Rosler uses the format of a cooking demonstration (as in Semiotics of the Kitchen) to address cultural transaction--the meeting of Eastern and Western cultures. Reading directly from a West Bend Electric Wok instruction booklet, Rosler wryly comments upon the Oriental mystique conjured by the West Bend manufacturers, a mystique evoked and then "improved" upon through Western technology--i.e. non-stick surfaces and electric power.
Revived as part of the Retrospective Project, White Dance is the first piece that Eiko & Koma performed in America.
“The idea was to address the cultural invisibility of older women through art and through action,” the voice-over explains as this video begins. This short works offers an introduction to the Whisper Minnesota Project, which organized The Crystal Quilt performance, an event that brought together hundreds of women over 60 on a Mother’s Day in Minneapolis. As the video explains, “The Crystal Quilt is a case study in reframing notions of older women’s beauty, power, and relevance. Through it we catch glimpses of life patterns and values lost to our generation.”
The word-based art and performances crafted by world-renowned artist Alison Knowles (b.1933) are 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.
Playwright and performance artist Marc Arthur paves a color-saturated path from 'awake consciousness' to sleeping 'dreamscape'.
In this interview, Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker Ryan Trecartin (b. 1981) discusses his personal interests and motivations, as well as the larger cultural and philosophical concerns that shape his videos and their reception. Trecartin is known for his construction of non-linear narratives, campy costumes, and excessively visceral characters and environments. One of the most compelling aspects of this interview is his insistence that language and its verbal articulation, rather than the visual, anchor his process. Trecartin identifies the influences of 1990s retro-rave culture, hip-hop videos, and editing software tools on his work. He notes that the accelerated disintegration of high and low culture has played a major part in his growth as an artist.
Psychologically disturbed Professor Herville (Joe Gibbons) analyzes the literary classic Moby Dick. He gives a tour of the Herman Melville Museum and makes much ado about the book’s Oedipial themes. Breer mixes in footage of the Hollywood adaptation starring Gregory Peck and her own irrepressible animation.
This title is also available on Emily Breer: Classics Exposed.
This two-part video Gender Cruise on the Circle Line involves Brenda and Glennda leading a group of drag queens, drag kings, and other gender nonconforming people on a three-hour ride on the Circle Line boat around Manhattan.
This two-part episode features Glenn Belverio and Duncan Elliott participating in an ACT UP demonstration at President George Bush’s summer house in Kennebunkport, Maine, interviewing activists and documenting this historic event. In addition to this, Brenda Sexual and Glennda Orgasm attend Wigstock, an annual outdoor drag festival in Manhattan's East Village. At the festival, they rally for National Healthcare and discuss other issues such as violence against LGBTQ+ people.
Black and White Tapes derive from a series of performances Paul McCarthy undertook in his Los Angeles studio from 1970 to 1975. Conceived for the camera and performed alone or with only a few people present, these short performances use video to articulate both monitor and studio space. In the first excerpt, McCarthy paints a white line on the floor with his face, dragging his body from one end of the studio to the other. In doing so, McCarthy performs a recognizable formal gesture--drawing a white line.
In Greetings from Lanesville, the Videofreex tour the countryside of Lanesville, New York interviewing the local people for a weekly broadcast program all from behind the wheel of the Lanesville TV Media Bus. As the first localized pirate television station, Lanesville TV brought its guerilla broadcasting to Upstate New York with interviews of ordinary townspeople in an effort to present an image of community created by the community itself.
The later 1950s and early 1960s saw the development and proliferation of radically new forms of dance driven by a desire to understand the essentiality of movement divorced from traditional, balletic and modern syntaxes. At the forefront of this new wave of performance was Simone Forti, an artist with a hand in both improvisational techniques and choreographed task-maneuvers. This interview details her exploration of each – with a particular focus on her earliest investigations into movement, owing to time spent under the study of Anna Halprin.
The third installment in the Action Series. Two characters engage Ann Hamilton's Headlands kitchen-space and create temporal resonances. To survive they must break the fast (a midnight snack) and service the meal.
This title is also available on HalfLifers: The Complete History.
