Performance

The artist swings a live-set small game trap near his extended other hand. The trap swings ominously: will it snap his fingers? The end comes quickly!

This title is also available on Sympathetic Vibrations: The Videoworks of Paul Kos.

Created from 2014 footage shot at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts Gallery with a mirrored curtain, the performer here meets a ghost of herself.

Performer: Elisa Osborne

Camera: Liliana Gao

Editor: Adam Burke

Special Thanks to Ethan Cohen

An upside-down close-up of the artist’s mouth, Nauman repeats the words “lip sync” as the audio track shifts in and out of sync with the video. The disjunction between what is seen and heard keeps the viewer on edge, struggling to attach the sound of the words with the off-kilter movements of Nauman’s mouth.

This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

Small Miracles is a suite of eight video animations in which the artist conjures up and controls forces of nature. Ignoring rational constructs of what is possible, Hechtman creates imaginary works to ground science fiction in the everyday experience. Coupling feminism and natural phenomena, the videos are located in the liminal space between fantasy and the everyday.

In this 2014 interview, South African artist Kendell Geers (b. 1968) discusses the function of magic, myth, and memory in his work. Beginning at childhood, Geers charts the path he has taken in his understanding of his own biography as a site of resistance. This interest in the use of personal biography culminated in 1993 with his decision to change his date of birth to May 1968 as a way to reference both the May 1968 student protests, and the fact that 1993 was the first year that South Africa had participated in the Venice Biennale since 1968.

Elizabeth LeCompte is the director of the Wooster Group, an experimental theater company that operates out of its own theater, the Performing Garage, in New York City. The group’s working process begins with "source" texts which are quoted, reworked, and juxtaposed with fragments of popular, cultural and social history, and combined with personal and collective experiences of the group. The resulting productions reflect a continuing refinement of a non-linear, abstract aesthetic that at once subverts and pays homage to modern theatrical "realism."

Interview by Lin Hixson.

You will never be a woman. You must live the rest of your days entirely as a man and you will only grow more masculine with every passing year. There is no way out.

An All-American boy and girl are swept into an international intrigue of demonic content as items cursed with the stench of Satan make their way to a museum dedicated to the spiritual overthrow of family values. Loaded with romance, thrills, and exotic adventures, this electronic tele-play, with its colorful moments of scenic horror, leads the viewer on a fast-paced voyage that speeds through the ruins of Egypt, the jungles of equatorial erotica, and the puritanical Wonderland of Middle America.

Forti uses the camera as a research tool to record the movements of three grizzly bears pacing anxiously behind the bars of their cage in the Brooklyn Zoo. The collected visual information becomes part of the basis for Forti's movements in Solo No. 1.

Developed in collaboration with and performed by DonChristian Jones.

The footage was filmed by Eiko during the Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in Captiva, FL in November 2017. Eiko edited the footage in Japan during her 2020 Virtual Creative Residency hosted by Wesleyan University. After editing, Eiko realized this is the first media work she created without her body.

Directed by Eiko Otake as a part of The Duet Project: Distance is Malleable.

Plowman's Lunch is called a documentary because its intent was to explore actual occurrences—be these the building of the work, or what befalls the players. It still uses an open form, but the characters are more developed; they have "names," and some of the scenes were truly dangerous for them to produce. As in the other films (with the exception of Done To) there is a nucleus of three characters—two women (Boris and Jamiee), and one man (Steentje, a tranvestite/hermaphrodite). The music, composed expressly for the piece, is harmonious with its developments.

Incense Sweaters & Ice is a new feature film inspired by the idea that anything one does while being watched is a performance. The film follows three protagonists — Mrs. Queen Esther Bernetta White, Girl, and WB (“whiteboy”) — as they navigate the dramas of surveillance, moving between looking, being looked at, and remaining unseen. How does the ever-present potential image affect the way we act and the way we see ourselves? By examining how cinema now happens in real time, Syms works between the documented and the live to find the lie.

Commissioned for the Ocularis curated Free to Be…You and Me Invitational compilation, which premiered at Brooklyn’s Galapagos Art Space and also screened at Chicago Filmmakers, where Mercedes Landazuri and I performed a banjo and synth rendition of “It’s Alright to Cry” (the song that followed Dudley Pippin on the compilation).

Strapped for time due to her busy schedule of personal appearances, Anderson creates a rather clumsy looking clone to take over and keep up her artistic production. Anderson plays both parts, pitting the chain-smoking, productive male half against the laid-back female half. In the end, one highly successful clone begets another clone, a situation spoofing the rise and fall of the '80s art star.

Lars Movin presents a video portrait of artists who have radically disrupted our conception of art since the 1960s. A large part of the video was made in Venice in 1990, when many of the original Fluxus artists met to hold a large exhibition in connection with the Biennale. The tape includes interviews with most of the leading Fluxus artists, documentation of their works, and clips from videos and films made during the 30 years of this ungovernable art form.

"It was as if I was living by the Nike slogan Just Do It."
— George Barber

There are times when concurrent multiple realities demand an attempt to determine who has this "place in the sun" and where, exactly, it is located. Hearts and Helicopters occurs at that moment in the lives of four people.

This title is also available on Lawrence Weiner: Hearts and Helicopters - A Trilogy.

In this episode of Glennda and Friends, Glennda Orgasm and Mark Allen drink at Marie's Crisis Café, a piano bar in Manhattan. They interview other bar patrons and discuss topics including politics, Judy Garland, and the idea of mid-life crisis.

An episode of Glennda and Friends, hosted by Glennda Orgasm and Mark Allen.

An audience-interactive game of Mad Libs, with support from a linguistically challenged newcomer. We replace various parts of speech in newspaper articles to create new, customized meanings.

Contemporary American composer and performance artist Robert Ashley (1930-2014) was a pioneer in the development of large-scale, collaborative performance works and new uses of language in operas and recordings. His landmark project, Perfect Lives, was opera produced for television in seven half-hour episodes.

This compilation features 11 of Jem Cohen's collaborations with musicians. Made on 16mm, Super 8 and Video, the works include the music of R.E.M., Gil Shaham and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Void, Elliot Smith, Jonathan Richman, Miracle Legion and Olivier Messiaen.

Nightswimming

A Yosemite gargoyle climbs two gothic arches.

This title is also available on Sympathetic Vibrations: The Videoworks of Paul Kos.

“[A] rather perverse exercise in futility,” this tape documents Baldessari’s response to Joseph Beuys’s influential performance, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Baldessari’s approach here is characteristically subtle and ironic, involving ordinary objects and a seemingly banal task. The philosophical underpinnings of Baldessari’s exercise are structuralist theories about the opaque and artificial nature of language as a system of signs.

A dance, performed by A.K. Burns and Lanka Tattersall

This title is also available on A.K. Burns: Early Videoworks

"In this record of a live performance, Acconci gives physical manifestation to the subterranean regions of the artist’s mind and will, revealing the effort he must make as an artist to simultaneously convince himself and his audience. Perhaps no other piece from the early 1970s more thoroughly spells out the psychologized drama engendered by performance-based video....