Sexuality

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."

Frances, a young Gay Indian (2 Spirit), played by Lacey Hill, is struggling with the aftermath of a gay basing. Through her friendship with her ex Jean, she gathers the strength to go out in public again. This video is a salute to the 70s and to Gay Indian movements which became 2Spirit/Indigiqueer communities.

Song performed by Lacy Hill.

Revelers at a masquerade ball enter an UnderWorld of guilt, vice, pain, chaos and redemption.

-- Mike Kuchar

A sweeping saga of an evil matriarch and her march to infamy as she invades the hearts and souls of those organs and entities that reside in the male physique. A lustful excursion to the far corners of the globe as this vixen of vice weaves an occult web of sticky substances guaranteed to gummy up the gals and grease down the guys.

When she was 16, Benning stopped going to high school for three weeks and stayed inside with her camera, her TV set, and a pile of dirty laundry. This tape mirrors her psyche during this time. With the image breaking up between edits, the rough quality of this early tape captures Benning’s sense of isolation and sadness, her retreat from the world. As such, Living Inside is the confession of a chronic outsider.

This title is also available on Sadie Benning Videoworks: Volume 1.

This video diary visits two sites that exhibited my visual works this past year, culminating at the VOLTA ART SHOW in N.Y.C., where I sold some paintings and a photograph.

The underling theme of the diary deals with some bloating, scarring and beefcake exposure while on the road to an acting gig where I'm scheduled to play a BI-SEXUAL, paraplegic in heat.

There are some in depth scenes of me working out the romance/sex routines with a young and attractive, male co-star. The all-girl crew appears to be getting off on the whole thing and I don't blame them!

Two boys are drawn together like metal to a magnet and conduct a somewhat confusing — but utterly charming "pow-wow" where dreams and ideas get tossed around like baseballs and artistic aspiration explores like pop-corn on a sunny porch.

This title comprises Adam's Apple (2014) and Dreamsville (2014) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

Commissioned to be a "promo" for a loud punk rock band, Mr. Kuchar feared that the noise the band made would spoil the mood of his visuals, so he used the sound of a lush orchestra to score the picture and the antics.

Shot in black and white, this rough-and-ready trilogy is about twin sisters who "act out" and act up in their own best interests. At the age when a young girl might discover her own sexuality, they explore themselves (and each other) in "games" and playtime together. In the three sections—"Icky and Kathy Find Liberty", "The Babysitter", and "Learning To Suck"—the girls engage in slightly illicit acts together. Being naughty can be fun!

See a boy turn into a tiger. See the lad vomit colors of the rainbow. Watch him toss marbles onto wet bathroom tiles while holding up a green skull. See him squirm on warm bedsheets, wearing only soiled socks on his feet…… This kid has a mouthful of flowery words to spit out to you !

This title comprises Witchery (2008), The Tiger (2009), Swan Song (2009), Medusa's Gaze (2010) and Opal Essence (2010) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

This interview depicts American writer, activist, and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman (b. 1958), discussing becoming a writer, her novels, and her long-term collaboration with filmmaker James Hubbard on projects devoted to gay liberation and AIDS activism. Born in New York to a Holocaust-surviving family, Schulman grew up in an era where women were not considered important.

You will never be a woman. You must live the rest of your days entirely as a man and you will only grow more masculine with every passing year. There is no way out.

EMR has created a sigil, a magic sex symbol abstracted from the words TRUST ME (NOT) TO HURT YOU that is spread across rituals of the beast.

“A soldier’s trip to Syria is complicated when he accidentally impregnates a friend. Meanwhile, a horse breeder from Ohio is driven away from home by her own desire to become pregnant. In Hard as Opal the lines between truth and fiction, fact and fantasy, are reined in and treated not as fixed, divisive markers but as malleable threads of narrative potential. Buckhiester and Leventhal perform alongside other non-actors who are filmed in their own varying domestic and professional environments.

