Segalove comes out as the child of a movie star haven where messy lawns are reported to the police and designer labels are removed from hand-me-downs for the maids. She reveals some of the dirt among the manicured yards, including a local custom of girls jumping from a terraced lawn at Beverly Hills High to induce miscarriages, and her friend Yasmin Hayworth’s wish that Rita was a “natural mother.”
This is the final part of a trilogy about the tribulations of Sherri Frankenstein (at least I think it's the last of these atrocities). Made with my class at the San Francisco Art Institute, this fast paced cheapy looks like a million bucks worth of eye candy as it relentlessly snowballs to a chilling climax. The thrills are cheap too as the plot details the heroine's joy ride through Hollywood and her detour into a cathedral of corruption. Fun for the whole, dysfunctional family!
Three ladies of the shadows come forth to illuminate themselves in the glare of a spotlight that is usually aimed at figures groomed for cinematic celebrity. Here we celebrate the force behind the funding, publicity and exposition of our tribal dreams as we rip the mask off formality to reveal the jolly and the jubilant behind all that jazz.
Animal Attraction is a documentary about the relationship between people and animals that questions the way we project our hopes and desires onto our pets, and ascribe human qualities and attributes to their gestures. The video was inspired by the plight of the filmmaker who was frustrated by the obnoxious behavior of her cat, Ernie. As a last resort, she gave in to a friend's suggestion to contact an animal communicator. This is her journey with interspecies telepathic communicator, Dawn Hayman, from Spring Farm CARES, an animal sanctuary in upstate New York.
Kip Fulbeck's landmark video, Banana Split, defined the genre of multiracial exploration in contemporary video, and established him as one of the premiere artists exploring Hapa and multracial identity. Completed while Fulbeck was still in graduate school, Banana Split screened throughout the U.S. and abroad, and is still used in hundreds of classes today.
This title is only available on Kip Fulbeck Selected Videos: Volume One.
The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries. All action takes place around NASA's Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries. Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent 'whistlers' produced by fleeting electrons. Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?
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.
Kuchar makes it to the Isis Oasis resort just in time to catch the marriage vows of his friends Rebecca and Steve. Transposing the myth of Isis in their union, Kuchar tries to make sense of this recreated paradise, this gathering of God’s creatures, and the fates of Rebecca von Hettman and Charlie Sheen—in this humid, steamy, stained story of the transmigration of souls.
In The Great Mojado Invasion (The Second US - Mexico War), writer/performer Guillermo Gómez-Peña and filmmaker Gustavo Vazquez combine Chicano wit and political vision to create an ironic, post-millennial and postmodern look at the future of U.S./Mexican relations. Both artist and director generate a complex commentary on history, society, pop culture, the politics of language and the repercussions of ethnic dominance.
The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century.
"Each disquieting image breaks down into a pixel, each pithy phrase into a word, and Reinke's stream of video-thought continues apace. The corpse won't stop talking."
— Jon Davies, Images Festival: Spotlight Essay, April 2018
Baby Bush meets Tubby-land. Completed in August 2001, this project was initially just a simple comic skewering of George W. Bush and his defense policies—but after September 11th, it took on a whole new meaning. State of the Union now has a surreal documentary quality that is genuinely disturbing.
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.
“[Segalove] pursues her self-analysis via the popular culture and TV addiction of her youth: seeing JFK shot on TV, falling in love with the TV repairman, being glued to the tube while suffering from the requisite bout of mononucleosis, and associating the memory of watching her parents kiss with the soundtrack of Dragnet.” —Marita Sturken, “Revising Romance: New Feminist Video,” Art Journal 45 (Fall 1985)
Snow falls gently in the background as kielbasa is cut and Walter Kapsuta mans the accordian in this Christmas special. Also on board is filmmaker Sharon Greytak, as she and I discuss matters of the flesh and joints. The snowscapes of Connecticut and the Bronx are viewed through the filter of domestic hellishness. Full of ominous Christmas cheer.
This real-time video-meets-digital-animation trilogy of shorts features the highly excited and mildly delusional Joe Gibbons, whose springboard becomes a surfboard as he fantasizes about his days as a lifeguard in 1963, when the young Brian Wilson would sit and jot down the songs he would sing while saving lives.
"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 day in the life of a professional photographer (Wegman) and his eager student (Smith), this tape offers a humorous, at times surreal, how-to instructional course in photography. Filled with practical advice, the tape sardonically centers itself more on the need to cultivate an effective artistic persona than actually taking any photographs. Wegman asks: "Before you carve out your own niche, it’s important to ask yourself one tough question: do you have the aptitude?"
Pastures filled with the bounty of a meateater's fantasy fill the screen with bellows of bovine origin as testosterone-driven madness runs rampant on 20,000 acres of Oklahoma soil. A lone female turkey stuffer prepares the goodies that will nourish the sunburned as they rocket skyward on the scales of numerical poundage to come crashing earthward in time for marinated hamburgers. A trip to the garden of Eden and its sanctuary for snakes with an appetite for dog meat.
A stay in Fairfiled, Iowa reveals the American dream being riddled with that which dwells on distant planes and the need for our nation’s people to express the forces of good and evil via videography and pyrotechnical vomit.
