Surveying the First Decade: Volume 1

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…

In the first tape, Two Dogs and Ball, Wegman uses the area framed by the camera as his performance space, employing a single, fixed camera to record the scenes as he, Man Ray and Fay Ray, his…

"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…

In this now infamous tape, exemplary of his early transgressive performance style, Acconci sits and relates a masturbatory fantasy about a girl rubbing his legs under the table. Carrying on a…

In this well-known early tape, Jonas manipulates the grammar of the camera to create the sense of a grossly disturbed physical space. The space functions as a metaphor for the unstable identity of…

In this classic personal elegy, Kubota mourns her father's death and recounts the last days of his life. Reflecting on Kubota's use of the video medium, the television emerges as the link between…

In 1972, Robert Morris and Lynda Benglis agreed to exchange videos in order to develop a dialogue between each other’s work. Morris’s video, Exchange, is a part of that process—a response to Benglis’…

Black and White Tapes derive from a series of performances Paul McCarthy undertook in his Los Angeles studio from 1970 to 1975. Conceived for the camera and performed alone or with only a few people…

From an inverted position, high above the floor, the camera records Nauman’s trek back and forth and across the studio; his stamping creates a generative rhythm reminiscent of native drum beats or…

Campus investigates the metaphoric overlap between properties of the video camera and processes of human perception, an area of great interest to many early videomakers. Double Vision inventories…

This is a tape which analyzes its own discourse and processes as it is being formulated. The language of Boomerang, and the relation between the description and what is being described, is not…

Strapping a video camera to himself as he drives a motorcycle around an island, Palestine harmonizes with the engine, maniacally repeating the phrase, "Gotta get outta here...gotta get outta here…

Cycles of 3's and 7's is a performance in which the harmonic intervals that would ordinarily be performed by a musical instrument are represented through the computation of their arithmetic…

Phenomenolgocial dramas involving household objects like candles, spoons, and matches, unfold with an extreme economy of gesture. Fox balances a spoon and a piece of ice on top of a bent fork. We…

"Soundings is a meditation on the phenomenology of sound, the translation of image into sound and sound into image through a series of experiments on an audio speaker. The speaker delivers sound both…

Viola has referred to Sweet Light and other tapes from this period as “songs”—personal, lyrical statements. Articulated through precise editing, Sweet Light incorporates symbolic imagery, changes of…

The Red Tapes is a three-part epic that features the diary musings of a committed outsider: revolutionary, prisoner, artist. The series offers a fragmented mythic narrative and a poetic reassessment…

A "young woman who finds herself surrounded by the relics of Western culture" is the subject of Richard Foreman's formal tableaux. The narration centers on a young woman's struggle to find a relation…

From 1970 to 1972, Arthur Ginsberg and Video Free America recorded the private life of a not-so-average American couple-Carel Row and Ferd Eggan. She is a porn actress and filmmaker; he is a bisexual…

“In her brilliant video Art Herstory, [Freed] has restaged art history, putting herself in the model’s role in numerous paintings.... Time dissolves under her humorous assault — one moment in the…

As two heavily made-up women take turns directing each other and submitting to each other's kisses and caresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that the camera is their main point of focus. Read…

This carefully structured documentary is both a character study of DeVito's grandmother, Adeline LeJudas, and an incisive social critique of patriarchal society. In contrast to the domestic comforts…

Segalove takes her mom as subject in these short pieces, recording her stories, her advice, and her daily routine. What results is a portrait of a contemporary mother-daughter relationship,…

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…

A classic example of feminist performance videos of the 1970s, which often incorporated autobiography, expansion of self through personae, and assertions of a new identity for women. In Nun and…

Taking aim at the social standardization enforced particularly on women's bodies, Rosler critiques the politics of "objective" or scientific evaluation that result in the depersonalization,…