The fourth collaboration between Jessie Mott and Steve Reinke continues its melancholic musings on desire and mourning, this time with more twerking. Hypnotic backgrounds and eccentric animals lend to its psychedelic children's cartoon vibe, and the signature Madonna and Stockhausen soundtrack enhances the desperation for paradise among those extra long tongues and snake-y bodies.

"Four days spent in a studio working on a centerfold photo for Playboy magazine provided the subject matter for my film. The magazine itself deals with culture, cars, a certain lifestyle. Maybe all those trappings are only there to cover up the naked woman. Maybe it's like with a paper-doll. The naked woman in the middle is a sun around which a system revolves: of culture, of business, of living!

Sing, O Barren Woman, part documentary part music video, satirizes and celebrates a taboo subject--voluntary childlessness. Susan Mogul gives voice to ten women who are childless by choice (or default) as they come out as non-mothers speaking and "singing" about the stereotypes of the "barren" woman. "Never mentioned in public or given a voice, we’re invisible women who made a provocative choice." These various refrains crescendo to Susan’s humorous song of sexual innuendo "Baby, I Still Can Conceive." This is the first U.S. film or video on voluntary childlessness.

A collage piece. Oppositions of agony and ecstasy are explored. Morticia trims yet another rose stem, while Bugs Bunny takes up Zen. Guilt-wracked, a nun tries furtively to cleans herself of imagined sin. Or attain spiritual release. Various divas flail to no avail. Lips, lipstick, frozen lips. Shakuhachi music by Chris Moran sets the mood, when there isn’t a thunderstorm raging.

"The world will devour you...."

A group of cops laugh and talk, while scanning the street for suspicious activity. An extreme close-up of a sensuously exposed neck; a soft pink fleshy ear turns to reveal an inquisitive hostile eye....

Through a catalogue of looks, movements, and gestures, Mayhem presents a social order run amok in a libidinous retracing of film noir conventions. Sexuality flows in an atmosphere of sexual tension, danger, violence, and glamour; antagonism between the sexes is symbolized in the costuming of women in polka dots and men in stripes. Censored in Tokyo for its use of Japanese lesbian erotica, this tape creates an image bank of what signifies the sexual and the seductive in the history of imagemaking, pointing to the way we learn about our bodies, and how to use them from images.

Chief Pedro Mãmãindê (who directed the proceedings and the shoot itself) describes the necessity of strengthening the girls of his village by secluding them after their first menses. After several months, the village throws a party, with singing, feasting, and the ritual abduction of the girl by an allied village. When the Nambiquara of Mato Grosso see videotape of themselves performing this ritual, the excess of Western clothing makes them uncomfortable. The ritual is then re-enacted with traditional body painting and adornment.

Paris, as in other metropolitan European cities, is rejuvenated by the influx of border crossing urbanites. While the old guard Europeans accept the arrival of the New Europeans, the tension of the urban mix is recounted in the collective tangled love stories left unfulfilled. Two young LOVEME agents, Natsuo and Hako, sent from Tokyo headquarter, are transported to Paris on a mission.

The “a-ha experience” is the moment when a child first recognizes its own image in a mirror; it is critical to the development of intelligence and identity. It is also the moment when the “self” is surrendered to the control of an external influence. The child accepts the power of the mother to confer or withhold love; it is the mother’s power to fulfill desire that shapes a child’s sense of identity. Similarly, a camera controls love by directing or not directing its attention to the desiring subject.

Cupid’s arrow pierces the heart of five individuals. You will see the arrow’s effect fleshed out before your eyes, and you will feel the searing heat that radiates from virile bodies infected by Cupid’s bow.

This title comprises The Season of Shadows and Flames (2018), Chromatic Effusion (2014), NightWars (2018), Testament (2012) and Street Meat (2018) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

Between the Frames is a series that offers a glimpse into contemporary history that is already past, a portrait of personalities and opinions shaping what and how art reaches a public forum.

The Critics: Between the Frames, Chapter 6