Performance

This tape compiles three profiles of performance artists: A Creative Synthesis: George Coates Performance Works (10:00), The Performance World of Rachel Rosenthal (16:00), and Paul Dresher Ensemble (08:00).

Threads of Belonging depicts the daily life of Layton House, a fictional therapeutic community, where doctors live with their schizophrenic patients. The characters and events of Layton House were drawn from writings of the anti-psychiatry movement, whose most famous proponent was R.D. Laing. In this film we see experimental therapies, power struggles, and the individual arcs of mental illness converge, as a community struggles to understand itself and determine its destiny.

The first video of the installation Touch Parade, which as a whole explores “plastic love” or fetish culture and the assimilation of marginalized sexuality on the internet. In questioning what is an explicit and/or illicit image, fetishes found on YouTube that consist of banal gestures, are re-performed. Unlike other pornographic content, these videos evade censoring because they are not culturally recognized as representations of sexuality.

Eiko & Koma's second son Shin Otake created this video for the occasion of the 2004 American Dance Festival Scripps Award ceremony. Shin edited and narrated the video to convey Eiko & Koma's history and the concepts behind their works.

Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. She worked for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma, but since 2014 has been working on her own projects. Her works often investigate themes of death and dying, history, and the persistence of collective memory. Eiko has also broadened her collaborative practice to create interdisciplinary work with artists from different backgrounds and disciplines, both alive and deceased.

C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), Part 1 is a collaborative video and performance work by artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, with AJ Blandford and Seattle-based band Kinski. Inhabiting the intersection of human movement and architecture, A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs) present a full-spectrum video, set to a score by rock quartet Kinski.

If television is truly the opiate of the masses, then Teddy Dibble is a living room crack dealer. This newly compiled series of television art comedy includes: 

1. The Cough, 03:17

2. Secrets I’ll Never Tell, 01:02

3. The Shot Heard Around the World, 00:52

4. Rabbit Rabid Raw Bit, 00:18

5. The Man Who Made Faces, 01:11

6. 11:57 P.M. December 31st, 01:05

7. The Sound of Music, 02:25

Reading the billboards, the cars, the people, and the graffiti of the street as cultural signs, Rosler extracts the network of social power and domination that determines whose culture gets represented where, asking whose culture is reported in the press and whose is forced to exist in the street?

“In Baldessari’s wonderful Inventory, the artist presents to the camera for thirty minutes an accumulation of indiscriminate and not easily legible objects arranged in order of increasing size and accompanied by a deadpan description — only to have the sense of their relative size destroyed by the continual readjustment of the camera [in order to] keep them within the frame. Who can forget Adlai Stevenson’s solemn television demonstration of the ‘conclusive photographic evidence’ of the Cuban missile sites, discernible over the TV screen as only gray blurs?”

The performers are seated around a pink octagonal table on pink, violet, and silver cinder blocks. One performer (Robert Stearns) stands up, recites the credits for the piece, and then says, “Do you believe in water? Robert Stearns.” He claps and turns to the next performer who asks the same question and gives his name. Next the players split up into pairs and attempt to relate to each other—playing tug-of-war, making love, arguing over who has the most integrity, and fighting for possession of the props.

An experimental video for electro-feminist-performance-artists Le Tigre, the early eighties MTV aesthetic unpacks a thoroughly current obsession: the hidden erotics of office supplies.

This title is also available on Elisabeth Subrin Videoworks.

Segalove takes her mom as subject in these short pieces, recording her stories, her advice, and her daily routine. What results is a portrait of a contemporary mother-daughter relationship, touchingly devoid of drama and full of whimsical humor. For example, in one piece, Ilene’s mother laments over a pair of shoes her daughter has chosen to hang on the wall instead of wearing, saying,”With you, everything is art.” In another segment the camera focuses on a pair of unoccupied, overstuffed chairs.

In July of 1971, American artist Lee Lozano gave a talk at NSCAD art college in Halifax, called “The Halifax 3 State Experiment”. Stretching over 8 hours, and moving through multiple locations, Lozano delivered her extended lecture in three states - sober, stoned on weed, and high on LSD. Filmmakers Maïder Fortuné and Annie MacDonell take this event up as a point of departure for an investigation into Lozano’s thoughts, practice and daily life.

In this video, Brenda Sexual, Glennda Orgasm, and friends act out a drag queen murder mystery that takes place on their talk show. Later, they attend the Queer Fashion Army Invasion, a sit in of openly queer public fashion performance outside the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. Then, the pair arrives at a video store to discuss queer undertones of Hollywood films, like Grease, Rocky II, and Yentil.

The Red Tapes is a three-part epic that features the diary musings of a committed outsider: revolutionary, prisoner, artist. The series offers a fragmented mythic narrative and a poetic reassessment of the radical social and aesthetic aspirations of the previous decade. Acconci maps a “topography of the self,” constructing scenes that suggest both the intimate video space of close-up and the panoramic landscape of film space.

The death that happens to others, the death that is in you already, the life that is in this death.

Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin deals primarily with monumentality, narcissism and the ways in which our heroes are embedded into our identities, and manifested through the body. Through a variety of gestures, the pervasiveness of this practice is highlighted alongside its ultimate, inevitable failure. The viewer moves through various stages of anxiety, idolization and actual touchdown with 1970s gay sex icon Peter Berlin himself, capturing both the apparent and the hidden.

Patti Smith asked if I would do a short film to accompany the release of her version of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. As neither of us are fans of the music video format or industry, we approached the project as a short film, with no lip sync, that would simply try to get at the heart of her version of the song. I shot in Super 8 film and pulled a few things from my archive. The film is a domestic portrait of Patti and her son, Jackson. William Blake was invited in the form of a plaster cast of his death mask.

"Mama mama mama...," a woman calls out again and again, over and over. Is it her child that she mimics, or is she calling for her own mother? A desperate video performance in the first person.

A Yosemite gargoyle climbs two gothic arches.

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

This two-part episode features Glenn Belverio and Duncan Elliott participating in an ACT UP demonstration at President George Bush’s summer house in Kennebunkport, Maine, interviewing activists and documenting this historic event. In addition to this, Brenda Sexual and Glennda Orgasm attend Wigstock, an annual outdoor drag festival in Manhattan's East Village. At the festival, they rally for National Healthcare and discuss other issues such as violence against LGBTQ+ people. 

In this video, Brenda and Glennda attend the opening day of The New Festival (now known as NewFest), a queer film festival in New York City. They interview attendees and filmmakers at the festival to discuss the importance of queer film. Videographer Hans Christian Dany pans back and forth between Brenda and Glennda's interviews and onlookers of the festival, some of whom seem intrigued by the crowd gathering outside the theater, and some who seem offended by the openly queer festival goers.

Eiko Otake, based in the United States since 1976, is a highly regarded artist who has performed in many countries as part of the performance duo Eiko & Koma. Her solo project A Body in Places has attracted much attention since it began in 2014, and she  performs it for the first time in Japan.

Eiko Otake, with her collaborator Merian Soto, visited a friend Bonnie Brooks in her country house and had a long walk in the forest. There was a small island occupied by three deers. They later returned to it and the deer were gone so Eiko danced in that place she named Deer Island.

An instructional road trip clarifies how to prevent a baby from choking. The giver of said instructions communes with stray dogs along the ocean front. She builds seaside graveyards, petit and monumental sand mountains. She nourishes the sand graves with fresh breast milk.