In Tree Song, Eiko & Koma continue their exploration of the body as a part of the landscape and the landscape as an extension of the body. Trees have been symbols of resilience, rebirth and portals through which spirits pass. Tree Song honors the iconography of trees and the primal mysteries of landscape and the human body.
Ming Wong creates videos that explore performance and issues of race and gender. Born in Singapore of Chinese heritage, and now based in Berlin, his work examines cross-cultural experiences by appropriating scenes of iconic world cinema. Wong casts himself anachronistically as the star, critically exposing the otherness of the relationship of media and world history.
Subtitled A Rebellion against the Commodity, this engaged reading of the urban black riots of the 1960s references Guy Debord’s Situationist text, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966). Along with additional commentary adapted from Barbara Kruger and musicians Morrissey and Skinny Puppy, the text posits rioting as a refusal to participate in the logic of capital and an attempt to de-fetishize the commodity through theft and gift.
Laurie Anderson is perhaps best known as a performance artist who works in both the art and commercial worlds. Anderson talks to Steven Poser through a voice manipulator, commenting on how performing abroad has informed her work and her perspective on American culture, especially regarding issues of language and voice in communication.
This video was produced for the Artists TV Network series Conversations.
Spit Sandwich is a compilation of 19 comical and entertaining works from the master of deadpan. Experiments with the video signal combine with visual jokes and one-liners to hilarious effect. Includes: II got . .Spit Sandwich is a compilation of 19 comical and entertaining works from the master of deadpan. Experiments with the video signal combine with visual jokes and one-liners to hilarious effect. Includes: II got . .
Less than two minutes long, this short tape makes playful and surreal use of video’s editing capabilities. Set to a sped-up version of The Band’s “The Weight” – complete with the falsetto vocals, and accelerated tempo that come with time manipulation on records – is a series of rapid, alternating washes and split-image cuts overlaying and juxtaposing the faces of the freex upon one another. Male faces and female faces fuse, the exact identity of the individuals becoming dissolving into ambiguity.
This first "Frieda" collaboration between performance artists Barbara Lipp and Tom Koden and video artist Tom Rubnitz chronicles Frieda's rise from assembly-line worker in a box factory to singing superstar. Featuring rock-bottom production values and a sound track which includes the Brady Bunch kids' tune "Gonna Find a Rainbow".
Documentary of the New York experimental theater company The Wooster Group on tour in Glasgow, Scotland, 2000, installing their production of HOUSE/LIGHTS.
A video adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses shot at the Parkville Senior Center, Connecticut, with the seniors reading the lines from cue cards. The piece addresses society, war, and personal mortality.
M+ Museum presented A Body in Hong Kong in two locations as part of Mobile M+: Live Art, 2015. Tim Mei Avenue, where Eiko chose and performed, was the main site of 2014 Umbrella Revolution. Nearly 100,000 people camped out, and in doing so, stopped traffic on twelve-lane highways and created a politically charged sphere.
A family embraces the heart of evil in this Poltergeist re-make/drag show, circa 1992.
Torn over the pressure to perform for his audience, Acconci fantasizes about "a dancing bear" who takes his place, performing in the spotlight, doing what others want, "what I always had to do." The viewer is placed in the position of an authority or analyst, above Acconci’s head, listening to his hallucination. This fantasy becomes increasingly erotic as Acconci unburdens himself psychologically and reveals his contradictory need to control and to be controlled.
This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.
...were repeatedly raised and lowered and people grew exhausted from never knowing if the moment was at hand or was still to come A project of The Speculative Archive "Peace. I don't want it. Justice. Why? Victory? Makes me sick! Love? What a pity. Freedom? Ugly! Friendship? My ass!" Rami Farah, a young Syrian performer, uses various modes of address such as a promise, a threat, a curse, a joke, a lament, and a premonition in order to speak to the current state of affairs in Syria and the Middle East.
Skating softly, but carrying a big stick, performer Kristin Elliott engages in an interlocking series of skits involving simple, slapstick activities performed by a pristine outdoor pool and in a venetian blind windowed corner of a room. Bodies of water - an aquarium is transported into the interior space - become a major link between these two settings. These containers of water end up functioning as both wombs and graves.
Ice is fashioned into a magnifying lens and it is used to start a fire. Created in 1974 and restaged 2004.
This title is also available on Sympathetic Vibrations: The Videoworks of Paul Kos.
"A cup and saucer, pouring and drinking coffee, a duration ritual of contemplation and invigoration, doubled (tape copied), mixed, keyed + synthetic color, normal play and rewinding, sync events, the opening of a space to put the self in. 1/2 inch b+w Portapack, 2 reel to reel video tape decks, David Jones keyer and colorizer."
– Peer Bode
Each year, more women undergo treatment at hospital emergency surgical services as a result of family violence than rapes, muggings, and car wrecks combined. This startling statistic is the basis for a series of site-specific installations on domestic violence, On The Edge Of Time. Underground, the first installation for the Pittsburgh Three Rivers Art Festival, used three wrecked cars strewn along a 180-foot section of railroad track to reference the history of Abolition and the Underground Railroad, and as metaphors for different aspects of abuse.
In the second part of the Classics Exposed series, a neurotic scholar (Gibbons) leads a "buggy" ride tour through historic Charleston where, according to the professor, Franz Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis after taking a wrong turn on his way to Hollywood. Live-action with six-legged animation.
This title is also available on Emily Breer: Classics Exposed.
The temperature in your eyes will rise when you contract ‘FEVER DREAMS’ and experience the haunted mayhem contained therein.
This title comprises The Stone Boy (2011), Nonsensical (2014), and Coffee, Tea, and Wizardry (2015) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
A portrait of the artist as a not-so-young man. The filmmaker attempts to enter the digital age by making a new video version of one of his old films.
"The award of the Short Film Festival goes to a video in which the reflection of artistic work becomes a form itself. John Smith manages to give us a self-ironic humorous experiment about art and time."
—Prize of the International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen 2000
This title is also available on John Smith: Program 2.
In Performer/Audience/Mirror, Graham uses video to document an investigation into perception and real time informational "feedback." The performance is doubly reflected back to the audience by the artist's lecturing, and the architectural device of a mirrored wall. Graham has written extensively on how video, which can deliver information in real time, functions semiotically as a mirror.
A desktop video in five parts that modestly propose ways of existing with or against history and politics.
... part Bronx reminiscence, part landscape fantasy; part morality play, part melodrama. A film in many parts with monologue segments written by James Strahs for Willem Dafoe, Spalding Gray, Ron Vawter, Peyton Smith and Luche Sacker.
Featuring actors from the Wooster Group.
–– Ken Kobland
75 people speak 50 languages sometimes simultaneously.
This title is also available on Sympathetic Vibrations: The Videoworks of Paul Kos.
There is no need to "sin" because Hell is here, just go to the window and peek out…. It’s next door and is on display in this movie.
… See the poet tumble down a flight of stairs as he avoids the clutches of a behemoth babe who practices witchcraft and carries plastic flowers.
