A documentation of a performance/installation. Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes created a fictional religion based on inter-cultural confessions. Exhibiting themselves in Plexiglas boxes as "end-of-the-century saints", the two performers hear the confessions of audience members willing to reveal their intercultural fears and desires to the saints.
I wander around empty halls of academic buildings carrying bags of Halloween atrocities for our latest class project: a horror movie that lives up to that classification on multiple levels. The viewer is given a front row seat to the directorial process as young and nubile film students submit to attacks by rubber props in a Frankenstein thriller big on chills (caused mainly by the lack of budget) and low on underwear paraphernalia.
Chris Burden came into prominence in the late 1960s, but unlike many of the performance artists of his generation, Burden was interested in empirical and scientific investigations. His goal was to return the control of art making to the artist and to question the relevancy of more established art practices. In this documentary Burden talks about his hard-hitting performances in the ’70s that took a jaded art world by surprise and continues on to discuss the sculptural and installation works of the ’80s.
Eiko Otake’s I Invited Myself is a multi-volume installation which features choreography of place, movements of both performer and viewers, along with projections of selected video and film works created by Eiko over the last 40 years.
Unlike audiences to cinema, literature, music, and visual art works, the audience to contemporary performance work often experiences one newly created evening-length piece. Those audiences who saw the artist’s earlier works have an understanding of her trajectory, but younger or new audiences might not.
Grace + Gravity is a choreographed performance that reflects on Simone Weil’s poetic and profound writing entitled Gravity and Grace.
Director: Cynthia Madansky
Dancer: Idil Kemer
Voice: Lara Baladi
Cinematographer: Meryem Yavus
Sound: Zeena Parkins
Nauman is seen standing and leaning back in a corner of his studio. Just as he bounces back to a standing position, his body falls again, momentarily collapsing, only to spring forward once more. This action places his body in an intermittent space, occupying a position halfway between standing and leaning, halfway between the wall and the room.
This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.
From the performance by the same name, by Suzanne Lacy, Stan Hebert, Councilwoman Sheila Jordan, Frank Williams, Officer Terrance West, Mike Shaw, and Annice Jacoby, Oakland, 1995-6. Suzanne Lacy worked alongside youth activists, city council members and the mayor’s office to draft a Youth Policy Initiative that would create a dedicated stream of funding to serve youth needs. In the spring of that year, No Blood/No Foul was a performance on the eve of the Policy’s vote by the Oakland City Council, with Mayor, Council members and a large audience in attendance.
As if trapped inside a nightmare, the main protagonist of Poster Girl is haunted by disturbing visions, thoughts and fantasies, which the viewer is privy to. She is joined at various points in the video by another woman, whose role in the narrative remains unclear – is she meant to function as a guardian or a demon? The video further complicates the matter by representing both women as simultaneously wounded and wounding, inviting and threatening, vulnerable and menacing.
"I, Soldier is the first part of a video series in which I am dealing with the state-controlled ceremonies for the national days of the Turkish Republic. The nationalistic attributes attached to these large-scale ceremonies are underlined in a non-descriptive and almost voyeuristic point of view. I, Soldier was shot at the National Day for Youth and Sports; the day that marks the start of the independence war of the Turkish public under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, against the Allied Forces back in 1919.
Distracted Blueberry follows a performance art band through a series of poetic encounters. Masculine tropes are undone to form a relationship between male sexuality and the human death drive. The body, violence and humour are positioned in the larger context of nothingness and somethingness, bridging a tension between externalized anxieties and the terrors of nature. Evocative of inner emotional states, strange landscapes exist as reflections of our shared dreams and nightmares.
Viewer discretion advised
In Wigstock ’94, Glennda and her friend Bobra attend Lady Bunny’s Wigstock festival. Following the event’s move from the East to the West Village, they explore the changing dynamics and configurations of queer culture in New York. The pair interview other drag queens, members of the local community, and passersby to get a sense of how an event like Wigstock is received by the city.
An episode of Glennda and Friends, hosted by Glennda Orgasm and Bobra. Featuring Jackie Beat, Joan Crawford, Jackie O., Sherry Vine, Nona Vulva, Wendy Wild, and Yumi.
Shot in December 1969, this video documents a live performance by the Incredible String Band at the Fillmore East, NYC. Beginning with footage of people waiting in line at the doors before the show begins, the video goes on to record the performance itself. Early on, the band experiences some audio problems, before settling down to play. We witness the band talking, tuning their instruments and playing.
Filmed by Jingqiu Guan on November 7, 2022 at Royce Hall Rehearsal Room during the creative residency sponsored by UCLA Center for the Art of Performance (CAP). This video was used for the performance on November 20, 2022 at UCLA.
Performed by Eiko Otake
Edited by Eiko Otake, assisted by Jingqiu Guan
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.
In Tree Song, Eiko & Koma continue their exploration of the body as a part of the landscape and the landscape as an extension of the body. Trees have been symbols of resilience, rebirth and portals through which spirits pass. Tree Song honors the iconography of trees and the primal mysteries of landscape and the human body.
Ming Wong creates videos that explore performance and issues of race and gender. Born in Singapore of Chinese heritage, and now based in Berlin, his work examines cross-cultural experiences by appropriating scenes of iconic world cinema. Wong casts himself anachronistically as the star, critically exposing the otherness of the relationship of media and world history.
Subtitled A Rebellion against the Commodity, this engaged reading of the urban black riots of the 1960s references Guy Debord’s Situationist text, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966). Along with additional commentary adapted from Barbara Kruger and musicians Morrissey and Skinny Puppy, the text posits rioting as a refusal to participate in the logic of capital and an attempt to de-fetishize the commodity through theft and gift.
Laurie Anderson is perhaps best known as a performance artist who works in both the art and commercial worlds. Anderson talks to Steven Poser through a voice manipulator, commenting on how performing abroad has informed her work and her perspective on American culture, especially regarding issues of language and voice in communication.
This video was produced for the Artists TV Network series Conversations.
Spit Sandwich is a compilation of 19 comical and entertaining works from the master of deadpan. Experiments with the video signal combine with visual jokes and one-liners to hilarious effect. Includes: II got . .Spit Sandwich is a compilation of 19 comical and entertaining works from the master of deadpan. Experiments with the video signal combine with visual jokes and one-liners to hilarious effect. Includes: II got . .
Less than two minutes long, this short tape makes playful and surreal use of video’s editing capabilities. Set to a sped-up version of The Band’s “The Weight” – complete with the falsetto vocals, and accelerated tempo that come with time manipulation on records – is a series of rapid, alternating washes and split-image cuts overlaying and juxtaposing the faces of the freex upon one another. Male faces and female faces fuse, the exact identity of the individuals becoming dissolving into ambiguity.
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".
Documentary of the New York experimental theater company The Wooster Group on tour in Glasgow, Scotland, 2000, installing their production of HOUSE/LIGHTS.
A video adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses shot at the Parkville Senior Center, Connecticut, with the seniors reading the lines from cue cards. The piece addresses society, war, and personal mortality.
M+ Museum presented A Body in Hong Kong in two locations as part of Mobile M+: Live Art, 2015. Tim Mei Avenue, where Eiko chose and performed, was the main site of 2014 Umbrella Revolution. Nearly 100,000 people camped out, and in doing so, stopped traffic on twelve-lane highways and created a politically charged sphere.
A family embraces the heart of evil in this Poltergeist re-make/drag show, circa 1992.
