Surveying the First Decade: Volume 1

07:25:25

Collection: Box Sets , Curated Compilations

Tags: Feminism, Gender, Performance, Video History

Surveying the First Decade: Volume 1

This comprehensive anthology on the history of experimental and independent video is an essential tool for teachers, libraries, and researchers. Volumes 1 and 2 include over 16 hours of historic video on eight thematically curated programs, exploring conceptual, performance-based, image-processed, feminist, documentary and grassroots community-based genres.

Volume 1 includes:

Program 1: Explorations of Presence, Performance, and Audience

Performer/Audience/Mirror, Dan Graham, 1975, 22:45
Selected Works (Dog Duet, Used Car Salesman, Dog Biscuit in Glass Jar), William Wegman, 1972, 08:44
Baldessari Sings LeWitt, John Baldessari,1972, 03:38 (excerpted from 12:50)
Undertone, Vito Acconci, 1972, 09:15 (excerpted from 37:20)
Vertical Roll, Joan Jonas, 1972, 19:37
My Father, Shigeko Kubota, 1975, 14:46
Exchange, Robert Morris, 1973, 36:02

Program 2: Investigations of the Phenomenal World: Space, Sound, and Light

Black and White Tapes, Paul McCarthy, 1970-75, 06:30 (excerpted from 33:00)
Stamping In The Studio, Bruce Nauman, 1968, 05:00, (excerpted from 1:01:35)
Double Vision, Peter Campus, 1971, 14:22
Boomerang, Richard Serra with Nancy Holt, 1974, 10:27
Island Song, Charlemagne Palestine, 1976, 16:02
Cycles of 3s and 7s, Tony Conrad, 1976, 02:51 (excerpted from 30:54)
The Children's Tapes, Terry Fox, 1974, 29:36
Soundings, Gary Hill, 1979, 17:41
Lightning, Paul and Marlene Kos, 1976, 01:17
Sweet Light, Bill Viola, 1977, 09:07

Program 3: Approaching Narrative: "There are Problems to be Solved"

The Red Tapes Part II, Vito Acconci, 1976, 57:55
Out of the Body Travel, Richard Foreman, 1976, 23:50 (excerpted from 42:00)
The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd, Arthur Ginsberg and Video Free America, 1972-75, 33:15 (excerpted from 1:00:00)

Program 4: Gendered Confrontations

Art Herstory, Hermine Freed, 1974, 14:49 (excerpted from 22:00)
Female Sensibility, Lynda Benglis, 1973, 13:05
Ama L'Uomo Tuo (Always Love Your Man), Cara DeVito, 1975, 18:52
The Mom Tapes, Ilene Segalove, 1974-78, 03:39 (excerpted from 26:52)
Primal Scenes, Linda Montano, 1980, 09:52
Nun and Deviant, Nancy Angelo, 1976, 14:08 (excerpted from 20:28)
Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, Martha Rosler, 1977, 39:16

See also Surveying the First Decade and Surveying the First Decade: Volume 2.

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Included Titles
LISTING STYLE:

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…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Documentation, Performance

In the first tape, Two Dogs and Ball, Wegman uses the area framed by the camera as his performance space, employing a single, fixed camera to record the scenes as he, Man Ray and Fay Ray, his…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags:

"One of Baldessari’s most ambitious and risky efforts. Seated and holding a sheaf of papers, he proceeds to sing each of Sol LeWitt’s 35 conceptual statements to a different pop tune, after the model…

Collections: Early Video Art, Single Titles
Tags: Art Criticism, Conceptual Art, Humor, Performance, Video History

Vito Acconci

Undertone

1972| 00:37:20

In this now infamous tape, exemplary of his early transgressive performance style, Acconci sits and relates a masturbatory fantasy about a girl rubbing his legs under the table. Carrying on a…

Collections: Early Video Art, Single Titles
Tags: Conceptual Art, Gender, Performance, Sexuality, Video History

Joan Jonas

Vertical Roll

1972| 00:19:37

In this well-known early tape, Jonas manipulates the grammar of the camera to create the sense of a grossly disturbed physical space. The space functions as a metaphor for the unstable identity of…

Collections: Early Video Art, Single Titles
Tags: Body, Feminism, Performance, Sound, Video History, Mental Landscape

Shigeko Kubota

My Father

1975| 00:15:34

In this classic personal elegy, Kubota mourns her father's death and recounts the last days of his life. Reflecting on Kubota's use of the video medium, the television emerges as the link between…

Collections: Early Video Art, Single Titles
Tags: Death and Dying, Family, Feminism, Performance, Video History, Post-colonialism, Television

Robert Morris

Exchange

1973| 00:36:02

In 1972, Robert Morris and Lynda Benglis agreed to exchange videos in order to develop a dialogue between each other’s work. Morris’s video, Exchange, is a part of that process—a response to Benglis’…

