Humor

At the San Francisco Art Institute, a studio awaits the onslaught of creative concoctions perpetrated by a bearded atrocity who now hovers over past malpractices that cast a Technicolor pall over the whitewashed walls. The viewer becomes privy to a cesspool of cinematic venues that rage in the underworld of nice homes in need of spiritual fumigation. See the agents of these misdemeanors commit their crimes of celluloid crassness under the supervision of vision-impaired deviltry that besets lax Christians in need of baptismal bathing.

A dragumentary about a day in the life of a score of drag queens on the lookout for photo opportunities at Lincoln Center, the Guggenheim Museum, Tiffany’s, and in SoHo. A tripped-out Hapi Phace shares her haiku, and The “Lady” Bunny pouts about the concept of unisex clothes. Also featuring Sister Dimension and Dagmar Onassis.

This title is only available on Tom Rubnitz Videoworks: Sexy, Wiggy, Desserty.

Attempting to apologize for the lack of good weather in Weather Diary 3, George arrives in Milwaukee only to find the drought back in full swing. Since there’s not enough good weather, the tape becomes a social diary against the backdrop of the Motivation Of The Carcasoids project.

The splendor of a mountain lake is clouded by the musings of a brain in memory mode. The head relives the heartbreak of suburbia and the vacancies that fill every motel on the edge of nowhere. The body moves through a rainbow palette of indelible stains that color the journey with the hues of heaven and hell.

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

This real-time video-meets-digital-animation trilogy of shorts features the highly excited and mildly delusional Joe Gibbons. As the phony, Gibbons recounts his influence among rock legends Iggy Pop and Brian Wilson. Brilliant superimposed computer animation by Emily Breer provides an additional layer of biting commentary.  

"The title, A Boy Needs A Friend, is both a pathetic plea and just a fact."

 – Steve Reinke

Shot in low-light style, Kuchar documents his experiences with various underground filmmakers such as James Broughton and Ken Jacobs, then moves on to the other side of Hollywood lifestyle to visit Nicholas Cage. Images of crowds and facial close-ups comprise this haunting tape.

Psykho III The Musical is an intriguing play on the tension between “authentic” and “pop” camp. This celebration of artifice was originally written, directed, and produced by Mark Oates as a stage musical parody following the release of Psycho II in 1983, and was performed at the East Village’s most notorious nightspot — The Pyramid Club. In 1985, after a wildly successful run, Oates reached out to longtime friend and Downtown video artist Tom Rubnitz to produce a video adaptation of the stage musical.

"Here is Everything presents itself as a message from The Future, as narrated by a cat and a rabbit, spirit guides who explain that they've decided to speak to us via a contemporary art video because they understand this to be our highest form of communication. Their cheeky introduction, however, belies the complex set of ideas that fill the remainder of the film. Death, God, and attaining and maintaining a state of Grace are among the thematic strokes winding their way through the piece, rapturously illustrated with animation, still and video imagery." 

Holzer adopts the form and language of commercial messages to disrupt communication, presenting kamikaze texts that are designed to stimulate thought, with humor, and inspire a critical attitude in an often passive audience. As in all of Holzer’s work, these television spots present deceptively simple sequences of text that mix provocative social commentary with resonant poetic reflection.

A bullet fired by two children travels on and randomly, intervening in a series of scenes in Oursler’s quirky, dismal puppet land. The bullet kills a suicidal man, re-aligns an antenna, strikes a prize stud bull, and ultimately impregnates a woman by passing through her neighbor’s left testicle, then lodging in her ovary. In this metaphor for the spread of violence in society, the bullet represents destructive forces of accidental death and the sexual forces that create new life.

Rubnitz’s short cooking clip showcases a chicken casserole recipe from the kitchen of Elaine Clearfield. All you need is chicken, rice, a packet of Lipton onion soup mix, a can of cream of mushroom condensed soup, and water!

This title is only available on Tom Rubnitz Videoworks: Sexy, Wiggy, Desserty.

