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.
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.
"One of Baldessari’s most ambitious and risky efforts. Seated and holding a sheaf of papers, he proceeds to sing each of Sol LeWitt’s 35 conceptual statements to a different pop tune, after the model of Ella Fitzgerald Sings Cole Porter. What initially presents itself as humorous gradually becomes a struggle to convey Lewitt’s statements through this arbitrary means."
—Helene Winer, “Scenarios/Documents/Images,” Art in America 61 (March 1973)
Love is in the air as newlyweds chomp on cake, brides marry werewolves, and hatchets fall on adulterous heads. Amid the real-life romance is mixed the real-life business of directing my film students in a tale of run-away passions for the silver screen.
The works on Reel 3 were produced during 1972-73, and re-mastered in 2005 when several newly available titles were added. The focus here is on social relationships and attaining the perfect life, be it through making the right decision, getting something for nothing, or just having it all. Many of the comic skits parody television ads and infomercials, and Man Ray has to make some consumer choices.
Four tales about cannibal monsters narrated and performed by the Waiãpi Indians. “We have made the video,” say the Waiãpi, “to teach people to be more careful with monsters they never heard about. Even a white man can be eaten as he goes into the forest.”
Directed by Vincent Carelli and Dominique Gallois.
Edited by Tutu Nunes.
In Waiãpi with English subtitles.
Interrupting the nightly news in an act of guerrilla television, Gómez-Peña returns to the persona of a Chicano-Aztec veejay—"The Mexican who talks back, the illegal Mexican performance artist with state of the art technology"—to elaborate the complications of American identity. This post-NAFTA Cyber Aztec pirate commandeers the television signal from his underground "Vato bunker", where virtual reality meets Aztec ritual. Gómez-Peña embodies the doubly radical Chicano performance artist, delivering radical ideas through a radical form of entertainment.
Swamp Swamp and Wurmburth are each comprised of a series of tightly cropped shots of small, hand-made table-top sculptures or "sets". Paint and many other materials that behave like paint (i.e. lotion, shampoo, foodstuffs) are blown through these environments with plastic tubing and forced air. Each edited collection of shots makes an endless cycle of primal sludge and rupturing goo.
Joe Gibbons plays Dr. Joe Baldwin, the self-styled child education expert. He prepares Zoe, from birth, for acceptance into a coveted “gifted-only” kindergarten program. He brings to each lesson an assortment of modified educational books, games and toys. These sessions, along with monologues analyzing her development, are recorded in hopes of proving that “genii [his term] are not born, but made.” What becomes evident is one man’s misguided quest to manipulate pitted against one child’s exuberant resistance to being controlled.
Director’s statement:
People black and blue with life’s bruises, People who glow red with hot passions, or turn deep purple with spiritual purpose are here, boldly rendered in the widescreen format. Sit back and witness the event… See the faces, observe their bodies and hear them speak with their own colors.
Two performers, Acconci and a young woman, occupy two wooden boxes in separate rooms, connected via monitor, camera, and microphone. The situation is symbolic of a vicarious and distended power relation, a relationship built through and reliant upon technological mediation. Watching her on a monitor, Acconci coaches the woman through tying herself up, urging her to pretend he is winding the rope around her legs and neck.
Identically dressed, and with sibling-like resemblance, performance artists Trevor Martin and Kym Olsen shift between spoken word and athletic dance choreography in a collection of 29 scenes. Set in various locations--including a gymnasium, an abandoned hospital, and a trailer park circus--Martin and Olsen slip between a ventriloquist and his dummy, a seducer and his surrogate, a doctor and his patient, and synchronized dance partners. The film examines a complex social psychology--questioning the colonization of the human body for various political, medical and religious agendas.
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.
Designed as the centerpiece of Eiko & Koma’s three-year Retrospective Project, Raven is a radically scalable work. It can be performed in a theater, a gallery, outdoors, or at any other special site, and its length can vary depending on the context of the presentation. Raven’s genesis is in the concept underlying Eiko & Koma’s 1991 Land. The earth is precious in part because it can be unyielding. The landscape does not squander its riches on us; we have to negotiate our survival.
