In Two-Spirits Speak Out, Brenda and Glennda interview members of We'Wah and Bar-Chee-Ampe, one of the first Two-Spirit Native American organizations in New York. This episode addresses gender identity among Two-Spirit people, and discusses their involvement and experiences within the queer community in New York City.
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.
Eiko Otake, with her collaborator Merian Soto, visited a friend Bonnie Brooks in her country house and had a long walk in the forest. There was a small island occupied by three deers. They later returned to it and the deer were gone so Eiko danced in that place she named Deer Island.
A trans performers enacts an improvised strip-tease in silence, adhering to directions of positioning and movement. The performance fails to reveal genitals. Perspective oscillates between three stages of distance from the subject; re-focusing and reframing the (lack of) genital revelation.
McGuire constructs a murky black and white soap-opera world of endless, timeless, and placeless limbo, where the characters talk to each other entirely in clichés, bad poetry, and other contrite forms of speech — a short TV show in which nothing is resolved. The video culminates in an absolutely stunning monologue performance by legendary underground film and videomaker George Kuchar.
A woman is lying on her back on the floor. She seems to be tied down on the ground, but she is holding her ankles with her own hands. She wears only tights and a pair of high-heeled red shoes. Her hair-covered face makes her an anonymous victim of the camera, which is making converging circles around her body.
This title is also available on Hester Scheurwater Videoworks: Volume 1.
Small Miracles is a suite of eight video animations in which the artist conjures up and controls forces of nature. Ignoring rational constructs of what is possible, Hechtman creates imaginary works to ground science fiction in the everyday experience. Coupling feminism and natural phenomena, the videos are located in the liminal space between fantasy and the everyday.
Four tales about cannibal monsters narrated and performed by the Waiãpi Indians. “We have made the video,” say the Waiãpi, “to teach people to be more careful with monsters they never heard about. Even a white man can be eaten as he goes into the forest.”
Directed by Vincent Carelli and Dominique Gallois.
Edited by Tutu Nunes.
In Waiãpi with English subtitles.
The performers are seated around a pink octagonal table on pink, violet, and silver cinder blocks. One performer (Robert Stearns) stands up, recites the credits for the piece, and then says, “Do you believe in water? Robert Stearns.” He claps and turns to the next performer who asks the same question and gives his name. Next the players split up into pairs and attempt to relate to each other—playing tug-of-war, making love, arguing over who has the most integrity, and fighting for possession of the props.
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.
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.
Filmed during a trip sponsored by UCLA CAPS in 2019.
Camera by Alexis Moh.
Edited by Eiko Otake.
Stephen Varble began Journey to the Sun as a series of performances with projected slides in 1978. After becoming notorious for unauthorized costume performances on Soho streets in the mid 1970s, Varble receded from his public persona at this time. Deriving from his identification with his idol, the reclusive actress Greta Garbo, and informed by the spiritual practice of Subud, Varble began writing an allegorical epic about a musician, the Grey Crowned Warbler, who undergoes tribulation and metamorphosis on a journey to transcendence.
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.
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.
In Performer/Audience/Mirror, Graham uses video to document an investigation into perception and real time informational "feedback." The performance is doubly reflected back to the audience by the artist's lecturing, and the architectural device of a mirrored wall. Graham has written extensively on how video, which can deliver information in real time, functions semiotically as a mirror.
Gone is a two-channel installation based on the second episode of An American Family — the landmark PBS verité documentary about the Loud Family of Santa Barbara, California. Dougherty has created a free-form variation on the theme of parental visits to wayward queer children by mapping the dialogue and plot onto a contemporary community of artists and writers in New York today, paying homage to the art underground and the city itself.
Made with Stanton Kaye, and the only Lynda Benglis video with a discernible plot, The Amazing Bow-Wow follows the adventures of a talking, hermaphroditic dog given to Rexina and Babu by a carnival barker. Rexina and Babu soon decide to make the dog a sideshow act hoping to earn their fortune. Babu eventually becomes jealous of Rexina's devotion to the dog and one night attempts to castrate it, accidentally cutting off its tongue. The dog's head becomes hideous and skeletal, ruining its sideshow career and the profits.
Director Jonathan Reiss and cinematographer/editor Leslie Asako Gladsjo traveled to Europe with Survival Research Laboratories to produce this entertaining and challenging portrait of the innovative group of artist technicians. The tape shows their machines in action and provides insight to their inspirations, political objectives, and budgetary constraints. The tape also reveals SRL’s efforts to confound and confront their foreign audiences with an artform that is, perhaps, uniquely American.
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).
Weaving Stories While Walking, a reading-performance film by Sónia Vaz Borges and Mónica de Miranda, interweaves multiple accounts from members of the resistance against the colonial powers in Cabo Verde, Guiné-Bissau, Angola, and Portugal. It looks at the centrality of individual and collective walking, movement, and affective experiences in understanding the liberation struggles and their legacy in the contemporary times. Weaving Stories While Walking intermingles timely narratives for the current social contexts.
Through a successful eBay bid in January of 2004, 1975 eteam dollars turned into 10 acres of personal U.S. property. The lot, a generic square within the larger American grid of townships, is located in the desert of Nevada. The closest settlement, Montello, "The town that refuses to die", is eight miles away, and the almost abandoned airbase Wendover, at the edge of the Salt Flats, is located about 30 miles SE. It's the 10-acre lot and its surroundings that started the eteam's search for solutions to problems, which were created by big systems that had made some small mistakes.
In 1985 the great soprano Leontyne Price sang the title role in Verdi’s Aida as her farewell opera. After the ‘O patria mia’ aria, the audience breaks into a four-minute applause. Oh My Homeland is the third in a series of minimal single shot 16mm films. It’s a film about representation, art, and material exchange. It’s a film about endings. It’s a film about identity, love, power, patriotism and the transcendent potential of art through the viewing of a face receiving adoration.
A Body in Fukushima is a film created by dance artist Eiko Otake consisting of still photographs, inter-titles, and an original score. Photographs are selected from tens of thousands taken by historian/photographer William Johnston of Otake alone in the surreal landscapes of post-nuclear meltdown Fukushima, Japan. Otake edited the film and sound, which includes original music by Kronos Quartet’s David Harrington.
