Body

Compromise is Episode 1 of the video art trilogy, This is More Than Love I Feel Inside, in which Jillian Peña traces a queer relationship from inception to demise.

In this interview American filmmaker, poet, and lyricist, Cecelia Condit gives shape to the contours of her work process. The artist describes the influence of her relationship with her mother, her long-term investment in the macabre, and her ongoing desire to confront death through art. While covering a broad range of topics, Condit’s discussion of her work and interests returns to several defining themes: aging, grotesqueness, and the notion of movement, both in terms of her own past as a dancer and the notion of the body in decay. With a particular emphasis on the production and context of her videos, Annie Lloyd (2008), and All About a Girl (2004), this interview offers insight into the artist’s fascination with aging, sweetness, and storytelling, while also articulating her joyful sense of discovery within the art-making process. No longer working with scripts, Condit presents herself in the interview as a scavenger–much like the crows she incorporates into her work–assembling videos which straddle the line between strange and silly. – Faye Gleisser

Illustrating the modern woman’s mantra “I shop therefore I am", Barbara Latham’s Consuming Passions examines the passion for sweets as a replacement for a sense of security and a source of erotic satisfaction.

Stephen Varble (1946-1984) staged gender-confounding costume performances on the streets of 1970s Manhattan, and he became infamous for his anti-commercial disruptions of galleries, banks, and boutiques. In 1978, he retreated from this public work to focus on the making of an epic, unfinished piece of video art, Journey to the Sun, until his death in the first days of 1984. Lush, ribald, and unorthodox, the video mixed non-narrative costume performances with a surrealist fable of a messianic martyr, the Warbler.

From the point of view of the psychoananlyst's chair, we witness images that place us implicitly within the scene. The images depict two embracing men, and suggest a complex and ambiguous web of associations. The embrace is both erotic and tender, and invites questions about power relationships. The pain of love and possible rejection is exposed through the flash of a naked leg, or the vulnerability of a fleeting expression.

Covert Action is a stunning melange of rapid-fire retro imagery accomplishing Child’s proclaimed goal to “disarm my movies.” “I wanted to examine the erotic behind the social, and remake those gestures into a dance that would confront their conditioning and, as well, relay the multiple fictions the footage suggests (the ‘facts’ forever obscured in the fragments left us). The result is a narrative developed by its periphery, a story like rumor: impossible to trace, disturbing, explosive.”

Crush is the story of a man who wants to turn into an animal as told by the man himself, and one or two observers. He employs a variety of techniques to transform himself into a beast, including cutting off parts of his body, exercising, swimming; he wants to return to the water, to speed up evolution a little. Has he gone mad, or is he just tired of being human? As the narrator descends into private obsessions, we begin to perceive the distorted outlines of reason which guide his descent.

CURRENCY is a sound-film of refusal—a woman wears bygone forms of currency on the tips of her hair while preserving the greatest currency for herself. CURRENCY explores the archive of embodiment through gesture and sonic transmissions, with sounds generated from articulations of the body itself.

The police phoned. They left a message on the machine. They said he was dead. The video unwinds through stories of sex for rent, unclaimed bodies, cigarette burns, and other monuments of life’s long run from wall to wall. Cut the Parrot is three grotesque comedies in one: the stories of Gerry, Susan, and Albert. Songs of hope and heartbreak spill from the mouths of the performers. The order of impersonation rules.

Riffing on relations between grief, love, bodies, and embodiment, this short film features two former professional Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus clowns. A Dark Love Story for Clowns weaves together a loosely adapted William Faulkner story with a spiritual ritualistic practice in order to explore the performativity around ethics of care and love.

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

Dead Body Pose absurdly touches the contemporary bubble, encapsulating both connectivity and spirituality, a connection fueled by the global capitalistic consumption of the self. The more we are in the connectivity loop, the more thirsty we are for spirituality and assign it "a time slot". In the video, the artist performs the yoga rest pose Shavasana (dead body pose) as computer cursors come out of her body cavities and connect to their own spirituality together with her chakra affirmations.

An avatar, created through a 3D scan of Syms, navigates a plain and vast virtual landscape, the perspective sometimes floating above, sometimes alongside, as she progresses through a perpetual cycle of death and resurrection. Her avatar's journey seems to reflect the spectacularly confusing or nonsensical experience of inhabiting a body during a time of violence and illness that has unceasingly threatened notions of stability and consequentiality, forcing ever-evolving tactics of survival.

