Through her performances and videotapes, Eleanor Antin (b. 1935) creates characters (King, Ballerina, Black Movie Star, and Nurse) while spinning tales that blur fiction and history.
Through the deployment of various structural strategies, the narrative logic of three problematic and influential films is transformed into a sensuous hallucinatory unveiling of repressed representations in historical dramas of the U.S.’s critical perio
Addressing the tear that Lucio Fontana cut in the canvases of his Spatial Concepts, the performer, Russ Nordman, rejoins and repairs the split screen.
Rosie Cutler, a middle school lunch lady, and TJ Fortune, a outcast student, have an unusual relationship.
Produced in Liege for Belgium TV, this tape considers how broadcast television functions in a multi-lingual area.
Adapted, quite loosely, from interviews with the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in the late 60s and early 70s.
John Cage’s compositions and performances have had a profound influence on generations of musicians and artists. In this tape, he initiates For the Third Time as author Richard Kostelanetz interviews him.
Joan Fontcuberta was born in Barcelona in 1955. His work has been widely exhibited internationally. Fontcuberta uses photography as a conceptual medium, often testing the limits of the image’s credibility.
La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo is a recreation of one day at the Canto Grande prison in Peru, following women guerrillas from the Maoist Shining Path movement, from their morning marches to their bedtime chants.
The innocence of creating a mirror, only to repeatedly crush it underfoot.
Part of the paraconsistent sequence series.
This two-part episode features Glenn Belverio and Duncan Elliott participating in an ACT UP demonstration at President George Bush’s summer house in Kennebunkport, Maine, interviewing activists and documenting this historic event.
British theorist and art historian Eddie Chambers (b.1960) is a curator and a regular contributor to Art Monthly and European journals on contemporary art. His writings were collected in Run Through the Jungle (1999). Since the early 1980s he has been involved in organizing and curating a considerable number of artists' exhibitions. In addition to his exhibition work, he has written extensively about the work of artists in the United Kingdom and other countries, including Australia, Jamaica and the U.S. His articles and other texts have been widely published in magazines and journals such as Third Text, Visual Culture in Britain, International Review of African American Art, and Wasafiri.
Illness, treatment, recovery, conversation. This experimental short presents stories of illness and disfunction, bringing together but also separating two performers, their stories, their bodies.
This eight-minute video is part experimental video art, part sketch comedy routine, and part informational lesson on the advantages and disadvantages of owning Sony's latest video technology.
Through a catalogue of looks, movements, and gestures, Mayhem presents a social order run amok in a libidinous retracing of film noir conventions.
In this cooking demonstration/performance, Sobell wears a chicken carcass over her face while dressing (literally, in baby clothes) a chicken to be cooked for dinner.
Miller & Shellabarger, their breath made visible by the cold of a refrigerated room, exchange breath with each other.
Since the Gulf War in 1991, warfare and reporting it have become hyper-technological affairs, in which real and computer-generated images cannot be distinguished any more.
Cheang has taken her camera to the streets for a candid glimpse of lesbian public sexuality.
Laurie Anderson is perhaps best known as a performance artist who works in both the art and commercial worlds.
A familiar landscape comprised of big box stores and parking lots proves a rich site for longing, intimacy, and radical change. Celebrities are observed in this environment and are reduced to ordinary beings in the process.
“It is curious that in the most important periods of one’s life, one never keeps a diary. There are some things that even a habitual diary-keeper shrinks from putting down in words—at the time, at least.
Attempting to apologize for the lack of good weather in Weather Diary 3, George arrives in Milwaukee only to find the drought back in full swing.
The Erosions series develop the concepts of oxidation, wear and entropy from an audiovisual and cinematographic perspective.
A color-separation portrait of the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens, Greece, made during the Anti-Austerity protests in late 2011.
“Trolling for news we call it,” says Bart Friedman a minute into this video, as he pushes down a road the Lanesville TV News Buggy – a baby carriage filled with video equipment, spilling over with wires.
A video about the conception of video and of life itself. This work suggests that all that is conceived transcends the division between the external and interior worlds.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999) was best known as a photographer and filmmaker. He moved to New York from his native Basel in 1935 at age 21.
The young and the innocent at the mercy of a palpable presence oozing menace and scarlet-stained goodness as a strawberry sundae melts under the glare of future hell-firestorms in search of kindling.
Something Else is a film about found footage as subject matter and Miss Black Roanoke, Virginia 1971 expressing her thoughts about the upcoming Miss Black Virginia 1971 Pageant.
Cast: Rene Marie.
Presenting his bare torso to the camera, Nauman meticulously applies, and removes, layers of white and black pigment, to his face, arms, and chest.
"Combining the comical with the absurd, I created six funny faces to animate the images of Japanese vowels while differentiating between 'image', 'letter', and 'voice'."
— Takahiko iimura
"Starring an inflatable wig holder that I got at a car boot sale in Bremen, Germany, this film began as a demonstration of different film animation techniques, but evolved into a bizarre improvised narrative in which the head escapes from the violent cl
Une Ville de l'Avenir uses the lens of Alphaville to look at the City of the Future that we live in today. The modernism of La Defense in Paris is the setting for this chilling revisiting.
BIT Plane is a highly compact spy plane, wingspan 20 inches, radio-controlled, video-instrumented and deployed over areas of scenic interest. Due to its refined dimensions, BIT plane is able to enter territory inaccessible to other aircraft.
In this interview with Carl Bogner, Sky Hopinka (b.
Actor Richard Marcus speaks directly and intimately to the viewer, relating a tale of personal loss, and then changing the subject to baseball. The video is about amateur vs. professional, personal vs. public space, and loyalty and self-confidence.
In Mondo Toronto, Glennda travels to Toronto to visit Liza LaBruce (Bruce LaBruce). Liza gives Glennda a tour of the city's public parks, with specific reference to their role in gay culture.
Twelve church bells are rung daily for 30 days in a sculptural setting at the Capp Street Project in San Francisco. Ringers progress from practice sessions on beer bottles to a full-scale ring.
The Waiãpi videomaker Kasiripinã decides to show white people the documentation he did on his people in Amapo. He presents and comments on three celebrations that represent episodes of the myth-cycle of the creation of the universe.
BE CAREFUL KYLE was produced over a few days shortly before Jacob Ciocci and Kent Lambert discussed their work with Scott Wolniak in a webinar for the University of Chicago's Local Produce series.
In this short video, the Videofreex sit in on, and record part of, a lecture given by Jesse Ritter to undergraduate students at Princeton University in 1969.
In Dreams and Autumn is a three-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the three channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.
The video opens with visual feedback and various sounds including snoring, whistling, and other generated audio. The video then slowly transitions into Phil Morton’s monologue and a solarized image.
Linda M. Montano: 14 Years of Living Art is a video catalog of the artist’s exhibition, performance and workshop in Montreal in 2003.
Craig Owens (1950-1990) was a critic who wrote and lectured extensively on contemporary art. He showed particular interest in the issues of photography, postmodernism, feminism, and Marxist thought. A former associate editor for October and senior editor for Art in America, as well as professor of art history at Yale University and Barnard College, his writings were collected in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (1994). Owens died of an AIDS-related illness in 1990.
Dirty Laundry speculates upon the buried narratives of gender and sexuality in Chinese-Canadian history of the 19th Century, when Chinese communities were almost exclusively male.
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.
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 the heroine deposits a mysterious Hefty bag at the curb. Like Condit's other video narratives, Possibly In Michigan shows bizarre events disrupting mundane lives. Combining the commonplace with the macabre, humor with the absurd, she constructs a world of divided reality.