Nancy Cain interviews an upside down chin face about Women's Liberation, asking "Where do you stand on the subject?" The chin face professes to be happy with her lot, and says she enjoys living alone with her cat.
This video was shot in the Prince Street, New York loft/studio used by the Videofreex.
Primal urges and lofty aspirations saturate this lush excursion into the human landscape where internal battles rage – see pens spill forth poems – observe the paintbrush dripping passions, as writers and artists search for inspiration in the sordid depths of society and in spiritual recesses of the mind.
This title comprises Ruffled Spirits (2016) and Nightfall (2013) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
Letter to a missing woman, based partly on memories of someone who has been a political fugitive since 1983, combines documentary "evidence" and fiction in an imaginative reconstruction of public documents and private history. This is a quiet, obsessive piece addressing the human costs and repercussions of re-inventing oneself – one’s body, memories, and future – as a living piece of propaganda. The writer/narrator of this "crazy letter" is an unreliable one, a composite of half-truths, paranoid digressions, and feelings of loss.
Hey Bud revolves around the suicide of Bud Dwyer, a government official who killed himself before a television audience. Zando compares the suicide to a kind of pornographic sex act that plays upon the tension created between exhibitionist and voyeur. It forces viewers to take either an empathetic position vis-a-vis the exhibitionist, or to act as voyeur through release of the repressed desire to see the forbidden face of Death. The piece attempts to understand the power gained through exhibitionism, and how that power is lost through death.
He is mute flesh that the stroking of fingers can bring to sing.
-- Mike Kuchar
The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century.
"Each disquieting image breaks down into a pixel, each pithy phrase into a word, and Reinke's stream of video-thought continues apace. The corpse won't stop talking."
— Jon Davies, Images Festival: Spotlight Essay, April 2018
This absurdist, microscopic film noir follows the activities of an underground network of ill people, desperate to create alternative methods of self-care in a world where natural resources are disappearing. While examining the meaning of health, disease, and well-being in the post-industrial world, Apple Grown In Wind Tunnel imagines the development of a culture at the margins, linked by illicit radio broadcasts, toxic waste sites, the highway, and ultimately by the overwhelming desire to find a cure.
As if trapped inside a nightmare, the main protagonist of Poster Girl is haunted by disturbing visions, thoughts and fantasies, which the viewer is privy to. She is joined at various points in the video by another woman, whose role in the narrative remains unclear – is she meant to function as a guardian or a demon? The video further complicates the matter by representing both women as simultaneously wounded and wounding, inviting and threatening, vulnerable and menacing.
C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), Part 1 is a collaborative video and performance work by artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, with AJ Blandford and Seattle-based band Kinski. Inhabiting the intersection of human movement and architecture, A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs) present a full-spectrum video, set to a score by rock quartet Kinski.
Revelers at a masquerade ball enter an UnderWorld of guilt, vice, pain, chaos and redemption.
-- Mike Kuchar
Acconci explodes the notion of an artist’s creation, his creative act being the build-up and discharge of saliva, an activity more properly belonging to the realm of necessary and autonomic bodily functions than art. Positioning himself as a hyper self-conscious artistic subject, Acconci fuses the terrains of body art and process art, formulating the body as process, and art as a natural function of the body.
This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.
Take a trip into and out of the body to ponder Time’s endless depths where Earth spirits roam and inner Demons lurk, and find secrets that hide behind the "self". Its here for you to see.
This title comprises Moon Lit Vows (2017), Boy in the Mirror (2015), Celestial Horizons (2019), Book of the Angel (2017) and Floating on the Currents of Consciousness (2019) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
A haunting look at the hidden issues of erotic power relationships between women, told through the reconstructed story of two girlhood friends. In Zando’s tape, the origins of desire and domination are traced to the early stages of the childhood relation between mother and daughter, as revealed in the often fearful and cruel framework of childhood play. In the paradigm of need and dependency versus power and control, the submissive impulse is linked to the transcendent yearning to reunite with the pre-natal mother.
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
This video-lament for Mother Earth is a collaboration among Jim Barbaro, sound; Tobe Carey, cinematography and video editing; and Brenda Hutchinson playing a long tube.
"Made right after Covid lockdown, my art gave me an opportunity to rejoice, grieve and sonically face impermanence via sounds and a Chicken Dance I’ve been performing for decades. The beauty of this video is that it looks like Chicken Linda can finally FLY!! Please interact if you wish and dance, sing, cry, and FLY HIGH."
–– Linda Mary Montano
Stephen Varble began Journey to the Sun as a series of performances with projected slides in 1978. After becoming notorious for unauthorized costume performances on Soho streets in the mid 1970s, Varble receded from his public persona at this time. Deriving from his identification with his idol, the reclusive actress Greta Garbo, and informed by the spiritual practice of Subud, Varble began writing an allegorical epic about a musician, the Grey Crowned Warbler, who undergoes tribulation and metamorphosis on a journey to transcendence.
"The Flag is the second part of a video series about the state-controlled national day ceremonies of the Turkish Republic. Shot during the April 23rd Children’s Day celebrations, which mark the establishment of the new Turkish Parliament, and hence the official demise of the Ottoman Empire back in 1920, this split screen film documents a pompous patriotic performance devised by elders to be performed by children.
The repeatedly distorted, primate behaviour of an (ani)female carrying her baby, reflecting the pain and suffering provoked by the mother/child relationship.
Voice: off is the autobiography of a forgotten man. Brain damaged, body violated, emotions crushed, Gerry who rarely spoke has now lost the power of speech. The video camera is his prosthesis and he borrows the memories of people who no longer need them. How can this be a comedy? It is. "Donigan Cumming looks at the violence of time that damages the body and exhausts memories. For the main character in Voice: off, Gerald, the illness is incurable. Two cancers are at work, one of which is attacking his throat.
A Day for Cake and Accidents features a cast of animal characters — each of a different, though often indeterminate, species — who struggle with impending astrological despair and engage in absurdist dialogs, confessing various melancholic desires and transgressive secrets in poetic cartoon abjection.
A Day for Cake and Accidents is the third in a series of short collaborative animations.
Identically dressed, and with sibling-like resemblance, performance artists Trevor Martin and Kym Olsen shift between spoken word and athletic dance choreography in a collection of 29 scenes. Set in various locations--including a gymnasium, an abandoned hospital, and a trailer park circus--Martin and Olsen slip between a ventriloquist and his dummy, a seducer and his surrogate, a doctor and his patient, and synchronized dance partners. The film examines a complex social psychology--questioning the colonization of the human body for various political, medical and religious agendas.
Spit Sandwich is a compilation of 19 comical and entertaining works from the master of deadpan. Experiments with the video signal combine with visual jokes and one-liners to hilarious effect. Includes: II got . .Spit Sandwich is a compilation of 19 comical and entertaining works from the master of deadpan. Experiments with the video signal combine with visual jokes and one-liners to hilarious effect. Includes: II got . .
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.”
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.
A Meditation on Nature in the Absence of an Eclipse is a poetic glimpse into the ways centuries of extraction, racism, pollution, and nature's commodification have altered our relationship to sacred land, water, and resources. A constellation of intersecting histories and source material include testimony from a Water Protector at Standing Rock protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline, contaminated water in Flint Michigan, and original footage of Hierve el Agua near Oaxaca, Mexico, a rock formation revered for its healing properties.
