Problematizing Pleasure / Punk Theory

Liza Béar, Dara Birnbaum, Cecelia Condit, Tony Oursler, Julie Zando

01:07:18

Collection: Curated Compilations

Tags: Culture Jamming, Death and Dying, Feminism, Language, Love, Philosophy, Sexuality

Cecelia Condit Videoworks: Volume 1

VDB TV: Decades
1980s: Problematizing Pleasure / Punk Theory

An original program for VDB TV: Decades curated by Steve Reinke.

"I was born in 1963, and so the 1980s mean something to me, but I’m not sure what. I think it good, for instance, that I didn’t get AIDS and die. Also, that I only flirted with semiotics. Like cybernetics, which started in the 1950s, grew to dominance in the 1960s and simply faded away in the 1970s, we once believed in semiotics. In the 1980s, it was the way to understand how images contained meanings/produced discourses, and how texts circulate. (How do they circulate? Intertextually.) Perhaps semiotics was the dying gasp of modernism, a conservative strain of modernism posing as postmodernism. The death of the author resulting not in the birth of the reader, but in the birth of a severe, obscure, hermetic semiotician."

  Steve Reinke

This program is also avaliable on VDB TV: Decades, a unique five-disc compilation that casts a distinctive eye over the development of video as an art form from the early 1970s to the present. This five-disc compilation was released during 2017 in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Video Data Bank. Each program was curated by an inspiring artist, scholar or media arts specialist who has focused on a specific decade, diving into the archive of the VDB to create personal, distinctive, and relevant programs, accompanied by original essays and texts. VDB TV: Decades is the perfect accompaniment to VDB’s iconic anthology Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in the U.S. 1968-80providing another essential tool for understanding the development of video and media art over the past five decades.

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Included Titles
LISTING STYLE:

Possibly In Michigan is an operatic fairytale about cannibalism in Middle America. A masked man stalks a woman through a shopping mall and follows her home. In the end, their roles are reversed when…

Collections: Early Video Art, Single Titles
Tags: Consumer culture, Feminism, Music

Tony Oursler

Grand Mal

1981| 00:23:40

"Oursler’s thematic concerns betray classic Freudian anxieties about sex and death. In Grand Mal, the hero takes a convoluted odyssey through a landscape of disturbing experiences. The video’s free…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Death and Dying, Sexuality, Animals, Drawing

The second part of the Damnation of Faust Trilogy centers on the development of Marguerite, the female character in the Faust legend. Masterfully composing fragmentary "memory" images in elegant 19th…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Feminism, Literature

Liza Béar

Earthglow

1983| 00:08:00

Earthglow is a poem written for the character generator and switcher that conveys a writer's internal dialogue through both subtle and dramatic color changes and through movement, size, and placement…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Language, Poetry, Technology

The final work in the Damnation of Faust Trilogy, ironically titled Charming Landscape, investigates the way in which the urban landscape is a place "where you lose your identity.” Two female…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Feminism

Julie Zando

Hey Bud

1987| 00:11:00

Hey Bud revolves around the suicide of Bud Dwyer, a government official who killed himself before a television audience. Zando compares the suicide to a kind of pornographic sex act that plays upon…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Body, Death and Dying, LGBTQ

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