"Benglis manipulates generations of video footage to confound our sense of time; she implies an infinite regression of time and space — Benglis making faces in front of a monitor of her making faces in front of a monitor of her... ad infinitum. The viewer retains a sense of the images sequentiality, although the sequence of creation is not revealed in a logical, orderly fashion, and is heavily obscured by the random layering and continual repetition of aural and visual components."
Through a successful eBay bid in January of 2004, 1975 eteam dollars turned into 10 acres of personal U.S. property. The lot, a generic square within the larger American grid of townships, is located in the desert of Nevada. The closest settlement, Montello, "The town that refuses to die", is eight miles away, and the almost abandoned airbase Wendover, at the edge of the Salt Flats, is located about 30 miles SE. It's the 10-acre lot and its surroundings that started the eteam's search for solutions to problems, which were created by big systems that had made some small mistakes.
In this episode of The Brenda and Glennda Show, Brenda and Glennda create a satire of 1990's infomercials. The video includes interviews and performances by Vaginal Davis, Bruce LaBruce, and Chris Teen.
An episode of The Brenda and Glennda Show, hosted by Brenda Sexual and Glennda Orgasm.
In a world of Internet and high technology, there still remains something so arcane, so simple and extraordinary, so absolutely incredible as a circus of educated fleas. Marvel at Maria Fernanda Cardoso's work as the powerful Brutus (The Strongest Flea on Earth) pulls a locomotive that weighs 160,000 times his own weight. See the flea ballerinas dressed in micro-tutus, dance to the rhythms of Tango! Hold your breath as the highwire artists defy gravity on the tightrope and swing precariously on a miniature trapeze.
An audience-interactive demonstration of Lev Kuleshov’s famous editing experiment, and a 3D review of loosely related principles of subject/spectator empathy.
Note: should be viewed through 3D glasses. See http://store.yahoo.com/rainbowsymphony/an3dglasreda.html
This title is also available on Ben Coonley: Trick Pony Trilogy.
An alternative earth music video. An epic last stand. A portrait of two utilitarian workers engaging in a collaboration with Karen, manifesting improvisational geographic friendships...
This title is also available on HalfLifers: The Complete History.
French performance artist Orlan uses her own body as a sculptural medium. Since 1990, she has worked on La Reincarnation de Sainte-Orlan, a process of plastic surgeries that she “performs,” making elaborate spectacles with surgeons dressed in sci-fi costumes and broadcasting the operations live via satellite to galleries worldwide. By exploring a total transformation of self, Orlan delves into issues of identity and the malleability of the flesh. She lives and works in Paris, exhibiting and performing internationally.
Interview by Shay Degrandis, via translator.
A historical interview originally recorded in 1983.
Interview by Joan Livingstone.
The performer interprets a video demonstration of a series of poses with mirrors, not unlike Breder's Bod/Sculpture photo series, but this time in a studio. This performance was later staged several times with Breder directing from off-camera.
Performed by Georgeanne Higgins.
Compromise is Episode 1 of the video art trilogy, This is More Than Love I Feel Inside, in which Jillian Peña traces a queer relationship from inception to demise.
A rockin’ talkin’ pony and its human companion examine the evolution of Halloween games, from the ancient rite of bobbing for apples to the contemporary spectacle of American football. Confronting liminality on 3rd down and long, the pony BRINGS IT TO THE HOUSE.
This title is also available on Ben Coonley: Trick Pony Trilogy.
In 50 Blue a young man (the artist’s brother) pushes an elderly disabled man (the artist’s father) in a wheel chair through a muddy landscape. It is a long and exhausting trip to an unknown destination only discovered at the end. After an arduous struggle the two arrive at the edge of a grey lake where a 10-meter high guard tower stands. The young man ties the wheel chair to a rope and hoists the old man up on the tower platform with the help of eight men, all dressed in yellow plastic raincoats.
Commissioned by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) for the occasion of Eiko receiving the Sam Miller Performing Arts Award. Premiered at LMCC’s A Toast to Downtown on December 9, 2020. Shot at LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island.
Performer Eiko Otake.
Director/Editor Liz Sargent.
