Art Collective

This is a kinetic tribute to Sylvia Plath at a time of the pandemic vortex, a dissemination of suspended bodies in the liminal space. Haunted figures in the Capitalocene era.

Stephen Varble (1946-1984) staged gender-confounding costume performances on the streets of 1970s Manhattan, and he became infamous for his anti-commercial disruptions of galleries, banks, and boutiques. In 1978, he retreated from this public work to focus on the making of an epic, unfinished piece of video art, Journey to the Sun, until his death in the first days of 1984. Lush, ribald, and unorthodox, the video mixed non-narrative costume performances with a surrealist fable of a messianic martyr, the Warbler.

Simultaneously dark, surreal, and unnerving, this seventeen-minute tape is a stark departure from the usually playful productions of the Videofreex. Through the use of slow fades, processed audio, and the juxtaposition of often-times violent imagery with a bleak, winter forest, the viewer is thrust into an atmospheric and experimental trip.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Archives recovers the formal community that mobilizes the diagrammatic experience of archives, a formal community that claims the sensory nucleus where hypertrophic rhythms, abstract machines, monuments and memorials, digital servers, corporate architecture, traffic and computer flows, light brutalisms, digital gadgets, detention camps, prisons and hospitals, institutes and academies, universities and housing all integrated in the rhythmic and diagrammatic outburst of the archives.

Parry Teasdale, David Cort and Chuck Kennedy visit The Kitchen in New York looking for Shirley Clarke, and bump into Steina and Woody Vasulka who are overseeing a show in progress.  A few doors down they find Shirley in her studio, dressed in white and full of energy. 

A Kafkian vision of the New World. The arrival of Karl Rossman to the contemporary Babylon under the spell of the paranoid avant-garde. Kinetic coexistence of the archaic forms in dissolution.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

An all-over textile constructed under the spell of Arachne, an audiovisual textile in five parts that exposes a web of raids in construction over the american houses, a landscape of protests under the webs of segmented time, the entrails of the american factory in movement through the endless american party.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

This is the invocation to the gods, the incense to the gods. A kinetic dance to the gods. Behold the hieratic nature of Tonatiuh (The Sun) and the ferocity of Tlaltecuhtli (Goddess of the Earth) raising her agitation from the white smoke of the burned Copalli, Mesoamerican aromatic resin, sacred resin that tears celluloid with smoke, white hair, on the dark background of the world.

Timely concerns about the future of video, artists’ complicity in the money making system of the ‘establishment,’ and the effect of the camera’s presence on personal encounters, is discussed and debated in this late night video produced by David Cort, Chuck Kennedy, and Skip Blumberg.

A dissemination of suspended bodies in the liminal space.

Part of the paraconsistent sequence series.

1968 was the opening of the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, ten days after the massacre of students and civilians by military and police on October 2 in the "Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Tlatelolco."

A lighting psalmody by the current Mexican conflagration. Light through the veins.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

A Videofreex performance.  Bart Friedman plays the pump organ and David Cort sings.  He asks Bart to "Play something that I can laugh to," and much laughter ensues.  Then, "because of American society," there is a sad song, and much wailing ensues.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

In these lunar paths the moon is the celestial body of brilliant colors that crosses with its cyclical and mythical dance the dark space of our present time and in whose dance the moon enters, moves away, approaches and lies on itself in a cycle rhythmic of celestial agitation. These are the shamanic ways of the moon. Part of the Lunar Films series.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (Tehuacán) is a Mexican film collective founded in 2012 to dismantle the commercial and corporate audiovisual grammar and its embedded ideology. The collective is inspired by the historical avant-gardes, and their commitment to using both form and content against alienating realities. Their methods combine digital and analog mediums, interventions on archival materials, mythology, agitprop, social protests, and documentary poetry.

The Sun Quartet is a solar composition in four movements, a political composition in four natural elements, an audiovisual composition in four bodily mutations: a sun stone where youth blooms in protest, a river overflowing the streets, the burning plain rising in the city. And, finally, the clamor of the people that shook Mexico after the night of September 26, 2014. The disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa opened a breach in the Mexican political body.

Pandora is one who communicates to the human world the powers of the night. These are glimpses of her visions.

This is the audiovisual translation of the Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History.

In this interview, Indian artist Shuddhabrata Sengupta (b. 1968) discusses his role in the initiation of the Raqs Media Collective, a Delhi-based artist collective, active since the 1990s. At the time of this interview, Raqs had been creating documentaries, art installations, and educational programs for eighteen years. Sengupta likens the driving force of Raqs to that of a game of catch, a process generated by a back-and-forth dialogue mobilized through writing and in-person meetings. As children of the late sixties, Sengupta explains how and why the members of Raqs, (himself, Jeebesh Bagchi and Monica Narula) share an interest in investigating mass communication, technologies of visibility, and the significance of memory and travel. It is also for this reason, Sengjupta explains, that the Collective’s work is committed to fostering rigorous research in addition to art-making endeavors.