Defiantly humorous in its tone, Delirium reflects Faber’s mother’s personal experience with what has been classified as “female hysteria.”  While never reducing her mother’s condition to a single explanation, Delirium firmly and convincingly links her illness to the historically embattled position women hold in a patriarchal culture. The video layers haunting imagery and humorous iconoclasm, referencing everything from television episodes of I Love Lucy to Charcot’s 19th Century photos of female hysterics.

Erase the 1940s. The desire to better appearances. To try to record a love story. It's in this way that a facial can become the biggest remaining pleasure.

This title is also available on Ximena Cuevas: Dormimundo Vol. 1 (Sleepworld Vol. 1), Ximena Cuevas: El Mundo del Silencio (The Silent World), and Half-Lies: The Videoworks of Ximena Cuevas.

Cool sheets and warm male bodies ignite the screen with antics that go from hot pink to black and blue as they romp, stomp, spit and strut their "goods" before your eyes.

… Watch out – things get rough!

This title comprises Peek-A-Boo (2008), Litany of the Seven Kisses (2011), and Boy Toys (2000) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

Distracted Blueberry follows a performance art band through a series of poetic encounters. Masculine tropes are undone to form a relationship between male sexuality and the human death drive. The body, violence and humour are positioned in the larger context of nothingness and somethingness, bridging a tension between externalized anxieties and the terrors of nature. Evocative of inner emotional states, strange landscapes exist as reflections of our shared dreams and nightmares.

Viewer discretion advised 

"This movie was collected for four years before being sprayed scattershot over 28 minutes of psychic mayhem. The line between living and dead is a frontier crossed and re-crossed here. The living are dead while the dead are animated, breathing, swimming, giving birth. Consumed by the animal life of the city, the artist undertakes a first person journey, producing diary notes from one of the most skilled lens masters of the new generation. The camera is her company in this duet of death, the instrument that permits her to see the impossible, the unbearable, the invisible."

The raw facts and naked truths behind hedonistic rascals and obsessive artists is boldly uncovered and revealed to you.

This title comprises Blue Vibrations (2014), Museum of Damaged Art (2015), and Moods for Moderns (2016) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

Lips that issue forth melodious vows. Warm skin on bedsheets stained with dreams. Faces crowned with halos that light a path to temples of the soul…..You will find it here in DREAMS and OMENS!

This title comprises Wishful Thinking (2015), Testimony (2013), and New Beginnings (2014) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

A reverse striptease, non-stop comedic monologue about shopping for clothes, while eating corn nuts. Dressing Up was inspired by the artist’s mother’s penchant for bargain hunting. Mogul produced Dressing Up as a student in the feminist art program at the California Institute of the Arts in 1973.

Drink Deep is a lyrical vision of friendship, hidden secrets, and desires. Cohen uses several types of film image to add texture to the layered composition. Beautiful shades of grey, silver, black and blue echo the water, reminiscent of early photography and silverprints. Cohen says, "The piece was constructed primarily from footage I’d shot of skinnydippers at swimming holes in Georgia and rural Pennsylvania. It’s about water and memory and stories just submerged. It is also, in part, a response to thinking about censorship.

This arresting early work conveys a tension that emanates from what Tanaka posits as life's basic dualities: male/female, past/present, known/unknown. By focusing issues of identity, doubt, wonder, and awareness through the body, and the bodies of her ancestors, Tanaka succeeds in creating a work with both personal and political power. Tanaka creates a unique voice that speaks of her experience of maturing into womanhood, repeating the refrain, "I my mother." An experimental video, this work contains one of the first examples of flicker editing.

Illness, treatment, recovery, conversation. This experimental short presents stories of illness and disfunction, bringing together but also separating two performers, their stories, their bodies.

“Duet confronts illness with a caress; it takes us on a journey with two different people with two distinct conditions that present obstacles to very specific senses. A film that makes us address the way that we feel, hear, see, taste, and speak.” —Lynne Sachs

Andro/lesbian body-doubles wrestle each other in an outer-space fantasy.

Performers: A.K. Burns & K8 Hardy

Audio: Matt Volla

This title is also available on A.K. Burns: Early Videoworks