Taking its title from the four consonants of the ancient Hebrew name for God, Tetragramaton contemplates the relationship between man, technology, and ecological systems.
A very special episode of television's Full House devours itself from the inside out, excavating a hypnotic nightmare of a culture lost at sea. Tropes of video art and family entertainment face off in a luminous orgy neither can survive.
In this interview painter Robert Ryman (b. 1930) describes his artistic influences, recounts his work process, and assesses the use and meaning of painting, both in the 1960s and the 1990s.
The Videofreex document a street intervention by Turkish artist Tosun Bayrak (b.1926). The performance was to become a notorious example of the element of "shock" in contemporary art. Within the work:
Musica Electronica Viva at Baggie’s is a quintessential Videofreex work in its documentation style and explicit discussion of the Videofreex project.
Video Data Bank is proud to present the wonderful work of artist Laura Parnes.
Based on a painting depicting St. Bernard receiving milk from a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Words: Donald Kuspit
Performer: Heidi Bartlett
Sound/Camera: Hans Breder
Post-production: Adam Burke
In Dry Blood (Sagre Seca), various historical moments of political activism in Mexico are superimposed and corroded on the emulsion of expired film.
Spanning two years of protest and resistance, this video chronicles the politically-motivated police harassment of the homeless population in Manhattan’s Lower East Side; including suspected arson, illegal eviction, and the demolition of buildings that
Glass House examines the creative process of a modern architect who builds a house made of glass and concrete for his family.
Nathaniel Dorsky’s films are precise articulations of cinematic qualities: the surprise of an edit, the composition of framing, and the flash of the image. Dubbed the “filmmaker’s filmmaker”, Dorsky’s work captures the fleeting moments of everyday life in its poetic chaos in such films as Pneuma (1976-82), Triste (1974-96), Alaya (1976-87), and Variations (1992-98). Using a spring-wound Bolex and 16mm reversal stock film, Dorsky’s films operate in the realm of the purely visual.
In 1992, Tran came across a New York Times article about a group of hysterically blind Cambodian women in Long Beach, California, known as the largest group of such people in the world.
Sister City channels moments of paradoxical experience — of being a superhero or being for sale — into reverberant conduits, articulating a nature divided by panes of glass or suspended in watery solitudes.
Jennifer, an intelligent but insecure 14-year-old student at a boarding school, seduces her married dormitory counselor, a photographer who has offered to teach her about his art and winds up shooting her in the nude.
Though the use of fairytales and dark fantasies, these works combine the commonplace with the macabre to construct a new world of the subconscious.
In Shelly Silver’s frog spider hand horse house, the effort of all things to keep existing has been observed by someone with a camera who seems, as far as personality goes, to be no one.
Laurel Klick and I were members of the feminist art program at CalArts and became close lifelong friends.
A series of numbers that form infamous years that are uttered in a repetitive pedagogical litany. Ominous dates as a correlate of forgotten apolitical portraits. Portraits of a remembered royalty whose wealth was made possible by infamous times.
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 arbitrary.
An architect and urban planner by training, Dara Birnbaum began using video in 1978 while teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where she worked with Dan Gra
E42 is a cinematic exploration of the area in Rome knows as the EUR, a modernist landscape that was originally designated by Mussolini as the the site of the World Fair of 1942 and as a celebration of the 20 year anniversary of Fascism.
Oued Nefifik: A Foreign Movie is an experimental narrative that incorporates an actual political situation. The film was shot in the immediate aftermath of violent repression following food riots in Casablanca, June 1981.
A woman is standing barefoot on a tile floor. In slow motion, the investigative camera circles around her. Her breasts are bared and liquid runs down her legs. Bit by bit, every part of her body is shown, except her face, which remains
This dreamlike, poetic video provokes the viewer to question the nature of the most human of experiences.
In this work, Alfred Hitchcock's 128-minute film Vertigo (1958) has been condensed at the rate of one frame every two seconds.
Rackstraw Downes’s “observation” paintings, executed on-site at ponds, intersections, and baseball parks, began as a mischievous response to the dogma of style and modernist criticism.
a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert extends Coco Fusco’s in-depth examination of racialized imagery.
