Performance

Eiko & Koma created Dancing in Water: the Making of River as the first video work for the Retrospective Project. Often produced in collaboration with environmental groups and park officials, River is an outdoor work Eiko & Koma performed in nine different sites. River usually takes place in a body of moving water, and the journey downstream suggests the passage of life and time. This video follows Eiko & Koma from rehearsals in the Catskills to performances in the Delaware River and the American Dance Festival.

April 26, 1976. San Francisco. Doug Hall and Jody Procter of T.R. Uthco, a San Francisco art/performance group, sat 60 feet above the pavement in chairs bolted to the masonry wall outside the east windows of the third floor of La Mamelle Gallery on 12th Street. They sat from 9:00 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon, and during this time They talked continuously. The two performers were clearly visible to spectators on the street below. The sounds of their amplified voices and video images from two nearby cameras were fed into the gallery space.

Danny Tisdale is a performance artist from New York City. His performances challenge prevailing ideas of race, assimilation, appropriation and success by offering passers-by the chance to racially change their appearance as a means to achieve greater financial success. The mimicry of museological practices of cataloguing and preservation, display and presentation provides one of a range of rhetorical frameworks upon which Danny Tisdale hangs his practice of social critique.

A classic example of feminist performance videos of the 1970s, which often incorporated autobiography, expansion of self through personae, and assertions of a new identity for women. In Nun and Deviant the performers come to happier terms with their identities both as women and as artists.

The artist uses wire to suspend a block of ice in a pit-like industrial space. He swings the ice block, which is lit by a similarly swinging light bulb on a separate pendulum.

“‘I will not make any more boring art,’ John Baldessari wrote over and over again in a work done in 1971. The impulse for the piece, he says, came from dissatisfaction with the ‘fallout of minimalism,’ but its implications are far greater. It is typical of Baldessari’s work, for not only is it extremely funny, but it is also a strategy, a set of conditions, a directive, a paradoxical statement, and a commentary on the art world with which it is involved. Like all his work to date, it addresses, on many complex levels, issues about art, language, games and the world at large.”

Rosler calls Domination and the Everyday, with its fragmented sounds, images, and crawling text, an artist-mother's This Is Your Life. Throughout this work, we hear—but do not see—a mother and small child at dinner and bedtime while a radio airs an interview with a gallerist about Californian art of the 1960s. The soundtrack moves into overdrive with feedback, a passing train, barking dogs, and a bedtime story. The visuals, all still images, are drawn from television, movies, advertising, and the family album.

“[This tape] gives a clear picture of the consistency of Jonas’s concerns. The performance was based upon the merging of two fairy tales — The Frog Prince told backward and The Boy Who Went Out To Learn Fear told forward. These two tales become intertwined into a single text whose transformations are effected through fragmentation, demonstrating a process “unhitched” from time, as free from the laws of physics as are the fairy-tale sources. “

Irreverent yet poignant, The Eternal Frame is a re-enactment of the assassination of John F. Kennedy as seen in the famous Zapruder film. This home movie was immediately confiscated by the FBI, yet found its way into the visual subconscious of the nation. The Eternal Frame concentrates on this event as a crucial site of fascination and repression in the American mindset.

"The intent of this work was to examine and demystify the notion of the presidency, particularly Kennedy, as image archetype...."

— Doug Hall, 1984 

five more minutes is an exploration of grief. Two women spend an afternoon recreating lost time. What begins as play-acting breaks open into a world where the tenderness and sorrow of having to say goodbye exist untempered.

In this diptych, Yi-Ching Chen plays the lowest possible sound on her tuba and Magenheimer's own electronically synthesized voice sings a letter that Ada Byron, the world's first computer programmer, wrote to her mother. In the letter she describes what it felt like to discover the extraordinary power of her own vast intellect.

Text excerpted from a letter Ada Byron wrote to her mother.

This compilation is produced with "myself" as the sole object, as well as the material of the performance (except two videos with Akiko iimura).  The videos are not just documents of the performances, but works of video-art made specifically for utilizing the video system, including the camera and monitor, as part of the performances.  The collection also questions the identity of oneself in video, having tense relationships between words and images, and asks who is "I" and what "I" means.

