Body

Miller & Shellabarger, their breath made visible by the cold of a refrigerated room, exchange breath with each other.

This title is only available as an excerpt on Suitable Video, Volume 1.

I moved three thousand miles from the east coast to join the feminist art program at CAL ARTS in 1973.  I had only been in LA three weeks when Judy Chicago took us to a "Menstruation" art exhibition at Womanspace Gallery.  The exhibit included every conceivable medium about menstruation - paintings, weavings, sculpture.  I was amazed - nothing was taboo.  Being outrageous was normal in this LA feminist art environment.  Around the same time I read "Female Eunuch" by Germaine Greer.  She wrote, and I paraphrase, "If you taste your blood when you scratch your fin

It is in Pan’s playground where one hears lyrical words that echo in deep realms of imagination where one can dance with inspiration.  But it is not all fun with fulfillment. The playground has vegetation with thorns that inflict the brain with a fever…

Ken Mate, a 56 year old solipsistic individual, recites Finnegan's Wake while doing sit-ups, talks about talking, and kvetches when a neighbor "steals" the first tomato from his hand-cultivated garden. Drawn from the inside out, this portrait describes who Ken is rather than describing what he does. Commissioned by and presented at the Second Annual Silver Lake Film Festival, 2001.

Wittnerchrome, Exacto Knife, Fishing Line, Sewing Machine

From the point of view of the psychoananlyst's chair, we witness images that place us implicitly within the scene. The images depict two embracing men, and suggest a complex and ambiguous web of associations. The embrace is both erotic and tender, and invites questions about power relationships. The pain of love and possible rejection is exposed through the flash of a naked leg, or the vulnerability of a fleeting expression.

Dead Body Pose absurdly touches the contemporary bubble, encapsulating both connectivity and spirituality, a connection fueled by the global capitalistic consumption of the self. The more we are in the connectivity loop, the more thirsty we are for spirituality and assign it "a time slot". In the video, the artist performs the yoga rest pose Shavasana (dead body pose) as computer cursors come out of her body cavities and connect to their own spirituality together with her chakra affirmations.

A trans performers enacts an improvised strip-tease in silence, adhering to directions of positioning and movement. The performance fails to reveal genitals. Perspective oscillates between three stages of distance from the subject; re-focusing and reframing the (lack of) genital revelation. 

Treating the problem of anorexia nervosa from the parents' perspective, Rosler presents a mother and father speaking about the tragedy of their daughter's death as a result of dieting. The conversation turns toward the irony of self-starvation in a land of plenty and toward the international politics of food, where food aid is used as a negotiating tool. Confronting a serious issue, Rosler simultaneously sets into play the confessional form and the ghoulish staginess of talk show dramatics.

A woman is standing barefoot on a tile floor.  In slow motion, the investigative camera circles around her.  Her breasts are bared and liquid runs down her legs.  Bit by bit, every part of her body is shown, except her face, which remains hidden behind her hair.  The camera besets the woman, who remains silent.

This title is also available on Hester Scheurwater Videoworks: Volume 1.

In the solar system 18 SCORPII, located some 45.3 light years from Earth at the northern edge of the Scorpius constellation, two planets have evolved cultures of profound mutual symbiotic reliance. The ecstatic dance-like interaction between the almost inert Kalataka and the exhausted but entranced Tarzanians, is extraordinarily beautiful, building to the climactic effusion of Kalataka sporge.

Produced in Tempe, Arizona this cosmic symbiosis is rendered with the help of masks, costumes, and campy visual effects.

Life Without Dreams is set in the outer space of consciousness, where the surfaces of far out planetary bodies form the terrain for an exploration of 24/7 capitalism, insomnia, and the disappearance of darkness.

Through the testimonies of five women, this video lays out the complex problem of anorexia, detailing how the disease develops as a response to both personal and societal pressures. The common thread in these accounts is how the disease clusters around a need to control one’s body, and how not-eating becomes a way to gain that control, with anxieties and frustrations being displaced onto a negative obsession with food.

Netherlands, January 29th 2006/January 29th 2007

Hamas have just won the Palestinian elections and a chocolate bar in a Rotterdam hotel room eventually reminds the filmmaker that there are more important things going on in the world outside. Exactly one year later he returns to the same city and checks in at a very different hotel. Pyramids/Skunk is a double 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.

Path combines striking imagery of the earth’s topography from the air, the ground, and beneath the sea. With calming shots of living ocean coral and acrobatic aerial footage of the Illinois prairie, Path investigates the physical sensations of the body as it moves through time and space, closely observing the natural world.

"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!

Nauman is seen standing and leaning back in a corner of his studio. Just as he bounces back to a standing position, his body falls again, momentarily collapsing, only to spring forward once more. This action places his body in an intermittent space, occupying a position halfway between standing and leaning, halfway between the wall and the room.

This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

Child masterfully composes a rhythmic collage of symmetries and asymmetries in a fluid essay that forefronts the treatment of the body as a mechanized instrument — placing the body in relation to the man-made landscape of factories, amusement parks and urban office complexes. Vocals performed by Shelley Hirsch.

This experimental documentary meditates on the space between two bodies and explores three key bodies in transition: the erotic "cruising" body, the transgender body, and the pregnant body.

Carole S. Vance is an anthropologist and writer and Associate Research Scientist of Public Health and Director of the Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health and Human Rights at Columbia University. She has written extensively on sexuality and public policy, as well as issues of gender, health, and medical anthropology. Her books include Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (1984 and 1993) and Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography, and Censorship (1988). Interview by Carole Tormollan. A historical interview originally recorded in 1989. 

Acconci's open mouth is framed by the camera in an extreme close-up, bringing the viewer uncomfortably close. A desperate sense of strained urgency comes across as Acconci gasps, "I'll accept you, I won't shut down, I won't shut you out.... Im open to you, I'm open to everything.... This is not a trap, we can go inside, yes, come inside...." Acconci continues to plead in this way for the length of the tape, his mouth held unnaturally wide open. The pathological psychology of such enforced openness betrays a desperate struggle to accept and be accepted by others.

A reverse striptease, non-stop comedic monologue about shopping for clothes, while eating corn nuts. Dressing Up was inspired by the artist’s mother’s penchant for bargain hunting. Mogul produced Dressing Up as a student in the feminist art program at the California Institute of the Arts in 1973.

An artist looses faith in the world his brush depicts... A "Romeo’s" wounded heart causes him to shun intimate connections with others, and a "poets" struggle with domestic situations hinder his ability to create words of beauty... See and hear it all for yourself.

This title comprises Indigo Moods (2018), Fallen Angels (2013), and The Alphabet Garden (2018) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

Steve Seid of Pacific Film Archive calls it, “An episodic adventure about extra-evolutionary transformation. Organized as 'lesson plans’, this unique work is an ambitious tutorial for the neo-nauts of inner space."

This title is only available on Soft Science.

"The video Emission found its origin in three performances which I wrote between 1988 and 1991. In their original form, the performances dealt with sex, romance, and communication technologies. The video elaborates upon these themes to speak of how human beings exist in a margin between nature and technology, and works towards confounding any simplified analysis of this worn-out duality.