For Example: Decorated is a talk show featuring art world personalities Britte Le Va, Peter Gordon, and James Sarkis. The show begins with Le Va reciting the credits; then she introduces herself, Soviet style — as in Do You Believe in Water? — by saying her name, then clapping. The other guests follow, and as the three converse about the role of art in life, they build little structures with the Lego blocks that cover the coffee table.
Three nuns in dark sunglasses sit at a table playing cards while a nurse is inteviewed about "what death looks like” on the soundtrack. As the nurse speaks, in medical detail, of death as a natural process, the nuns sit with party hats on their heads and light birthday candles stuck in bananas. On Death and Dying is a mocking and macabre look at the institutions of death—how hospitals and religions “manage” death. The tape resolves in the conclusion that “death is a job that you do by yourself.”
My teaching assistant during the spring semester (Marc Rokoff) at the San Francisco Art Institute began shooting a documentary of me and the students making our sci-fi drama, The Planet of the Vamps. Three years later it remained unfinished as he felt inadequate as a documentarian, and so I was offered the box of tapes to edit. I took on the task and the result is a lively record of the production class in action as it tackles the teleplay with a minuscule budget and scanty costuming.
"Ever on the lookout for learning opportunities, Reinke envisions an art institute where you don’t have to make anything, and with a library full of books glued together. All the information’s there—you just don’t have to bother reading it!"
—New York Video Festival (2002)
On December 8, 1984, Linda Montano began a 7-year performance titled 7 Years of Living Art, based on the seven Hindu chakras, and performed public and private vows and tests of personal endurance. Upon completing the project, Montano began again and titled the new work Fourteen Years of Living Art. During that time she composed and performed CHAKRAPHONICS, a sonic experience for the chakras. This video can be used as a guide to meditation on the chakras.
A re-reading/ re-construction of a Wooster Group theater production: Part I / LSD: Just the High Points, 1978
"Inspired by Ralph Hocking's fish biting video. Eighty-seven stones thrown, volumes shifting of water sound, a real time performance event. Holding the camera and throwing 87 stones into the frame. 1/2" reel to reel Sony portapack."
– Peer Bode
Presenting his bare torso to the camera, Nauman meticulously applies, and removes, layers of white and black pigment, to his face, arms, and chest. Beyond the link to body art, and the idea of treating the human body as artistic subject matter and material, Nauman enacts a process of self-transformation—a masque applied and removed—as the tape ends where it began.
This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.
Operation Atropos is a documentary about interrogation and POW resistance training. Director Coco Fusco worked with retired U.S. Army interrogators who subjected her group of women students to immersive simulations of POW experiences in order to show them what hostile interrogations can be like and how members of the U.S. military are taught to resist them. The group of interrogators is called Team Delta, and they regularly offer intensive courses that they call "Authentic Military Experiences" to civilians.
The orchestra begins and a male and female dancer move from opposite sides of the stage. The dancers embrace and begin the White Swan pas de deux from the ballet Swan Lake. However this is not the ballet as it is normally performed. The choreography has been re-staged so that in every single frame the two original dancers have been replaced by the bodies of four new dancers. The movement remains continuous, the characteristics of the dancers’ movements and gestures the same, but in each frame a different person occupies the dancers’ body spaces.
“A spoof on current art attitudes [that] stretches the definition of what can be considered art. Because the late 1960s and early 1970s were periods of innovation, using the human body as art, making process equivalent to product... [etc.], Baldessari questions that very sense of originality and exploration by taking it to its (rather mundane) limits. By taping a stick at one end, then picking it up at the other, he is both questioning and spoofing what constitutes art.” —Marcia Tucker, “John Baldessari: Pursuing the Unpredictable,” John Baldessari (New York: New Museum, 1981)
Craig Owens (1950-1990) was a critic who wrote and lectured extensively on contemporary art. He showed particular interest in the issues of photography, postmodernism, feminism, and Marxist thought. A former associate editor for October and senior editor for Art in America, as well as professor of art history at Yale University and Barnard College, his writings were collected in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (1994). Owens died of an AIDS-related illness in 1990.