Collections: Early Video Art, Single Titles
Tags: Feminism, Performance, Video History

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…

Collections: Early Video Art, Single Titles
Tags: Performance, Video History

From an inverted position, high above the floor, the camera records Nauman’s trek back and forth and across the studio; his stamping creates a generative rhythm reminiscent of native drum beats or…

Collections: Early Video Art, Single Titles
Tags: Performance, Video History, Conceptual Art

Peter Campus

Double Vision

1971| 00:14:22

Campus investigates the metaphoric overlap between properties of the video camera and processes of human perception, an area of great interest to many early videomakers. Double Vision inventories…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Video History

Richard Serra

Boomerang

1974| 00:10:27

This is a tape which analyzes its own discourse and processes as it is being formulated. The language of Boomerang, and the relation between the description and what is being described, is not…

Collections: Early Video Art, Single Titles
Tags: Language, Sound, Video History

Strapping a video camera to himself as he drives a motorcycle around an island, Palestine harmonizes with the engine, maniacally repeating the phrase, "Gotta get outta here...gotta get outta here…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags:

Cycles of 3's and 7's is a performance in which the harmonic intervals that would ordinarily be performed by a musical instrument are represented through the computation of their arithmetic…

Collections: Single Titles
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Phenomenolgocial dramas involving household objects like candles, spoons, and matches, unfold with an extreme economy of gesture. Fox balances a spoon and a piece of ice on top of a bent fork. We…

Collections: Single Titles
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Gary Hill

Soundings

1979| 00:17:41

"Soundings is a meditation on the phenomenology of sound, the translation of image into sound and sound into image through a series of experiments on an audio speaker. The speaker delivers sound both…

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Bill Viola

Sweet Light

1977| 00:09:07

Viola has referred to Sweet Light and other tapes from this period as “songs”—personal, lyrical statements. Articulated through precise editing, Sweet Light incorporates symbolic imagery, changes of…

Collections: Early Video Art, Single Titles
Tags:

Vito Acconci

The Red Tapes

1976| 02:20:00

The Red Tapes is a three-part epic that features the diary musings of a committed outsider: revolutionary, prisoner, artist. The series offers a fragmented mythic narrative and a poetic reassessment…

Collections: Early Video Art, Single Titles
Tags: Performance, Politics, Video History

A "young woman who finds herself surrounded by the relics of Western culture" is the subject of Richard Foreman's formal tableaux. The narration centers on a young woman's struggle to find a relation…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Body, Dance, Documentation, Feminism, Gender, Language, Mental Landscape, Performance

From 1970 to 1972, Arthur Ginsberg and Video Free America recorded the private life of a not-so-average American couple-Carel Row and Ferd Eggan. She is a porn actress and filmmaker; he is a bisexual…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Documentary, Family, LGBTQ, Portrait

Hermine Freed

Art Herstory

1974| 00:22:00

“In her brilliant video Art Herstory, [Freed] has restaged art history, putting herself in the model’s role in numerous paintings.... Time dissolves under her humorous assault — one moment in the…

Collections: Early Video Art, Single Titles
Tags: Feminism, Humor, Video History, Art History

As two heavily made-up women take turns directing each other and submitting to each other's kisses and caresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that the camera is their main point of focus. Read…

Collections: Early Video Art, Single Titles
Tags: Feminism, Gender, Performance, Video History

This carefully structured documentary is both a character study of DeVito's grandmother, Adeline LeJudas, and an incisive social critique of patriarchal society. In contrast to the domestic comforts…

Collections: Early Video Art, Single Titles
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Ilene Segalove

The Mom Tapes

1974| 00:26:52

Segalove takes her mom as subject in these short pieces, recording her stories, her advice, and her daily routine. What results is a portrait of a contemporary mother-daughter relationship,…

Collections: Early Video Art, Single Titles
Tags: Autobiography, Family, Feminism, Performance, Video History

Over grainy, black and white images of a woman giving birth, Montano reads the story of a nun’s sexual self-discovery—recounting Sister Joan’s growing awareness of her body’s sensuousness and…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Body, Feminism, Performance, Sexuality, Video History

Nancy Angelo + 1 other

Nun and Deviant

1976| 00:20:28

A classic example of feminist performance videos of the 1970s, which often incorporated autobiography, expansion of self through personae, and assertions of a new identity for women. In Nun and…

Collections: Early Video Art, Single Titles
Tags: Feminism, Gender, Performance, Video History

Taking aim at the social standardization enforced particularly on women's bodies, Rosler critiques the politics of "objective" or scientific evaluation that result in the depersonalization,…

Collections: Early Video Art, Single Titles
Tags: Body, Feminism, Performance, Science