Viewpoints on Video: Open Channels Five Year Survey

This tape surveys the works supported during the first five years of Open Channels, a grant program sponsored by Long Beach Museum of Art that gives artists production facilities at local cable stations, critical feedback from staff, and exhibition at the museum and on cable. Although essentially a promotional video, this tape offers insight into the important but rarely portrayed issues of artist funding and residencies. This retrospective offers excerpts from and context for 24 tapes, including Open Channels I: Mary Daval’s 5 Dances for Small Spaces, Scott Rankin’s Fugue, Aron Ranen and Kevin Bender’s Television Believers, Sherry Millner’s Scenes from the Micro War, and Ezra Litwaks’ Stranded; Open Channels II: David Stout’s Prisoner of Light, Ed Jones’s Bemused in Babylon, Jeanne Finley’s Common Mistakes, John Arvanites’s Blues for Piggy, and Tony Labat’s Mayami: Between Cut and Action; Open Channels III: David Bunn’s The Torrid Zone, Jim Shaw’s Billy Goes to a Party #4, Paul McCarthy’s Family Tyranny, Donna Matorin’s Quickening, and Paul Kos’s Tower of Babel; Open Channels IV: Lynn Kirby and Erika Suderburg’s Memory Inversion (Los Angeles), Bruce and Norman Yonemoto with Jeffrey Vallance’s Blinky, Jayce Salloum’s Once You’ve Shot the Gun You Can’t Stop the Bullet, Victoria Bearden’s There Is No History in Heaven, and Hilja Keading’s Let Me (Entertain You); and Open Channels V: Lawrence Andrews’s Strategies for the Development of/Redesigning the Purpose Served, Art in the Age of … aka, The Making of the Towering Inferno, Nancy Buchanan’s Mouth(Piece), Fu-Ding Cheng’s The Winged Cage, and Paul Tassie’s Remember Flavor.