In Shadow and Substance, cloth as a motif and a total eclipse of the sun are metaphors used to suggest the intersection of the spiritual and physical worlds and the moods, emotions, and colorations that these intersections can evoke. Shot on location in India, Nepal, and Houston, Shadow and Substance is an interpretation of Eastern and Western aesthetic traditions and an exploration of the resonances between music, poetry, and image.
In The Jungle playfully and sorrowfully tells the tale of an unreliable narrator in a self-imposed exile. Given a grant to study the equivalent of animal cries and whines in jungle flora our heroine has lived for 1,612 days deep in an unnamed jungle. This jungle serves as an extended metaphor for excessive and continual growth and death and fear and sustenance; a metaphorical space of chaos in which the scientist finds solace and which stands in contrast to the human jungle of 'civilization'.
Men asleep, a dream, play, a song; angel and snow, wings and flowers, money and trees; fast then slow, piano decays, laughter.
Vito Acconci (b. 1940) is known as a conceptual designer, installation and performance artist. In the 1960s he embraced performance in order to "define my body in space, find a ground for myself, an alternate ground from the page ground I had as a poet." Acconci’s early performances, including Claim (1971) and Seedbed (1972), were extremely controversial, transgressing assumed boundaries between public and private space and between audience and performer.
Nurit Sharett visited the city of Hebron over the course of a year, teaching video art to a group of young Palestinian women. Over time the artist established firm relationships with three of her students and their families. The video documents everyday life in that microcosm, dissimilar to any other city.
In this diptych, Yi-Ching Chen plays the lowest possible sound on her tuba and Magenheimer's own electronically synthesized voice sings a letter that Ada Byron, the world's first computer programmer, wrote to her mother. In the letter she describes what it felt like to discover the extraordinary power of her own vast intellect.
Text excerpted from a letter Ada Byron wrote to her mother.
I sit at my computer cutting up real time footage of waterfalls, snow storms, boiling water. I combine these to make threads of moving images. I look and listen to the result in front of me and I think of people whose actions transcend fear—not in a momentary instinctual way—but over a sustained period of time. The name Florence Nightingale comes to mind, a woman whose name has become a cliche but of whom I know so little. I order books of her writings from Amazon and select phrases spread over hundreds of pages to make a soliloquy or poem. We collaborate.
The video hovers tentatively between therapy, documentary, poetics and mystic traipsery and ends, like all good things, in surrender to song. There is a challenge presented (the challenge to engage earnestly with the piece as it requests) to fall into the breathing and pacing presented, and the challenge to view the video as a discrete piece of art at the same time. The piece relies heavily on the text, the disembodied Virgil through which the words become musical, instructive and (due to the absence of image) visual.
As a "Post-Mexican” performance artist operating out of the US for over 20 years, one of my conceptual obsessions has been to constantly reposition myself within the hegemonic maps. Whether this map is the Americas, the larger cartography of art, or my personal biography, one of my jobs has been to move around, cross dangerous borders, disappear and reappear somewhere else, and in the process create "imaginary cartographies” capable of containing the complexities of my multiple and ever-changing identities, voices, communities and performative bodies.
“Ursonate 1986 is the result of a transference process which utilizes computer and video technology to transport a 1932 phonetic poem, Ursonate, by the German artist Kurt Schwitters into a contemporary context. The poem is recreated by translating the original German phonetics into English for performance by a Macintosh computer. In the early 20th century, Dada artists who experimented with phonetic poetry were exploring the concepts of pre-language and pre-consciousness. The title of Schwitters' piece, Ursonate, translates as a primordial sonata.
This video is staged as a reading of the great Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky's famous poem A Cloud in Trousers, written 1914-15. It was an attempt to go beyond the autobiographical mode of Fast Trip, Long Drop by appropriating the allegorical potential of another artist's work. Mayakovsky's poem is lyrical and didactic, romantic and materialist.
In Shayne's Rectangle, Dani Leventhal's moving and mysterious prayer for healing, a horse farm and a casual poolside dissection are the nodes between which a series of patiently taken sharp turns maneuver through moods both intimate and detached. The camera pursues, observes, offers, reflects, and is reflected. Things clear and things indistinct interact rhythmically, resonantly, producing a volatile and haunting visual prosody.
