To counteract the talkie I had done with graduate student the day before, this undergrad project has no dialogue but just a steady stream of images we dreamed up on the spot. A psychodrama that’s heavy on the beefcake, our picture deals with the sexual dementia of a sex addict undergoing hypnotherapy. It’s a mixture of fantasy and desire with some animals thrown in and lots of strange angles of the leading actor’s attributes.
A performance by A.K. Burns and Ulrike Müller.
The title is also available on A.K. Burns: Early Videoworks.
A video collage that chronicles the issues and events that arose in Linda M. Montano’s life while she devoted a year to each of the seven chakras. Beginning as a piece devoted to themes of commitment and limitation, the work becomes a fascinating hybrid of art and life, as Montano experiences the onset of menopause, her mother’s death, her choice to enter and then leave a convent, the suffering of a stroke, and thoughts of her own death—all within the structural confines of an intense work of art.
I.S.L.A.N.D.S. #1: In Residence Dual trajectories through lush innerscapes propel us into color-saturated action-scenarios where the mission to re-establish identity and sustain communication linkage is never-ending.
I.S.L.A.N.D.S. #2: Operation Big Yellow A useful inanimate object, burdened with excessive psychic residue, is funneled through Half-Life for a complete wipe-down and a few healthy exercises.
Illness, treatment, recovery, conversation. This experimental short presents stories of illness and disfunction, bringing together but also separating two performers, their stories, their bodies.
“Duet confronts illness with a caress; it takes us on a journey with two different people with two distinct conditions that present obstacles to very specific senses. A film that makes us address the way that we feel, hear, see, taste, and speak.” —Lynne Sachs
An experimental video for electro-feminist-performance-artists Le Tigre, the early eighties MTV aesthetic unpacks a thoroughly current obsession: the hidden erotics of office supplies.
This title is also available on Elisabeth Subrin Videoworks.
Segalove takes her mom as subject in these short pieces, recording her stories, her advice, and her daily routine. What results is a portrait of a contemporary mother-daughter relationship, touchingly devoid of drama and full of whimsical humor. For example, in one piece, Ilene’s mother laments over a pair of shoes her daughter has chosen to hang on the wall instead of wearing, saying,”With you, everything is art.” In another segment the camera focuses on a pair of unoccupied, overstuffed chairs.
In July of 1971, American artist Lee Lozano gave a talk at NSCAD art college in Halifax, called “The Halifax 3 State Experiment”. Stretching over 8 hours, and moving through multiple locations, Lozano delivered her extended lecture in three states - sober, stoned on weed, and high on LSD. Filmmakers Maïder Fortuné and Annie MacDonell take this event up as a point of departure for an investigation into Lozano’s thoughts, practice and daily life.
In this video, Brenda Sexual, Glennda Orgasm, and friends act out a drag queen murder mystery that takes place on their talk show. Later, they attend the Queer Fashion Army Invasion, a sit in of openly queer public fashion performance outside the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. Then, the pair arrives at a video store to discuss queer undertones of Hollywood films, like Grease, Rocky II, and Yentil.
Performance engineers Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) construct machines that live in their own fictional world, acting out scenarios of perpetual torment, exasperated consumption, and tragic recognition. This film presents a fractured narrative featuring these large anthropomorphic robots and represents Jonathan Reiss and SRL’s collaborative desire to go beyond the restraints of event documentation.
I just got this tattoo — you can see it's still healing, the edges are raised like some sort of fancy business card — to mark the completion of this, Series One of my on-going project, Final Thoughts. So, on one wrist, facing fistward, a skull and, on the other, still tender and healing, a ghost. Let them be the mascots for the series, little cartoony avatars.
"A major influence for generating ideas for me was not what I could contrive on my desktop, but being open and receptive to “accident”. For instance, one evening in 1972 while typing a syllabus for a class on my old Smith Corona typewriter, I happened to see on the TV a documentary by Leni Riefenstahl. German troops were marching, and I found that I could duplicate the “ta ta tum, ta ta tum, ta ta tum tum tum” of the drumbeat by typing “mar mar march mar mar march.“ Had not the broadcast of this film taken place while I was typing, I would never have thought of this concept.
