Performance

The performers are seated around a pink octagonal table on pink, violet, and silver cinder blocks. One performer (Robert Stearns) stands up, recites the credits for the piece, and then says, “Do you believe in water? Robert Stearns.” He claps and turns to the next performer who asks the same question and gives his name. Next the players split up into pairs and attempt to relate to each other—playing tug-of-war, making love, arguing over who has the most integrity, and fighting for possession of the props.

Tripping out on loneliness, The Loner drifts through one daydream about “Her” after another. Oursler nightmarishly fantasizes about the dismal prospect of looking for love in a sleazy singles bar. Painfully aware of his lack, the hero is moved by his constant misrecognition of the object of his desire in an adolescent melodrama of sexual obsession and failure. As one of Oursler’s earliest tapes, The Loner is especially crude in its details, with many of the hand-painted sets dissolving under a stream of water. 

In July of 1971, American artist Lee Lozano gave a talk at NSCAD art college in Halifax, called “The Halifax 3 State Experiment”. Stretching over 8 hours, and moving through multiple locations, Lozano delivered her extended lecture in three states - sober, stoned on weed, and high on LSD. Filmmakers Maïder Fortuné and Annie MacDonell take this event up as a point of departure for an investigation into Lozano’s thoughts, practice and daily life.

In this now infamous tape, exemplary of his early transgressive performance style, Acconci sits and relates a masturbatory fantasy about a girl rubbing his legs under the table. Carrying on a rambling dialogue that shifts back and forth between the camera/spectator and himself, Acconci sexualizes the implicit contract between performer and viewer—the viewer serving as a voyeur who makes the performance possible by watching and completing the scene, believing the fantasy.

A Perfect Pair posits the idea that individual consumers are walking billboards for the products they use; product slogans and brand names peeking out from every crevice and cranny of the actors’ bodies. Export demonstrates how the body of the consumer, especially that of the female consumer, is co-opted by commercialism. In tongue-in-cheek fashion, A Perfect Pair celebrates the modern-day co-mingling of fetish objects, as a body builder seduces a prostitute at a bar saying, “Your eyes are the most beautiful blue ad-space. Your cheek could promote a Mercedes.

Feathers: An Introduction is a self-portrait centered on the story of Latham's grandmother’s comforter which, old and worn, scatters feathers everywhere. Displaying an arresting stage presence, Latham addresses the viewer as a potential friend or lover, speaking in a soft-spoken near-whisper, and gingerly touching and kissing the camera lens and monitor. Then, almost mocking the video’s intimacy, Latham gives us close-ups of herself chewing a sandwich and shaving her armpits, heightening the sense that she has been playing cat and mouse with the viewer all along.

The inverted camera catches Nauman standing at the end of the room, slowly spinning around on one foot, first head down in one direction, then head up in the other direction. The tape seems to be as much a trial of Nauman’s endurance as an exercise in becoming a human machine, some type of cog or mechanized weather vane.

Using performance as a means of personal transformation and catharsis, Mitchell’s Death mourns the death of Montano’s ex-husband. Every detail of her story, from the telephone call announcing the tragedy, to visiting the body, is chanted by Montano as her face, pierced by acupuncture needles, slowly comes into focus then goes out again. The chanting is reminiscent of Buddhist texts, while the needles signify the pain that is necessary for healing and understanding.

giroscopio is a short experimental film by two artists, one in Pennsylvania and one in Puerto Rico, each in pandemic lockdown, each disoriented. Objects seem to control them; their bodies are unbalanced, unwieldy, comical. The horizon spins; the ground falls away; and yet a strange wonder reigns. / giroscopio es un cortometraje experimental de dos artistas, uno en Pensilvania y otro en Puerto Rico, cada uno en confinamiento por la pandemia, cada uno desorientado. Los objetos parecen controlarlos; sus cuerpos son desequilibrados, difíciles de manejar, cómicos.

This tape compiles three profiles of performance artists: A Creative Synthesis: George Coates Performance Works (10:00), The Performance World of Rachel Rosenthal (16:00), and Paul Dresher Ensemble (08:00).

“Similar in structure to The Speech, this tape suggests the gesture and language of the television proselytizer as opposed to the politician.”

— Doug Hall

“This Is The Truth is a recitation of the rules and social codes that makes evident the results of strategic posturing and facial expression on television. Through emblems and selected phrases, Hall dissects those components that produce the image of authority.”

— Bob Riley, The CAT Fund Presents: Doug Hall (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1986-87)

This is an over-the-top Video bouquet audaciously delivered by flamboyant "Pan" – like poets determined to paint the world pink.

