American Psycho(drama): Sigmund Freud vs. Henry Ford

01:17:00

Collection: Curated Compilations

Tags: Animals, Culture Jamming, Humor, Mental Landscape, Performance

American Psycho(drama): Sigmund Freud vs. Henry Ford

This humorous selection of performance-oriented videos maps a trajectory between consumer society and psychoanalytic confession. HalfLifers perform two rescue missions using colored snack food and everyday objects as means towards transcendence. In The Horror, Emily Breer and Joe Gibbons recuperate Coppola’s Apocalypse Now as a day at the beach. Gibbons’s solo work Multiple Barbie features the artist as a smooth-talking psychoanalyst, gently attempting to fuse the mute doll’s shattered plastic psyche. Three works by Anne McGuire all employ genre conventions derived from popular culture (the variety show, the talk show, and the rock video); McGuire’s presence as a performer amplifies the sense of strangeness that lies at the heart of the familiar, creating a vertigo between form and content. Animal Charm’s interventions in this program are homemade commercials and infomercials, sampled from a reservoir of neglected or useless images.

Curated by Nelson Henricks.

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Included Titles
LISTING STYLE:

Animal Charm

Stuffing

1998 | 00:04:00

In Animal Charm's masterful example of video montage, a monkey is mesmerized as he watches two dolphins toss a woman from snout to snout. Go cross-eyed with cross-cutting. Sometimes, in order to…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Chicago Art, Culture Jamming, Found Footage, Humor, Television

HalfLifers

Control Corridor

1997 | 00:11:00

In a fictional conduit space, language and function are recontextualized as the HalfLifers struggle to re-assess the nature of their mission while engaged in an eternal cycle of maintenance and…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Humor

Emily Breer

Caddy

1997 | 00:01:00

This real-time video-meets-digital-animation trilogy of shorts features the highly excited and mildly delusional Joe Gibbons. Against a background of live action and animation, the caddy’s…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags:

Emily Breer

Pool Boy

1997 | 00:01:00

This real-time video-meets-digital-animation trilogy of shorts features the highly excited and mildly delusional Joe Gibbons, whose springboard becomes a surfboard as he fantasizes about his…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Animation, Humor, Performance

Emily Breer

The Horror

1997 | 00:02:00

This real-time video-meets-digital-animation trilogy of shorts features the highly excited and mildly delusional Joe Gibbons. As the phony, Gibbons recounts his influence among rock legends Iggy…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Humor, Performance

A wonderfully witty work about nostalgia and desperation. Anne McGuire portrays a Kennedy-era singer performing in the space where theatre meets television. McGuire's Garland-esque gestures provide…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Performance

Animal Charm

Ashley

1997 | 00:09:00

Animal Charm's Ashley seems to develop a conventional story about a modern mother and wife with typically modern desires. But the insertion of incongruous soap opera scenes soon ensures that the…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Chicago Art, Culture Jamming, Found Footage, Media Analysis

HalfLifers

Actions in Action

1997 | 00:10:30

This first work in the HalfLifers' Action Series plunges into a world of frantic heroes trapped in a continual crisis of dissolution and reification. An ordinary domestic setting is recast as a…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Expedition/Travel, Food, Future, Humor

Anne McGuire

The Telling

1998 | 00:03:30

The Telling (1994-98) shows Anne McGuire telling two acquaintances a secret from her past using a three-camera set-up in the Desi Arnez style. The commodification of intimacy is not the strangest…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Performance, Television, TV production

Joe Gibbons

Multiple Barbie

1998 | 00:09:00

Shot in Pixelvision, Joe Gibbon's Multiple Barbie features the artist as a smooth-talking psychoanlayst imploring the silent doll to explore her multiple personalities in order to purge their…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Humor, Pixelvision, Television, Psychoanalysis

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…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Animals, Humor, Performance

A performance about the artist’s experience in the aftermath of an accident. “While When I Was a Monster conveys McGuire’s feelings about her own body after falling off a cliff, it also articulates…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Body, Performance

Animal Charm

Lightfoot Fever

1996 | 00:01:30

Fuelled by lavish doses of disjointed hyper-editing, super-talented Jim Bailey dances with wild animals in Animal Charm's hot and exciting performance of "Fever."This title is also available on…

Collections: Single Titles
Tags: Chicago Art, Culture Jamming, Found Footage