Diary

A behind-the-scenes look at the man behind the trophy and the poisons that taint an otherwise jubilant jamboree.

This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.

The fragment contains within it an implied reference to something that was once whole. It suggests damage and violence, time and distance. These qualities I found were integral to my own constitution, and it was with the making of Cooperation Of Parts that this became clear.

“Misfortune makes and breaks you.” I have the misfortune of a history of disruptions, and the fortune of having that history to work with.

In the second installment of George Kuchar’s Alumni Series, he begins with news coverage of the mudslides the month before that had resulted from the flooding documented in his Alumni Series #1. Kuchar next cleans his house in anticipation of a visit from his friend Leslie, but as he mentions not having toilet paper, the threat of mudslides continues to linger. After simulating his guest sloppily using the restroom with the aid of two balloons and some questionable unknown liquid, the two happily lounge around Kuchar’s apartment while discussing cats.

A lavish home is visited, shutters click, bottoms are exposed, water splashes and a welcome wetness stains an area unquenched for so long. A jacuzzi bubbles to life in a bedroom community that floats to sleep on aqua-filled rubber.

This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.

"Over the course of one year, I periodically shot footage from the front window of my third floor apartment. This material became the basis of Window, a video about knowing. How do we come to know a place or a person? Through repetition and variations; our knowledge comes from more than one unique experience. It is the sum of many things. 'The sum of all sight and sound. The sum of all motion.' Window attempts to show how a whole can be more than merely the sum of the parts."

—Nelson Henricks

An animation developed from the collective experiences of a diverse group of LGBTQIA+ people to create a narrative. The result is a queer valentine having a fever dream.

Sections 1-30 of an incomplete extended poem describing the artist's connection to the radical black tradition. The completed poem will be formed of 180 sections.

"Lessons are all about constraints; they are thirty seconds, must feature a black figure, and I have rules about where to make cuts, how to edit sound, etc."
— Martine Syms in conversation with Aram Moshayedi, Mousse Magazine

A very chatty array of people along with still photos and a loose-tongued cab driver, make this a leisurely stroll through my social life of several years ago.

Two gardens of plenty sprout with the seeds of bitter fruit made sweeter by the touch of summer, which rushes in with the scent of floral flatulence. Made heady by the gorgeous gas, the subjects of this video open both heart and mouth to nature's bounty which is served in microwaveable platters of convenient disposability to protect the environment from caustic suds. A touch of poison does escape the purity of these proceedings, but the general mood is one of gregarious grimness amid the plentitudes of paradise."

The artist Bruce Conner is featured in this videotape which bounces east and west, depicting the fragility of holistic hooligans in a world of hit-and-run encounters, Prozac, and pizzas. A meditation on faulty plumbing and paradise lost... but not forgotten!

A nocturnal COVID-19 memoir. 

Piano assemblage and image sequencing by Bob Snyder. Images by Sara Livingston.

In a version of the “teenage diary,” Benning places her feelings of confusion and depression alongside grisly tales from tabloid headlines and brutal events in her neighborhood. The difficulty of finding a positive identity for oneself in a world filled with violence is starkly revealed by Benning’s youthful but already despairing voice.

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

In this impressionistic piece, O’Reilly provides a gripping portrait of personal trauma, while detailing the severe mental and physical confusion following two incidents. In April of 1991, O'Reilly broke his jaw in a biking accident, and in July of that same year he was assaulted and had to undergo brain surgery as a result. The video is breathtaking, as O’Reilly narrates the painful story of his recovery, his problems with Public Aid, and his daily adjustment to pain.

An urban and suburban blend of nerd, nebbish and nympho, united in the urge to create a cosmetic cosmology.

Cameras aim and click in this breezy short that blows hot and cold kisses to the "Big Apple" below and the maple leaf above and beyond the northern border of this great nation. Harmonize with the hairy (bleached or flea-powdered) as they smoke or yelp in unabashed abandon to the tune of time zones we all share.

In Xmas 1986, George Kuchar’s mother Stella has come to stay with him for the holidays. After a series of dinners with friends, Stella’s repeated discussions about her shingles and Kuchar’s ominous film-noirish narration, Kuchar rescues the morale of a dinner party gone bad thanks to an undercooked ham by presenting his hosts with a very memorable holiday gift.

– Kyle Riley

Invited to speak at an Indigenous Revolutionary Meeting, the narrator describes an intimate encounter with an Evil Colonizing Queen which leads to Turtle Island's contraction of an invasive European flora.

This title is also available on the compilation What Was Always Yours and Never Lost.

Addressing the camera, Segalove confesses to plagarizing her 5th grade report, The Story of Coal.

A brief trip to the Miami '09 art festival was the moving (or swimming) force to instigate this travelogue. There are some bathing sequences sprinkled about and lots of munching going on in this latest addition to my Christmas video series. There's even a Santa Claus figure trodding across sand instead of snow; but don't let that dismaying personage in shades of gray discolor an otherwise plentiful poo-poo platter of pulchritude.

The Love Tapes: World Trade Center is a collection of videos from Wendy Clarke's Love Tapes project. The project began in 1977 and is ongoing. Love, as described throughout the tapes, is not defined by any one singular meaning, but is instead contextualized by the variety of personal perspectives and experiences within this collection. Videos in this selection were recorded at a station the artist set up in the World Trade Center in 1980, open over the course of three weeks.

"Persistence was shot in 1991-92 in Berlin, and edited with films by U.S. Signal Corps cameramen in 1945-46, obtained from Department of Defense archives. Interspersed through these materials are filmic quotations from Rossellini's Germany Year Zero (1946). A meditation on the time just after a great historical event, about what is common to moments such as these—the continuous and discontinuous threads of history—and our attachment to cinematic modes of observation that, by necessity, shape our view of events.

Two video letters made to communicate the artists longing for her friends, and produced with the same images from her daily life in Israel. The first is addressed to Jacqueline, the artist’s Swiss friend in Zurich, and the second to Abla, her Palestinian friend in Nablus.

This title is only available on Radical Closure.

A newsletter meets home movie, made by an experimental filmmaker who was constructing a paper mâché skeleton but whose leg (the filmmaker’s) suddenly went wrong. It got fixed, but (spoiler alert) that’s just kind of incidental. 

Possibly a diary but probably not a documentary: this is a play with form, animated with glee, edited with joy.

Letters, conversations: New York-Chicago, Fall, 2001 is driven by a fragmented voice-over that criss-crosses between two female voices – one seemingly formal and distant, the other more conversational and intimate. It begins with short excerpts from emails, phone conversations and letters between friends, family, ex-lovers and acquaintances in the days and weeks following September 11th, 2001.

Another edition to my weather diary series, this particular one has more social intercourse occurring in the prairie hovel which houses the hidden longings of he who seeks sustenance from the void.  The void acts up in the beginning and then simmers warmly in the glow of companionship from fellow travelers on this Route 66 to who knows where? Perhaps to that pillar of pancake perfection known as Denny's (the restaurant, not the deity).