Performance

A performance about the artist’s experience in the aftermath of an accident.

Performed by my graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute, this one act play that I had written gets the best production values that $500 can afford. Shot in a large can company, we actually pre-recorded the dialogue in the "can" as the only quiet room in the facility was the toilet. The actors then went onstage to mouth the dialogue, which was piped into the P.A. system.

In 1985 the great soprano Leontyne Price sang the title role in Verdi’s Aida as her farewell opera. After the ‘O patria mia’ aria, the audience breaks into a four-minute applause. Oh My Homeland is the third in a series of minimal single shot 16mm films. It’s a film about representation, art, and material exchange. It’s a film about endings. It’s a film about identity, love, power, patriotism and the transcendent potential of art through the viewing of a face receiving adoration.

In this video, Glennda and Judy LaBruce (Bruce LaBruce) visit the auction house Christie's East on New York's Upper East Side to view Judy Garland memorabilia that is being auctioned off. They attempt to rescue Garland's Oscar from those trying to profit from the auction.

An episode of Glennda and Friends, hosted by Glennda Orgasm and Judy LaBruce.

Irreverent yet poignant, The Eternal Frame is a re-enactment of the assassination of John F. Kennedy as seen in the famous Zapruder film. This home movie was immediately confiscated by the FBI, yet found its way into the visual subconscious of the nation. The Eternal Frame concentrates on this event as a crucial site of fascination and repression in the American mindset.

"The intent of this work was to examine and demystify the notion of the presidency, particularly Kennedy, as image archetype...."

— Doug Hall, 1984 

A collaboration with DonChristian Jones.
Filmed during the Rauschenberg Foundation Residency November 2017.

Whether they inhabit the desert or are lost in it, three men are clearly confronted to the ruins of modern times. They are explorers or players or performers of times past. Their encounters, their moves, their assessment of location take the form of an acoustic sounding of space. Filmed in Shaabiyat al Ghurayfah in Sharjah, a repertoire of simple gestures playfully engages with structure, space, movement, threshold, surveillance and perspective.

McGuire constructs a murky black and white soap-opera world of endless, timeless, and placeless limbo, where the characters talk to each other entirely in clichés, bad poetry, and other contrite forms of speech — a short TV show in which nothing is resolved. The video culminates in an absolutely stunning monologue performance by legendary underground film and videomaker George Kuchar.

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.

Acconci literally feels the music in this tape as he lays down on speakers playing jazz. The sound pulses through his body while a collaborator massages his nude back in time with the music, occasionally striking Acconci like a rhythm instrument.

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

Meredith Monk (b.1942) has been composing, choreographing, and performing since the mid-1960s. Monk is primarily known for her vocal innovations, including a wide range of extended techniques, which she first developed in her solo performances prior to forming her own ensemble. Her voice has a unique timbre, which she explores through a capella singing and speech. As a dancer and choreographer, she creates hybrid, theatrical productions that incorporate ritualistic movements, lighting effects, and small props.

Cutting to the core of cinematic realism, Fountain presents the plot-less character of human encounters. In a string of moments with the people who have presented themselves to Cumming’s camera for over twenty years, Fountain allows the accidental and the absurd to dominate our impressions. Storytelling is evacuated in the process.

Nancy Cain interviews an upside down chin face about Women's Liberation, asking "Where do you stand on the subject?"  The chin face professes to be happy with her lot, and says she enjoys living alone with her cat.

This video was shot in the Prince Street, New York loft/studio used by the Videofreex.

Made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute, this video drama explores the thrills and terrors of the Big Top as a travelling circus comes to town bringing with it the promise of cotton candy, eternal youth, and high-flying beefcake. A mother and son become enmeshed in a web of sin and sawdust, licorice and lust, as a town confronts its own hideous image in a maze of mirrors at a carnival of lost and found souls. 

A Body in a Cemetery is a 15-min short film that documents a place-inspired solo performance by dancer/choreographer Eiko Otake in Green-Wood Cemetery, the U.S.’s second oldest cemetery in Brooklyn that holds 570,000 "permanent residents." Presented in September 2020 by Pioneer Works and Green-Wood Cemetery, this event was for many the first time attending a live performance since the pandemic shutdown.

Co-commissioned by the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago and Danspace Project, Death Poem is a meditation on dying. Eiko dances a long solo on a futon under a mosquito net, accompanied by the sound of insects and cicadas. Koma enters from another world and tries to bring Eiko back with him, but he leaves without her, as she is not yet ready to go. 

Danh Vo is a Vietnamese-born Danish conceptual artist, currently living and working between Berlin and Mexico City. His large installations often deal with issues of personal identity and belonging. In conversation with Norah Taylor, an art historian specializing in South and Southeast Asian art, Vo discusses his upbringing, career, and what led him to become an artist.

Inspired by a riff on a popular joke “Everybody wanna be a black woman but nobody wanna be a black woman,” Notes On Gesture is a video comparing authentic and dramatic gestures. The piece uses the 17th Century text Chirologia: Or the Natural Language of the Hand as a guide to create an inventory of gestures for performance. The piece alternates between title cards proposing hypothetical situations and short, looping clips that respond. The actor uses her body to quote famous, infamous, and unknown women.

Over grainy, black and white images of a woman giving birth, Montano reads the story of a nun’s sexual self-discovery—recounting Sister Joan’s growing awareness of her body’s sensuousness and sexuality. Primal Scenes is an excellent example of women’s erotica, focusing on a woman’s experience of her body as both sexually powerful and deeply mysterious.

A comic monologue, I Was Once Involved in a Shit Show is a recollection of an imaginary art event that tallies with what most artists experience when they are involved in putting on an unfunded group show.

Four dummies, two cats, and a portal to bliss inside their attempts at symmetry. A hairball, and a mess of twigs, whose love has died and who are sad.

Nauman stands with his back to the camera, repeatetedly drawing the bow across the strings of a violin tuned D, E, A, D. Perhaps more than any other exercise, this tape demonstrates the sense of anticipation built up in the viewer, as we wait for Nauman to walk, to turn around, to play music ... to do something. This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

This title is only available on Kip Fulbeck Selected Videos: Volume One.

five more minutes is an exploration of grief. Two women spend an afternoon recreating lost time. What begins as play-acting breaks open into a world where the tenderness and sorrow of having to say goodbye exist untempered.

In this episode of The Brenda and Glennda Show, Glennda meets up with guest co-host Joan Jett Blakk to discuss Blakk’s 1992 presidential run. The pair interview people on the street outside of the 1992 Democratic Convention. They discuss topics including the police state, weaknesses of the two-party political system, feminism, and political elitism.