DP Minos Papas.
Production by Cyprian Films, New York.
The performance artist Stephen Varble spent the last five years of his life working on an epic, unfinished performance-turned-video titled Journey to the Sun (1978-1983). Only partially complete and under constant revision, this complex work combined Varble’s history of making costumes for performances with his fantastic stories involving metamorphosis and martyrdom. In 1982, Varble decided to make a “prelude” to Journey to the Sun, combining existing footage with new video taken in Riverside Park in New York City.
C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), Part 1 is a collaborative video and performance work by artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, with AJ Blandford and Seattle-based band Kinski. Inhabiting the intersection of human movement and architecture, A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs) present a full-spectrum video, set to a score by rock quartet Kinski.
Linda Montano (b. 1942) is an American performance and video artist. At the source of’s work is her search for a personal harmony and balance. She seeks to synthesize the intuitive processes that transforms the private self with the rationality and pragmatism of the public persona, extending this synthesis to both art and life. Her avowed interest lies in "learning how to live better through life-like artworks," with personal growth evolving out of shared experience, role adoption, and ritual.
From A to Z in this mock cooking-show demonstration Rosler 'shows and tells' the ingredients of the housewife's day. She offers an inventory of tools that names and mimics the ordinary with movements more samurai than suburban. Rosler's slashing gesture as she forms a letter of the alphabet in the air with a knife and fork is a rebel gesture, punching through the 'system of harnessed subjectivity' from the inside out.
"I was concerned with something like the notion of 'language speaking the subject', and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity."
— Martha Rosler
Breder used Stavros Deligiorgis’s encyclopedic ability to make associations as an element in this video art and performances, providing a kind of intellectual running commentary in works such as Intertext (1976). He watches a constantly changing mirror image and narrates his experience. His unscripted narration references “the seam” and the intercultural significance of symmetry. Deligiorgis interprets the seam, membrane, or border as an emergent text.
Andro/lesbian body-doubles wrestle each other in an outer-space fantasy.
Performers: A.K. Burns & K8 Hardy
Audio: Matt Volla
This title is also available on A.K. Burns: Early Videoworks
Acconci explodes the notion of an artist’s creation, his creative act being the build-up and discharge of saliva, an activity more properly belonging to the realm of necessary and autonomic bodily functions than art. Positioning himself as a hyper self-conscious artistic subject, Acconci fuses the terrains of body art and process art, formulating the body as process, and art as a natural function of the body.
This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.
A distinguished looking man (performance artist Richard Layzell) is apparently trapped in an ever changing void of colour, locked in a power play with a perversely operated camera. A mute, caged, charismatic TV presenter he is by turns charming, menacing, educational, confused. At times he appears to have great powers. A voiceover tells us extraordinary things — how this man is special — the first man to 'have a baby'. Hallucinogenic flash-frames punctuate the colour field to give us a view of his world's disturbing and alien futuristic logic.
The fifth video of the installation Touch Parade, which as a whole explores “plastic love” or fetish culture and the assimilation of marginalized sexuality on the internet. In questioning what is an explicit and/or illicit image, fetishes found on YouTube that consist of banal gestures, are re-performed. Unlike other pornographic content, these videos evade censoring because they are not culturally recognized as representations of sexuality.
In A Case for the Closet, Glennda Orgasm and Judy LaBruce host an episode of Closet Talk. They discuss why they are for people staying in the closet, and attribute coming out of the closet to the mediocrity, and thus downfall, of gay culture. Glennda and Judy establish their new movement, XXX Gay (replacing the postqueer movement), and explain its philosphies and values.
A compilation of five early short films made between 1966 to 1969.
Hand Movie 1966, 6:00, b&w, silent, 8mm
Close-up of a hand, the fingers of which enact a sensuous dance. Camerawork by William Davis.
Volleyball (Foot Film) 1967, 10:00 b&w, silent, 16mm
A volleyball is rolled into the frame and comes to rest. Two legs in sneakers, seen from the knees down, enter the frame and stand beside it. Cut to new angle, same characters and actions. Camerawork by Bud Wirtschafter.