— Jeremy Hoevenaar
At the computer, I cut video threads of wind storms and quaking trees. I create a companion piece for Florence called Etty using the words of a young woman from completely different circumstances who transcends fear and resists terror in the midst of extreme circumstances. Etty Hillesum was a 29 year old Dutch writer we know only from her diaries first published in the early 1980s.
A song of mourning, praise, and compassion for the sentient creatures with whom we share this planet. Focusing on the myth, history, and natural life of the elephant, the video explores the gulf we have created between ourselves and animals. Powered by the poetry of Lorca, Kipling, and Reeves, this impassioned lament for subjugated and slaughtered elephants earns its polemical stance—a broader relation to inhumanity—by force of its compelling subject matter.
As a "Post-Mexican” performance artist operating out of the US for over 20 years, one of my conceptual obsessions has been to constantly reposition myself within the hegemonic maps. Whether this map is the Americas, the larger cartography of art, or my personal biography, one of my jobs has been to move around, cross dangerous borders, disappear and reappear somewhere else, and in the process create "imaginary cartographies” capable of containing the complexities of my multiple and ever-changing identities, voices, communities and performative bodies.
On February 10th, 2005, Lynne Stewart was convicted of providing material support for a terrorist conspiracy. She is the first lawyer to be convicted of aiding terrorism in the United States. Stewart was convicted on charges of conspiracy and providing material support to terrorists in 2005, and sentenced to 28 months in prison. Her felony conviction led to her being automatically disbarred. She was re-sentenced on July 15th, 2010, to ten years in prison in light of her perjury at trial.
In this interview American filmmaker, poet, and lyricist, Cecelia Condit gives shape to the contours of her work process. The artist describes the influence of her relationship with her mother, her long-term investment in the macabre, and her ongoing desire to confront death through art. While covering a broad range of topics, Condit’s discussion of her work and interests returns to several defining themes: aging, grotesqueness, and the notion of movement, both in terms of her own past as a dancer and the notion of the body in decay. With a particular emphasis on the production and context of her videos, Annie Lloyd (2008), and All About a Girl (2004), this interview offers insight into the artist’s fascination with aging, sweetness, and storytelling, while also articulating her joyful sense of discovery within the art-making process. No longer working with scripts, Condit presents herself in the interview as a scavenger–much like the crows she incorporates into her work–assembling videos which straddle the line between strange and silly. – Faye Gleisser
In these seven short video performances directed by Isaac Artenstein, Gómez-Peña confronts Mexican-American culture clashes, stereotypes, and the Fourth World (immigrants). Speaking through a bullhorn or on the airwaves of mock-station Radio Latino FM, he broadcasts a message that will not be silenced.
Gray Hairs is a visual and aural poem to Man Ray, featuring close-up shots of the dog’s body and a soundtrack of panting, sniffing and licking.
The dog in dreamland? Or at least one of us is…
–– Ken Kobland
Out of the mouths of rural boys, finding the incomparable Mulla Nasrudin in Afghanistan.
Since comets have been recorded, they've augured catastrophe, messiahs, upheaval and end times. A short film about these meteoric ice-cored fireballs and their historic ties to divination that combines imagery of 15th-18th Century European broadsides with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory footage.
In these seven short video performances directed by Isaac Artenstein, Gómez-Peña confronts Mexican-American culture clashes, stereotypes, and the Fourth World (immigrants). Speaking through a bullhorn or on the airwaves of mock-station Radio Latino FM, he broadcasts a message that will not be silenced.
Fluid Frontiers is the fifth and final film in the series entitled The Diaspora Suite, exploring Asili’s personal relationship to the African Diaspora. Shot along the Detroit River, Fluid Frontiers explores the relationship between concepts of resistance and liberation, exemplified by the Underground Railroad, Broadside Press, and artworks of local Detroit Artists.
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was a leading American poet who gained notoriety in the 1950s and ’60s through his association with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance. One of the most controversial poets of his time, his book Howl and Other Poems faced an obscenity trial in 1957 and became one of the most widely read poems of the 20th Century. In the '60s and '70s, Ginsberg studied under gurus and Zen masters.
