Steve Seid of Pacific Film Archive calls it, “An episodic adventure about extra-evolutionary transformation. Organized as 'lesson plans’, this unique work is an ambitious tutorial for the neo-nauts of inner space."
This title is only available on Soft Science.
Actor Richard Marcus speaks directly and intimately to the viewer, relating a tale of personal loss, and then changing the subject to baseball. The video is about amateur vs. professional, personal vs. public space, and loyalty and self-confidence.
This title is also available on Chip Lord Videoworks: Volume 1.
"Playing like a series of overheard conversations, Life and People grapples with communication, language, and recitation by staging common situations—a doctor’s prognosis, a teacher’s report to a parent—in the director’s signature deadpan, but replicating the awkward interactions of his animation to live-action performances."
-- BAMcinematek, Migrating Forms, 2014
Executive Producer, Suzanne Lacy; Director, Steve Hirsch; Editor, Doug Gayeton.
From the performance Freeze Frame: Room for Living Room by Suzanne Lacy, Julia London, Ngoh Spencer, and Carol Leigh, San Francisco, 1982.
An experimental documentary about resistance, balance and fame. Kings of the Sky follows tightrope artist Adil Hoxur as he and his troupe tour China’s Taklamakan desert amongst the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim people seeking religious and political autonomy.
Relying on the magic echo found in an old power Station in Norway, the artist whistles and marches to the Internationale, a May Day workers’ song.
This title is also available on Sympathetic Vibrations: The Videoworks of Paul Kos.
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.
I'm here to bring you the Truth and the Pleasure
Here to show you the meaningful form
It's going to feel like a new kind of leisure
It's going to smell like a freshly mown lawn
I'm installing a personal toolkit for thinking
Especially customized only for you
You enable it just by the action of blinking
From now on your thoughts will be focused and true
Masked men prowling in the bushes and not touching anything but satin, dandelions and flesh.
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.
As a "Post-Mexican” performance artist operating out of the US for over 20 years, one of my conceptual obsessions has been to constantly reposition myself within the hegemonic maps. Whether this map is the Americas, the larger cartography of art, or my personal biography, one of my jobs has been to move around, cross dangerous borders, disappear and reappear somewhere else, and in the process create "imaginary cartographies” capable of containing the complexities of my multiple and ever-changing identities, voices, communities and performative bodies.
Fences Make Senses re-stages and interrogates international barriers and borders using the bodies of non-refugees. Through a series of rehearsals, Barber aims to have privileged bodies experience the themes, situations, and ideas that refugees frequently face. This video was produced in response to the great number of documentaries the artist witnessed that interviewed the unfortunate in their impoverished conditions. Kept in limbo and squalor for years, these refugees are casually disliked by their "host" country.
Richard Schechner is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University, author of numerous books including Performance Theory (1988) and The Future of Ritual (1993), and editor of The Drama Review. This interview with Nancy Forest Brown was conducted during an event at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Taped on Prince Street in Soho, New York City, Skip Blumberg creates a one-word performance. Shouting the word "money" over and over, he attracts the attention of New York's finest. The video crew attempt to explain to the policemen that there is no public disorder as the streets were empty when they began to tape.
The video is an unwitting early example of the reaction of the state to the use of video cameras on the streets.
The two-part video Gender Cruise on the Circle Line involves Brenda and Glennda leading a group of drag queens, drag kings, and other gender nonconforming people on a three-hour ride on the Circle Line boat around Manhattan.
"I made Take Off in my studio apartment on Myra Avenue during my second year living in Los Angeles. As a member of the Feminist Studio Workshop, I was writing an essay at the time comparing male artists’ representations of their sexuality with female artists’. Vito Acconci was my model for a male perspective. I had been captivated by his videotapes; particularly Undertone, where he was supposed to be masturbating while seated at a table. The videotape was my ultimate response and commentary on Acconci as well as an expression of my own sexuality."
— Susan Mogul
As the camera looks out through a barred window and the clock strikes four in a Swiss city, the death of Yasser Arafat provides the starting point for a journey back in time.
Throwing Stones is the third episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world’s hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.
A troupe of male and female jugglers and musicians perform for a growing crowd in Central Park, New York, led by Hovey Burgess and Judy Finelli. The sun is shining, and the troupe are skilful, playful, and flirtatious.
An evening-length collaboration work with the celebrated avant-garde pianist Margaret Leng Tan. The stage set is by Eiko & Koma and the lighting is by David Ferri.
Commissioned by and premiered at Japan Society, New York, October 18-20, 2007, celebrating Kazuo Ohno's 101th Birthday and the 100th anniversary of Japan Society.
Bubble is a short film performed by Zeena Parkins and the Plastic Girls, Eleanor Hullihan and Erin Cornell in a public park in Brooklyn, NY.
Repeating the same activity as featured in Bouncing in the Corner, No. 1—leaning back and bouncing forward from the corner—this time the camera is positioned just above Nauman’s head. This gives his body the sense of constantly rising and falling, his chin just crossing the bottom edge of the screen before sinking back.
This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.
“In Left Side Right Side, Jonas explores the ambiguities caused by her attempt to identify correctly the spatial orientation of images simultaneously played back by a monitor and reflected in a mirror. This is confusing because, contrary to what one might expect, the monitor image gives back a ‘true’ reading of the space while the mirror reverses it.… Throughout the course of the tape, the image switches back and forth between the double image of monitor and mirror to the simple ‘real’ image of Jonas’s face.”
