Humor

A film about haircuts, clothes, and image/sound relationships.

"This four-minute film explores our response to stereotypes—aural, visual and ideological. Smith signals these stereotypes to the viewer through a chiefly associational system, which deftly manipulates the path of our expectations. The structure is stunningly simple and deceptively subtle. We are taken on a journey from one concrete stereotype to its diametric opposite, as images transform and juxtapose to, ultimately, invert our interpretation of what we see and hear."

—Gary Davis

Enter the classic world of a haunted creature destined for stardom in the astrological realm beyond our heads. Visit a haunted soul in her house of horrors and heavenly delights. Sip tea with a sorceress of song and sorrows, earthly eloquence and ephemeral effusions. Taste her ghoulish goulash and smack thy lips with a forked tongue, for Lucifer and Lilith reside within us all.

As recent state cut-backs force many mental patients out into the real world, Tony Oursler and Joe Gibbons team up to address psychiatric deinstitutionalization from a comic angle. After years of being cared for, Tony, Joe and their dog Woody leave the cuckoo’s nest and reluctantly face the prospect of finding jobs and cooking their own meals. Their darkly comic adventures include a comatose Tony tuning in to daytime TV, and Joe fantasizing about death while strolling in the park.

As recent state cut-backs force many mental patients out into the real world, Tony Oursler and Joe Gibbons team up to address psychiatric deinstitutionalization from a comic angle. After years of being cared for, Tony, Joe and their dog Woody leave the cuckoo’s nest and reluctantly face the prospect of finding jobs and cooking their own meals. Their darkly comic adventures include a comatose Tony tuning in to daytime TV, and Joe fantasizing about death while strolling in the park.

Take a joyride through comfortable suburbia—a landscape molded by seductive television and corporate America (and keep in mind: disaster is another logo for your consumption...). This is the age of the "culture jammed" consumer preened with Friends hair, Survivor courage, and CNN awareness. A generation emptying their wallets for the most important corporate product of all: lifestyle. The psychological road trip across a slightly battered America travels at One Mile per Minute.

Introduces the audience to the rockin' talkin' pony, who provides musical accompaniment for a series of Texas country-dance lessons.

This title is also available on Ben Coonley: Trick Pony Trilogy.

Are gender outlaws considered the new biological terrorists seeking weapons of mass bodily destruction? OPERATION INVERT compares the different regulations mediating botox-related plastic surgery and gender reassignment "sex change." Historical medical assessments of the invert (homosexual and transsexual) "condition" reveal seemingly outdated absurdities about outsider deviance. Nonetheless, current institutional loopholes governing gender re-assignment surgery suggest a fresh resurgence of loony pathology and diagnosis.

Oral Fixations is a single channel video installation that evolves over a seven hour time period. The project is a darkly humorous look at a habit of endless consumption and the resulting accumulation of waste. A narrative gradually emerges from the on-screen action that depicts a large mouthed character who dances while flossing its one protruding tooth. A conveyor belt regularly delivers factory-farm fresh hams that the character delights in taking one large bite from and then tossing aside.

A military installation is beset by unidentified flying objects while the personnel try to come to grips with their own mysterious yearnings and the cumbersome protuberances that protrude from their own species.

Made at the San Francisco Art Institute with my students, this tuneful picture transports the viewer to the planet Mars as three attractive teens seek funding for an expedition into adulthood. Along the way they and we encounter the ups and downs of human relations and otherworldly intercourse. A family picture with timeless values, this foray into fantasy land on a tight budget should please the young at heart or old in body in unexpected ways. Although this trip is short on funding but big in concept it’s really quite a ride and looks like a million bucks for the vision impaired.

The expansive cycles of time vs. the ever smaller circles of life under lockdown. Includes: a journey to the river, some rat facts, more adverts, anagrams, and a noticeable build up of ideas.

Third video in The Variations cycle.

A bird of paradise is pruned for the lens of a Bolex camera as my Sony camcorder documents the film and video scene out here in fog-bound Frisco. A look behind the haze that blocks from view new and old faces as they frame within the medium of choice the tidbits we eventually devour with our eyes.

Pagan and Christian souls clash in this student-collaborated mix of the defrocked and the deflowered.

A high and low fidelity record of obsessions past and present. A hooded man named Cobra Commander (drawn naked) and a boy with black glasses. A fanged woman named Shadow-La and a girl in a rose colored wig. Belinda (Heaven on Earth), Madonna (Live to Tell), and headphones (worn naked). An airport terminal. Home. The Montgomery Ward catalog circa 1980. That orange bedspread, that red flowered couch.

An island. A mountain. A City of Angels who scoop up the pellets dropped by other winged creatures.

This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.

The Rudnick family run amok with unleashed talent in San Francisco and display a wide girth of creative curvature for all to admire over a hot cup of java. The fluidity of artistic endeavors spills over the borders of the Pacific Rim to highlight not only aquatic animals, but also desert-bound creatures etched in the thirst-quenching magnificence of kitchenware crystal.

The Badger Series has issues and attempts, each episode, to resolve them. Recasting a glove puppet show through his own present day sensibilities, Paul assumes the role of kindly uncle mentor to a household of capersome woodland creatures. Mortality, self-sacrfice, depression, altered states of consciousness and transgressive art practices are all explored as part of their everyday lives together.

The Badger Series has issues and attempts, each episode, to resolve them. Recasting a glove puppet show through his own present day sensibilities, Paul assumes the role of kindly uncle mentor to a household of capersome woodland creatures. Mortality, self-sacrifice, depression, altered states of consciousness and transgressive art practices are all explored as part of their everyday lives together.

A Perfect Pair posits the idea that individual consumers are walking billboards for the products they use; product slogans and brand names peeking out from every crevice and cranny of the actors’ bodies. Export demonstrates how the body of the consumer, especially that of the female consumer, is co-opted by commercialism. In tongue-in-cheek fashion, A Perfect Pair celebrates the modern-day co-mingling of fetish objects, as a body builder seduces a prostitute at a bar saying, “Your eyes are the most beautiful blue ad-space. Your cheek could promote a Mercedes.

The Jersey Devil lives again in this work the students and I mounted (or disrobed) for skeptical scrutiny.

A wide-ranging look at pictures I collect on my walls and in my head. A look at pictures I concoct with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute, and objects d’art collected by those whose picture is taken by my picture-taking machine.

A voyage through a California Christmas that begins in the turd-smeared streets of San Francisco and ends in a botanical wonder of ethnic endurance and faith. A journey that incorporates pelicans, palaces, and platters of plenty. A season of joy bloated with the ephemeral gasses of religious fermentation and the iconography of a movie-land Madonna.

A stark and simple drama of man versus TV. "Pixelhead is an exploration of my love-hate relationship with the television medium in the form of an exaggerated, tragi-comic, semi-autobiography." —Bryan Boyce

This science fiction adventure centers on the interaction between a crew of Earthmen and their seduction by the love-hungry Amazons of the red planet, Mars. The tale is brought to life with all the opulence that an $800 budget can produce and the young cast of non-actors live up to their fullest foibles as the plot thickens with a mix of romance and wartime action intertwined with a musical number or two. The ambitions were high and the necklines low in this effects-laden tribute to pulp fiction fantasy and intergalactic intercourse.

In this early Tom Rubnitz, Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken collaboration, "Frieda" performs her rap song with a bevy of dolls as back-up singers and dancers. Features rock-bottom production values and song lyrics by Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken.