orgasm and Vaginal Davis.

...As the Moth is lured to the candle's flame, so it is that a group of misfits enter a dark house to converse with shadows amid the dust of Time.

—Mike Kuchar

This video was produced as a part of Eiko & Koma's exhibition Time is not Even, Space is not Empty which opened at the Zilkha Gallery in Wesleyan University in the fall of 2009. Edited by Eiko with assistance of Tara Kelton and Shoko Letton, 38 Works shows the trajectory of Eiko & Koma's career through short excerpts of most of their works created between 1976 (the year they arrived in the US) and 2009 (the year they started the Retrospective Project).

"Pointing at my own image on the video monitor: my attempt is to keep my finger constantly in the center of the screen — I keep narrowing my focus into my finger. The result [the TV image] turns the activity around: a pointing away from myself, at an outside viewer."

— Vito Acconci, "Body as Place-Moving in on Myself, Performing Myself," Avalanche 6 (Fall 1972)

As the artist writes on a paper pinned to the wall in chalk, the left hand writes a mirror image of the right hand. The text reads "Symmetry is nature's way of seeing itself. P Kos 2004-2016"

5% is a ten-minute work that questions the cult of pop stardom, deconstructs music industry practices, considers the problematics of live performance, and suggests other, more anonymous working strategies.