Conceptual Art

Primate Cinema: Apes as Family is a drama made expressly for chimpanzees – and the chimps' reaction to its screening at the Edinburgh Zoo. Chimpanzees watch television as a form of enrichment in captivity. But no filmmaker had made a film for a specifically ape audience.

In a vile and ingenious way, Acconci pleads with the camera/spectator to join with him, to come to him, promising to be honest and begging, "I need it, you need it, c'mon... look how easy it is." Acconci addresses the viewer as a sexual partner, acting as if no distance existed between them. The monitor becomes an agent of intimate address, presenting a disingenuous intimacy that is one-sided and pure fantasy, much like the popular love songs in the background with which Acconci croons, "I'll be your baby, I'll be your baby tonight, yeah, yeah."

As a document of an early performance, this video details the process of orientating the body and self in space, providing a physical metaphor for the process of adjusting oneself in society.

"Blindfolded, ears plugged: our goal is to sense each other’s movement and bearing, to attempt to assume the same movement and bearing. An off-screen voice, heard only by the audience, gives directions that would help us attain our goal."

—Vito Acconci, "Concentration-Container-Assimilation," Avalanche 6 (Fall 1972)

Performance artist/sculptor Ana Mendieta used the raw materials of nature: water, mud, fire, rock, and grass. The consciousness of her politics and the poetics of her expression fill her work with an emotionally charged vision that is powerfully conveyed in this posthumous video profile. Drawing upon the raw spiritual power of Afro-Cuban religion, Mendieta used her art as a ritualistic and symbolic activity to celebrate the forces of life and the continuum of change.

Dennis Oppenheim was a prominent figure in various art developments throughout the ’70s. Oppenheim moved through body/performance art and related video work to earthworks to his current large-scale “factories.” In all of his work, the transference of energy is an underlying concern.

RECKONING 7 is something of an instrumental interlude between longer, denser episodes of the RECKONING series, which is now being made and released "out of order.” Through an improvised electronic score and footage from the prison yard lobby of a popular battle royale game, it floats a modest proposal of multiplayer online game as altered space for collaborative performance, meditation, levitation, and indecision.

A man is shot inside an empty room and he moves and takes on positions continuously out of center. The nature of the lack of balance is invisible and his ability to stand up in spite of unnatural postures is inexplicable: this videowork has been realized without special effects but is simply the result of a real shooting of an artificial condition.