Autobiography

Are gender outlaws considered the new biological terrorists seeking weapons of mass bodily destruction? OPERATION INVERT compares the different regulations mediating botox-related plastic surgery and gender reassignment "sex change." Historical medical assessments of the invert (homosexual and transsexual) "condition" reveal seemingly outdated absurdities about outsider deviance. Nonetheless, current institutional loopholes governing gender re-assignment surgery suggest a fresh resurgence of loony pathology and diagnosis.

This latest work from the ReStack’s pulls the experience of becoming mother (both through fostering and bio) through the lens of personal lives that are always, also, steeped in a world where systemic racism, classism and heteronormativity influence and shape.

The sonic fabric of 2nd Person, [originally] a multi-channel video installation, is formed through an array of women’s voices orchestrated as parallel tracks in a musical composition. The speakers, all women I have intimately known at different points in my life -- my child, my mother, my best friends, students, mentors -- talk with me about aging, growing up, death, motherhood, love and loss.

In the aftermath of a death things may seem very quiet, but there are struggles going on so deep not even those who struggle can recognize them.  This film looks and listens for signs of those struggles.  Psychoanalytic interjections consider the nature of time and rumination, and are used to step outside of the terribly interiorized state of mourning.

-- Jennifer Montgomery

Medicine Bundle is about a bundle that was used in my family to heal my Great Great Grandfather from a smallpox epidemic and a life threatening wound from a gatling gun used against him during the Battle Of Cutknife Hill in 1885. The bundle was again used in 1918 when my Grandfather contracted the Spanish Flu as a baby. It was buried in an unmarked grave to protect it from grave robbers, but the spirit within the bundle has continued to protect our family from more modern psychological effects of colonization like depression.

Susan Mogul's first video diary work, produced two years before Everyday Echo Street: A Summer Diary (1993), follows the artist on a trip though Eastern Europe immediately after the fall of the USSR. Through discussions with various characters about politics, art, and each others personal lives, Mogul creates a video time capsule of social life in Poland, then Czechoslovakia, and former Yugoslavia.

"I'm not going to go to the Anne Frank House—I don't think I could take it—being a tourist is bad enough—though I'm not really a tourist—I'm here working—my camera's the one on vacation—taking holiday sounds and images—it's having a nice change of pace—for me it's still the same old thing—talking and talking.

Color Schemes was exhibited in its installation form (with a self-service washing machine) at the Whitney Museum in 1990. Using the washing machine as a metaphor for the great American “melting pot” of ethnicity, the video presents individuals from a variety of ethnic backgrounds “representing” their ethnicity — in one sense by being on camera, and also by acting out or speaking about ethnic divisions. Cheang plays with this “overdetermiNation” of ethnicity, creating a multi-layered discourse on racism and assimilation that condemns the former and refuses to condone the latter.

“[Segalove] pursues her self-analysis via the popular culture and TV addiction of her youth: seeing JFK shot on TV, falling in love with the TV repairman, being glued to the tube while suffering from the requisite bout of mononucleosis, and associating the memory of watching her parents kiss with the soundtrack of Dragnet.” —Marita Sturken, “Revising Romance: New Feminist Video,” Art Journal 45 (Fall 1985)

I Stare at You and Dream is a slice of life melodrama that journeys to the core of interrelationships. This film juxtaposes and links the lives of four people: the filmmaker, Susan Mogul; her friend, Rosie Sanchez; Rosie’s teenage daughter, Alejandra (Alex) Sanchez; and Ray Aguilar; Susan’s-on-and-off boyfriend. Tender and unflinching, each character gradually reveals their desires, wounds, and romantic entanglements in the context of their everyday lives.

In Precious Products we are subtly reminded of this country’s obsession with consumerism and narcissism. George, with his ever-present video-8 camera, attends an opening of Precious Products—an exhibition of artworks satirizing art as commodity. He leaves the art world of San Francisco to spend a Christmas holiday with friends in their opulent home. Ironically, this is the home of a celebrity (another kind of commodity), Russian defector/ballerina Natalia Makanova. Surrounded by all the luxuries of life and Makanova’s image, George muses about death.

“Take back the airwaves: Mexico’s video art doyenne Ximena Cuevas books herself onto the tabloid talk show Tombola (Raffle), toying at first with whimsical deconstruction until she turns the whole affair on its head by seizing the televisual flow itself.”

The comings and goings of the late underground filmmaker, Curt McDowell—and the people and activities that came and went along with him—are the themes that run through this existential diary of daily life. McDowell was dying from AIDS-related illnesses during the production of the diary.

“An elegy for McDowell, the videowork captures Kuchar’s mournful remembrances of his long-lasting friendship with the young filmmaker. But it also has the inquisitive charm, perverse humor, and quirky candor that places Kuchar’s visual expressions in a gritty niche all their own.”

Thanksgiving in California is the setting in which the viewer experiences "the depression inherent to festive occasions. There were many things bothering me at this time, or maybe it was one thing that broke into many pieces.

This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.

This latest work from the ReStack’s pulls the experience of becoming mother (both through fostering and bio) through the lens of personal lives that are always, also, steeped in a world where systemic racism, classism and heteronormativity influence and shape.

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

George stays in San Francisco for this video about local filmmakers and their future projects.

A five-minute video collaboration between Dani Leventhal and Steve Reinke.

Laurel Klick and I were members of the feminist art program at CalArts and became close lifelong friends. Laurel is behind the camera as I recount my one-sided flirtation with a guy who worked at CalArts in the equipment “cage” - the cage where I checked out the video Portapak - the Portapak we utilized to record my anecdote. My story about an everyday interaction would become a trademark of my work. “Laurel and Susan” was not edited or presented publicly until 2022.

A performer lip-synchs to archival audio featuring the voice of author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston as she describes her method of documenting African American folk songs in Florida. The flickering images were produced with a hand-cranked Bolex so that the lip-synch is deliberately erratic and the rear-projected, grainy, looped images of Masai tribesmen and women, recycled from an educational film, become increasingly abstract as the audio transforms into an incantation. 

George goes to Oklahoma, but there's a lull in storm activity. It's spring, and though there's romance in the air, the lightning just doesn’t strike; so George makes his own rain—of sorts. Despite the drought, the videos must go on.

This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.

Segalove comes out as the child of a movie star haven where messy lawns are reported to the police and designer labels are removed from hand-me-downs for the maids. She reveals some of the dirt among the manicured yards, including a local custom of girls jumping from a terraced lawn at Beverly Hills High to induce miscarriages, and her friend Yasmin Hayworth’s wish that Rita was a “natural mother.”

The artist visits with seven cosmetic surgeons specializing in blepharoplasty (cosmetic eyelid creasing surgery) in the West Hollywood/Beverly Hills area for initial consultation sessions. The doctors demonstrate different reshaping options and comment upon the prevalence and success rates for different Asian nationalities while Tran presents statistics and facts in text that frame the consultations.

This title is also available on Tran, T. Kim-Trang: The Blindness Series.

George spends a week in Los Angeles on business and at eating engagements. “I eat in Beverly Hills and do my business behind closed doors for a change....”

Acconci again confronts both the viewer’s and his own expectations of his performance, saying, "I've waited for the perfect time, for the perfect piece, I'm tired of waiting... but no, you want me to have something ready for you, something prepared." Acconci addresses the artist's perpetual wait for both inspiration and appreciation. He pulls apart the relationship of the artist to the audience, which for Acconci constitutes a mixture of independence and co-dependence, relying on the viewer to both validate and motivate his work.