A pair of de-iced dove wings are on the floor next to his bed, states the poet who is deeply in love, and falling deeper, in this pictoral poem.
Joyce Kozloff was at the forefront of the 1970s pattern and decoration movement—a feminist effort to incorporate typically “feminine” and popular decorative arts into the fine arts.
We asked 12 people to walk 4 identical routes through the course of a day and a night, always attempting to repeat the manner of the first time.
This tape, Harriet, created by Videofreex member Nancy Cain, unfolds much like a short play or literary character study.
Made using voicemails the Kuchar brothers left on her home answering machine, the artist reveals George and Mike in all their candid honesty leading up to and following George’s untimely death in 2011.
By assembling these three films, the Endless Dreams compilation provides a unique opportunity to explore the vast array of cinematic modes employed by Green’s filmic oeuvre, and how these are articulated in her layered spatial and extrasensory
In 1985 the great soprano Leontyne Price sang the title role in Verdi’s Aida as her farewell opera. After the ‘O patria mia’ aria, the audience breaks into a four-minute applause.
El jardín del amor (The garden of love) is a celebration of life and love, religious ecstasy, where animals, humans and nature coexist in harmony.
Blind Huber is a film interpretation of a poem by the American writer Nick Flynn loosely based on the life of Francois Huber, the blind 18th Century beekeeper, who sat before a series of hives for fifty years unlocking an unknown world.
By using clips of evil queens/witches this video plays off the sadomasochistic lesboerotic subtexts commonly found in children's entertainment. A helpless maiden is tiring of her consensual s/m relationship with her lover, and "evil" queen.
An experimental video about cultural and political disputes surrounding immigration and naturalization processes. Work In Progress explores the effects of the 1986 U.S.
Meredith Monk (b.1942) has been composing, choreographing, and performing since the mid-1960s. Monk is primarily known for her vocal innovations, including a wide range of extended techniques, which she fir
Ron Gorchov (b. 1930) is an American artist who has been working with curved surface paintings and shaped canvases since 1967.
Thai conceptual performance video artist Kamin Lertchaiprasert (b.1964) anchors his work through a commitment to the core principles of Buddhism and his definitive goal to create “life-specific” rather than “site-specific” art. For Lertchaiprasert, the purpose of art is to reclaim the meaningfulness of human activities and collaboration. The artist describes how his techniques of production and his choice of medium ranges from environmental works, to formal sculptures made from recycled materials, to the use of relational aesthetics in the creation of collaborative workshops. With reference to cultural and religious differences between East and West, Lertchaiprasert also posits how the philosophy of art under Buddhist ideals can be a matter of survival, helping us to better understand the essence of being alive. -Faye Gleisser
You will never be a woman. You must live the rest of your days entirely as a man and you will only grow more masculine with every passing year. There is no way out.
Furthering the Animal Charm mission to undermine normality and create new stories from old, the videotapes in this collection seek to reinterpret and/or disrupt the flow of found footage narrative.
Last Man is made of the raw footage of security cameras that stream online.
It is a tribute of hyperkinetic colors to the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro in times of pandemic vortex and post-Cubist quarantine. This is Altazor's color drop. Part of the Harmonic and Hyperkinetic Color Film Series.
In this video diptych, Snyder uses image and music to depict opposing forces in semi-abstract terms.
Benning illustrates a lustful encounter with a “bad girl,” through the gender posturing and genre interplay of Hollywood stereotypes: posing for the camera as the rebel, the platinum blonde, the gangster, the '50s crooner, and the heavy-lidded vamp.
Shot in the northeast United States landscape, Willie and Brewsie reflects on the contemporary resonances of the last novella written by Gertrude Stein in 1946 entitled Brewsie and Willie.
The New Year is upon everyone in Bay City. Music plays, strangers mingle, friends get raunchy and the calories pile on as the sky comes ablaze with pyrotechnic pizzazz.
Outwardly from Earth's Center is a fictitious narrative about a society on an unstable piece of land that is in danger of disappearance.