Part of an ongoing video correspondence with sculptor Robert Morris, Mumble brings together repeated scenes and gestures, featuring Morris and Jim Benglis (the artist's brother), and a narrative of irrelevant, confusing, and often purposefully untrue, statements. Although the viewer is inclined to accept Benglis's narrative as true, such trust is called into question by her statements about actions taking place off-camera — actions that cannot be verified.
giroscopio is a short experimental film by two artists, one in Pennsylvania and one in Puerto Rico, each in pandemic lockdown, each disoriented. Objects seem to control them; their bodies are unbalanced, unwieldy, comical. The horizon spins; the ground falls away; and yet a strange wonder reigns. / giroscopio es un cortometraje experimental de dos artistas, uno en Pensilvania y otro en Puerto Rico, cada uno en confinamiento por la pandemia, cada uno desorientado. Los objetos parecen controlarlos; sus cuerpos son desequilibrados, difíciles de manejar, cómicos.
Made with Stanton Kaye, and the only Lynda Benglis video with a discernible plot, The Amazing Bow-Wow follows the adventures of a talking, hermaphroditic dog given to Rexina and Babu by a carnival barker. Rexina and Babu soon decide to make the dog a sideshow act hoping to earn their fortune. Babu eventually becomes jealous of Rexina's devotion to the dog and one night attempts to castrate it, accidentally cutting off its tongue. The dog's head becomes hideous and skeletal, ruining its sideshow career and the profits.
Threads of Belonging depicts the daily life of Layton House, a fictional therapeutic community, where doctors live with their schizophrenic patients. The characters and events of Layton House were drawn from writings of the anti-psychiatry movement, whose most famous proponent was R.D. Laing. In this film we see experimental therapies, power struggles, and the individual arcs of mental illness converge, as a community struggles to understand itself and determine its destiny.
The first 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.
Eiko & Koma's second son Shin Otake created this video for the occasion of the 2004 American Dance Festival Scripps Award ceremony. Shin edited and narrated the video to convey Eiko & Koma's history and the concepts behind their works.
Klaus Nomi (born Klaus Sperber) was an underground superstar in the East Village arts scene in the 1970s and early 1980s. Known for his dramatic attire and make-up, and his theatrical stage presence, Nomi was a countertenor and could achieve a wide vocal range, allowing him to include operatic embellishments to his musical numbers. He died in 1983 and was one of the earliest artists to die from AIDS.
Eiko Otake, with her collaborator Merian Soto, visited a friend Bonnie Brooks in her country house and had a long walk in the forest. There was a small island occupied by three deers. They later returned to it and the deer were gone so Eiko danced in that place she named Deer Island.
An unseen narrator weaves a textual “map of moral acupuncture” as two BDSM scenarios unfold between queer sex workers and their partners. Archive, architecture, land, sky, and touch bind the historical to the present. Where/what are the slippages between subversion and re-inscription? Liberation and retention? Real and fantasy? How do BDSM practices thicken historical narratives around bodies, sex, and power?
Martha Rosler tackles mainstream media's representation of the case of surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead.
Throughout the video, Benglis asks "Now?" and "Do you wish to direct me?" and repeats commands like "Start the camera" and "I said start recording." As in On Screen, she makes faces and sounds in reply to the images on a monitor; at one point she appears to kiss herself. The word "now", used as both question and command, focuses attention on the deceptive "real" time of video, and reveals the structure underlying her presence in the video.
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.
In the Queen City is a series of three videos shot in Buffalo, New York that were produced following an invitation from Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center as part of their Ways In Being Gay festival.
An episode of The Brenda and Glennda Show, hosted by Brenda Sexual and Glennda Orgasm. Production Support Provided by Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center.