This is a story of friendship between two independent female artists and their body memories each willingly carry. In January 2020, New York based, interdisciplinary performing artist Eiko Otake arrived in Beijing to visit Wen Hui, a Chinese choreographer and filmmaker. Eight years apart, Eiko grew up in postwar Japan and Wen during the Cultural Revolution. They planned to visit each other for a month to converse and collaborate. The surge of COVID-19 abruptly cut off Eiko's visit and the pandemic has made Wen's visit to the USA impossible but the collaboration continued.

In The Girls at the Dock, Teramana features performers at The Dock, a popular LGBTQ+ bar and nightclub in Cincinnati, Ohio. Teramana engages in backstage banter with the performers before a Tuesday night show, especially with Sirrocco, who was a friend and neighbor of Teramana's, and whom Teramana interviewed for an earlier video piece (Sirrocco). The Dock closed in 2018. 

"I never knew Tuesday night could be so much fun... but it sure didn't do much for Wednesday." –Diane Teramana

This video shows the design and choreography of Eiko's three-channel installation on one screen. Each video was shot in California by Alexis Moh and Marjorie Hunt during a creative residency at UCLA in April 2019. 

In a gallery, three sequences are projected on three different adjacent walls or shown on three monitors separately. Eiko "choreographed" 17-min sequences of three videos, considering the overall dynamic and how they are aligned. This is a shortened version.

Documentation of Eiko performing in the installation space is available by request.

In collaboration with Ishmael Houston-Jones.

On September 1, 2022, Eiko and Ishmael Houston-Jones performed in Beverly McIver's painting exhibition Full Circle, curated by Kim Boganey.

The whole event took place in connected galleries of her show, but this excerpt is when Ishmael and Eiko danced a duet in front of the paintings that were also a duet of a sort.

Camera by Julie Ganas.
Edited by Eiko Otake.

A pro-domme gives her friend a freshly shaved head. In return she gets a buzz cut. A client gets to be a (bound) fly on the wall.

This title is also available on Chicago Sex Change: 2002-2008, A collection of Minax's early videos that together create a punk-documentary tapestry of young queer life in Chicago in the early 2000s.

Marielle Nitoslawska’s Breaking the Frame is a feature–length profile of the radical New York artist Carolee Schneemann. A pioneer of performance art and avant-garde cinema, Schneemann has been breaking the frames of the art world for five decades by challenging the taboos leveled against the female body. Breaking the Frame is a kinetic, hyper-cinematic intervention, a critical medita-tion on the intimate correlations animating art and life.

Praise for Breaking the Frame:

Made in Germany, October 14th, 2004

While the Iraq war continues, a day's sightseeing and the features of a German hotel provoke a stream of thoughts about events large and small.

Museum Piece is the second episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world's hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.

In this early Tom Rubnitz, Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken collaboration, "Frieda" performs her rap song with a bevy of dolls as back-up singers and dancers. Features rock-bottom production values and song lyrics by Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken.

“A good example of Baldessari’s deadpan irreverence is the 1971 black-and-white video entitled I Am Making Art, in which he moves different parts of his body slightly while saying, after each move, ‘I am making art.’ The statement, he says, ‘hovers between assertion and belief.’ On one level, the piece spoofs the work of artists who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, explored the use of their own bodies and gestures as an art medium.

Based on Robert Heinlein’s 1941 story “Universe,” Double Lunar Dogs presents a vision of post-apocalyptic survival aboard a “spacecraft,” travelling aimlessly through the universe, whose passengers have forgotten the purpose of their mission. As a metaphor for the nature and purpose of memory, the two main characters (portrayed by Jonas and Spalding Gray) play games with images of their past; but their efforts to restore their collective memories are futile, and they are reprimanded by the “Authority” for their attempts to recapture their past on a now-destroyed planet Earth.

Taking aim at the social standardization enforced particularly on women's bodies, Rosler critiques the politics of "objective" or scientific evaluation that result in the depersonalization, objectification, and colonization of women and Others. As Joseph Di Mattia has pointed out, "The title of the tape is ironic--just exactly to whom are these 'statistics' 'vital'?

Rosler uses the format of a cooking demonstration (as in Semiotics of the Kitchen) to address cultural transaction--the meeting of Eastern and Western cultures. Reading directly from a West Bend Electric Wok instruction booklet, Rosler wryly comments upon the Oriental mystique conjured by the West Bend manufacturers, a mystique evoked and then "improved" upon through Western technology--i.e. non-stick surfaces and electric power.