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The Telling

Anne McGuire

1998 00:03:30 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3Hi8 video
Tags:
Performance, Television, TV production

Description

The Telling (1994-98) shows Anne McGuire telling two acquaintances a secret from her past using a three-camera set-up in the Desi Arnez style. The commodification of intimacy is not the strangest thing about this work. The fractured editing, silences, and lapses in continuity suggest vast narratives far more evocative than anything revealed on screen. McGuire uses television vernacular ambiguously to provoke discomfort, two things that television strives to avoid at all costs.

This title is also available on Anne McGuire Videoworks: Volume 1 and American Psycho(drama): Sigmund Freud vs. Henry Ford.

About Anne McGuire

Anne McGuire was born in the Valley of the Jolly Green Giant, and has lived in San Francisco since 1990. She began making videos in the late 1980s while she was a student. She has taught at various institutions in California including the San Francisco Art Institute, University of California Santa Cruz, and Stanford University, as well as KyungSung University in Busan, South Korea. 

Through her single-channel works, McGuire translates traditions of personal and poetic performances to camera, playing off of conventions of television. She has explored the personal through formal narrative, particularly in Strain Andromeda, The, her 1993 end-to-beginning re-edit of Robert Wise's The Andromeda Strain. Strain was her first foray into disaster deconstruction. In 2006 Anne completed Adventure Poseiden, The (The Unsinking of My Ship), which celebrates the 20-year anniversary of her very own real-life shipwreck experience. She also writes poems and sings them as songs, and has performed as Freddy McGuire with San Francisco-based electronic musician Wobbly, live and on radio.