Performance

With Benglis standing in front of a photograph of herself, which is then affixed to a monitor bearing her image, the notion of "original" is complicated—making the viewer acutely aware of the layers of self-images and layers of "self" that are simultaneously presented. Like Martha Rosler's Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, Benglis presents the viewer with a "document" of questionable veracity. It is a document attesting not to the "real" Benglis, but to the impossibility of discerning one real identity.

Nauman stands with his back to the camera, repeatetedly drawing the bow across the strings of a violin tuned D, E, A, D. Perhaps more than any other exercise, this tape demonstrates the sense of anticipation built up in the viewer, as we wait for Nauman to walk, to turn around, to play music ... to do something. This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

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 

Performance with with Tomoe Aihara.

In collaboration with Ben Greenwood.

I once read a story about the Tibetan Buddhist Master, Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche in a book by death-teacher, Steven Levine. Trungpa went into his son's room and said to him, "I'm dying." And then he said to his son, "You are dying too." This story made a deep impression on me because death is the last taboo, the hidden boogey-man, the unspeakable. It was a beautiful lesson in impermanence this father gave his son.

The word-based art and performances crafted by world-renowned artist Alison Knowles (1933-2025) were central to the 1960s international Fluxus movement and its enduring legacy. Describing her experience as a student at Pratt University in the 1950s where she learned from Richard Lindner and Adolf Gottlieb, Knowles recalls her transition from Abstract Expressionist painting to the chance operations initiated by John Cage and Bertolt Brecht.

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.

In a radical action like Nam June Paik destroying a violin, and rolling up in bandages the bodies of the players in in a concert by Yoko Ono, the international avant-garde group Fluxus changed not only art, but the concept of it.

Black and White Tapes derive from a series of performances Paul McCarthy undertook in his Los Angeles studio from 1970 to 1975. Conceived for the camera and performed alone or with only a few people present, these short performances use video to articulate both monitor and studio space. In the first excerpt, McCarthy paints a white line on the floor with his face, dragging his body from one end of the studio to the other. In doing so, McCarthy performs a recognizable formal gesture--drawing a white line.

In Glennda and Bruce Do Times Square, Glennda is taken on a night tour of Times Square by author Bruce Benderson. They observe the dynamic between forms of culture that would typically be identified as “underclass” in “suburbanite” culture within the economic and spatial landscape of New York City. Glennda and Bruce visit the apartment of performer Consuela Cosmetic, who was prolific within New York’s ball scene. She maps out the ways in which she believes gender can be expressed, and discusses the implications of ‘passing’.

In these seven short video performances directed by Isaac Artenstein, Gómez-Peña confronts Mexican-American culture clashes, stereotypes, and the Fourth World (immigrants). Speaking through a bullhorn or on the airwaves of mock-station Radio Latino FM, he broadcasts a message that will not be silenced.

Feminist artist Lynda Benglis is known for her sculptures, video performances, paintings, and photography. Her work in the 1970s was controversial, delving into issues of gender roles within and outside the art world. Produced in conjunction with her retrospective at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Dual Natures provides an introduction to Benglis’s work and includes excerpts from her videos of the mid-’70s and footage of the artist at work.

Cheri Mcelligott performance documentation.

For their first collaboration, artist duo eteam and the Hong Kong Puppet and Shadow Arts Center have developed a powerful opera-play that combines ancient stories and analog story-telling technologies with the digital tools and scripts we have available now.

I'm here to bring you the Truth and the Pleasure

Here to show you the meaningful form

It's going to feel like a new kind of leisure

It's going to smell like a freshly mown lawn

I'm installing a personal toolkit for thinking

Especially customized only for you

You enable it just by the action of blinking

From now on your thoughts will be focused and true

Forti uses the camera as a research tool to record the movements of three grizzly bears pacing anxiously behind the bars of their cage in the Brooklyn Zoo. The collected visual information becomes part of the basis for Forti's movements in Solo No. 1.

Developed in collaboration with and performed by DonChristian Jones.

The footage was filmed by Eiko during the Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in Captiva, FL in November 2017. Eiko edited the footage in Japan during her 2020 Virtual Creative Residency hosted by Wesleyan University. After editing, Eiko realized this is the first media work she created without her body.

Directed by Eiko Otake as a part of The Duet Project: Distance is Malleable.

Three Tales was commissioned in the late 1990s by different international music festivals to reflect on 20th century life as the new century approached. It recalls three well known events from the early, middle, and late 20th century—Hindenburg, Bikini, Dolly. Each of these events reflects on the growth and implications of technology during the 20th century from early air transport to the current ethical debate on the future of our species.

"Inspired by Ralph Hocking's fish biting video.  Eighty-seven stones thrown, volumes shifting of water sound, a real time performance event. Holding the camera and throwing 87 stones into the frame. 1/2" reel to reel Sony portapack." 

– Peer Bode

Presenting his bare torso to the camera, Nauman meticulously applies, and removes, layers of white and black pigment, to his face, arms, and chest. Beyond the link to body art, and the idea of treating the human body as artistic subject matter and material, Nauman enacts a process of self-transformation—a masque applied and removed—as the tape ends where it began.

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

Mr. Thomas is in the back garden, performing his new moves in the glorious sunlight, making things happen. Somewhere between ritual, a white suburban war dance and 1970's "keep fit" exercise to lovely music, Mr. Thomas tries to coordinate with the Black Blob, that persistently undermines the nature of his representational space...

And the song goes:

We've only just begun to live

White lace and promises

A kiss for luck and we're on our way...

Passage To The North is a companion film to Plowman's Lunch. It is set in the same location as Altered To Suit, and some of the players appear for a second or third time—Coosje van Bruggan and Kirsten Vibeke Thueson were in A Second Quarter; Thueson and Michael Shamberg were in Altered To Suit. Although there does not seem to be a relationship between the roles each has played from movie to movie, there are some similarities in the situations these characters find themselves in.

There is a crudeness to How's Tricks, Benglis's first venture into narrative fiction. No attempt is made to hide the mechanics of making the tape. At one point, while Benglis and [Stanton] Kaye argue about the tape they are making of [Bobby] Reynolds (a real-life carny who also appears in The Amazing Bow-Wow), Kaye is seen reaching over to turn off the video recorder — and thus the scene ends...