Are gender outlaws considered the new biological terrorists seeking weapons of mass bodily destruction? OPERATION INVERT compares the different regulations mediating botox-related plastic surgery and gender reassignment "sex change." Historical medical assessments of the invert (homosexual and transsexual) "condition" reveal seemingly outdated absurdities about outsider deviance. Nonetheless, current institutional loopholes governing gender re-assignment surgery suggest a fresh resurgence of loony pathology and diagnosis.

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.

Craggy, ice-encrusted peaks soar skyward as blue lagoons lap incessantly to the drumbeats of big city behemoths hellbent on halibut and hashbrowns! The magic and grandeur of glacier-masked real estate is here for all to see and digest in this bountiful serving of natural delights.

This classic feminist tape deviates from David Byrne’s and Jonathan Demme’s popular 1980s versions of suburban life, True Stories. Rather than poking sarcastic fun at the woman locked in the split-level, Suburban Queen poignantly evokes a daughter’s longings. Portraying the relationship of a mother and daughter inextricably bound yet puzzled by each other’s lives, Faber recounts her frustration with her mother’s depression and passivity, and her fantasy of how her mother might transcend these conditions.

Based on a Swedish folk tale, The Sausage tells the humorous story of two sisters, three wishes, and a calamitous obsession with a sausage. The Sausage is the first completed episode of Fairy Fantastic!, a fairy and folk tale series presenting gender fluid adaptations of classic tales.

®™ark is an organization dedicated to bringing anti-corporate subversion and sabotage into the public marketplace. This updated video compilation includes a glitzy promotion for the ®™ark system (Bringing It All to You!); a behind-the-scenes look at some ®™ark propaganda efforts; an ®™ark PowerPoint presentation concerning "the Y2K bug”; a Danish television report about ®™ark and Hitler; a Boston news report about ®™ark; and, finally, the grand prize winner of ®™ark 1998 Corporate Poetry Contest, reading his winning entry.

Segalove relates a tale from her childhood of a man's exposure with text (“the painter wagged it at me right here”), while an arrow blinks over a shot of the house where she grew up. Segalove narrates: “I looked down and expected to see a can of green paint. I saw a pink penis instead, peeking out of the fly of his pants... I wondered how it had got so pink; had he painted it too?” This and four other memorable stories are humorously presented in a series of video one-liners.

A sort-of music video that focuses on and under young women and men engaged in focusing video and movie cameras on other young men and women.

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

Does she ever! A tiny gem that utilises paper animation and a snippet of sound to humorous, kitschy effect.

A summer sojourn is fleshed out for maximum solar exposure in this video travelogue of sun, sea and epidermal exhibitionism. The states of mind and geographic localities are awash in a flow of imagery that rushes in on a tide of both Pacific and Atlantic origins. The people and places that bathe in this magnificence add both a sacred and profane froth into the salty brew; a witches brew of sculpted creations bubbling up with volatile violations from the depths of unfathomable needs.

Scenes from a vacation. Music comes on loud and clear and washes over a series of visual impressions of the land and the sky and the faulty plumbing that submerges porcelain bottoms in a sea of unmentionable froth.

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

Taking queer artistic license, Dougherty and Leslie Singer together portray a gay male playwright who took 1960s London by storm. The result is a witty play on narcissism and split personality that captures the banality of stardom while paying tribute to promiscuity and transgression. Filmed in black and white pixelvision and color video, this tape continues Dougherty’s exploration of counter-culture identity through lesbian portrayal, the same ingenious bait-and-switch device seen at work in the lesbian portrayal of the Beatles in her earlier tape, Grapefruit.

A cactus-strewn desert becomes the backdrop for this series of filmic stopovers that focuses on the living quarters assigned the assignee of this adventurous arrangement. Great natural beauty clashes with manufactured outdoorsmanship, as a tired body and sluggish mind seek the oblivion of hotel hospitality in an arid region of artistic aspirations. The viewer is introduced to a world of prickly plants and satin-skinned succubi who prowl the alleys of western decay to staple their fig leaflets on the vertical shafts that poke unsheathed at the virgin skies of southern Arizona.