DVD includes:

Self Identity, 1972, 1:00 excerpted

The plot of this colorful and episodic video drama concerns the gifted protégé of a war torn world who is granted a glimpse into the future by reading the imprinted impressions of human buttocks. At least that is what I think it is about. There are many loud sequences of inner and outer turmoil with pretty cast members being faithful to the weaving plot line as it spins its convoluted tale of exposed rear ends and dangling subplots. The pace is fast and painless as a parade of young people bring to life a story ripped from the pages of our most lurid, celebrity tabloids.

Gautam Chatterjee uses the streets, parks, and temple grounds of the city of Varanasi, India, to teach his students a 2000-year old method of acting.  Based on Natya Shastra, a treatise written by a quasi-mythical monk Bharat Muni, the instructions aim to intimately connect the actor with the real world.  Through deep engagement with the surroundings, people, animals, plants, and phenomena such as waves on the water or patches of sunlight on the ground, the actors work towards creating a truthful representation of the world.

In Two-Spirits Speak Out, Brenda and Glennda interview members of We'Wah and Bar-Chee-Ampe, one of the first Two-Spirit Native American organizations in New York. This episode addresses gender identity among Two-Spirit people, and discusses their involvement and experiences within the queer community in New York City. 

The artist stalks and serenades Joe Dimaggio in her car as he strolls the docks, unaware that McGuire is secretly videotaping his every step.

This video was originally created to be used as a projection in a performance of Bodies on March 29, 2019. DonChristian Jones and Eiko performed Bodies at the public plaza in front of Columbia University's Lenfest Center for the Arts on 125th Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive. The footage was shot at the same location days prior to the performance. Eiko re-edited the piece in May 2020.

Camera and edit by Eiko Otake.
The footage of Eiko's performance was shot by Alexis Moh and Sumie Yonei.

The artist swings a live-set small game trap near his extended other hand. The trap swings ominously: will it snap his fingers? The end comes quickly!

This title is also available on Sympathetic Vibrations: The Videoworks of Paul Kos.

Created from 2014 footage shot at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts Gallery with a mirrored curtain, the performer here meets a ghost of herself.

Performer: Elisa Osborne

Camera: Liliana Gao

Editor: Adam Burke

Special Thanks to Ethan Cohen

An upside-down close-up of the artist’s mouth, Nauman repeats the words “lip sync” as the audio track shifts in and out of sync with the video. The disjunction between what is seen and heard keeps the viewer on edge, struggling to attach the sound of the words with the off-kilter movements of Nauman’s mouth.

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

Small Miracles is a suite of eight video animations in which the artist conjures up and controls forces of nature. Ignoring rational constructs of what is possible, Hechtman creates imaginary works to ground science fiction in the everyday experience. Coupling feminism and natural phenomena, the videos are located in the liminal space between fantasy and the everyday.

In this 2014 interview, South African artist Kendell Geers (b. 1968) discusses the function of magic, myth, and memory in his work. Beginning at childhood, Geers charts the path he has taken in his understanding of his own biography as a site of resistance. This interest in the use of personal biography culminated in 1993 with his decision to change his date of birth to May 1968 as a way to reference both the May 1968 student protests, and the fact that 1993 was the first year that South Africa had participated in the Venice Biennale since 1968.

Elizabeth LeCompte is the director of the Wooster Group, an experimental theater company that operates out of its own theater, the Performing Garage, in New York City. The group’s working process begins with "source" texts which are quoted, reworked, and juxtaposed with fragments of popular, cultural and social history, and combined with personal and collective experiences of the group. The resulting productions reflect a continuing refinement of a non-linear, abstract aesthetic that at once subverts and pays homage to modern theatrical "realism."

Interview by Lin Hixson.

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.

An All-American boy and girl are swept into an international intrigue of demonic content as items cursed with the stench of Satan make their way to a museum dedicated to the spiritual overthrow of family values. Loaded with romance, thrills, and exotic adventures, this electronic tele-play, with its colorful moments of scenic horror, leads the viewer on a fast-paced voyage that speeds through the ruins of Egypt, the jungles of equatorial erotica, and the puritanical Wonderland of Middle America.