Performance

The later 1950s and early 1960s saw the development and proliferation of radically new forms of dance driven by a desire to understand the essentiality of movement divorced from traditional, balletic and modern syntaxes. At the forefront of this new wave of performance was Simone Forti, an artist with a hand in both improvisational techniques and choreographed task-maneuvers. This interview details her exploration of each – with a particular focus on her earliest investigations into movement, owing to time spent under the study of Anna Halprin.

The third installment in the Action Series. Two characters engage Ann Hamilton's Headlands kitchen-space and create temporal resonances. To survive they must break the fast (a midnight snack) and service the meal.

This title is also available on HalfLifers: The Complete History.

"Newly hand-built digital video A to D and D to A with ALU bit flipping. Controlled by an ELF II computer. The image brightness changes also controlled analog synthesizer parameters of the live flute playing. I sat in the camera image zone and played along with the programmed staccato picture and sound shifts. David Jones, digital video design."

– Peer Bode

Presenting a series of flashcards to the camera, Baldessari continues his exploration of visual semantics, defining the intersection of language and image. In this instance, each flashcard bears a picture that represents a letter of the alphabet. Like Teaching a Plant the Alphabet, a secondary theme of Xylophone is a critique of learning as memorization, with the length of the tape producing—not surprisingly—an effect of boredom rather than insight.

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

The Telling (1994-98) shows Anne McGuire telling two acquaintances a secret from her past using a three-camera set-up in the Desi Arnez style. The commodification of intimacy is not the strangest thing about this work. The fractured editing, silences, and lapses in continuity suggest vast narratives far more evocative than anything revealed on screen. McGuire uses television vernacular ambiguously to provoke discomfort, two things that television strives to avoid at all costs.

Masked men prowling in the bushes and not touching anything but satin, dandelions and flesh.

In collaboration with Iris McCloughan.

Weaving Stories While Walking, a reading-performance film by Sónia Vaz Borges and Mónica de Miranda, interweaves multiple accounts from members of the resistance against the colonial powers in Cabo Verde, Guiné-Bissau, Angola, and Portugal. It looks at the centrality of individual and collective walking, movement, and affective experiences in understanding the liberation struggles and their legacy in the contemporary times. Weaving Stories While Walking intermingles timely narratives for the current social contexts.

An audience-interactive demonstration of Lev Kuleshov’s famous editing experiment, and a 3D review of loosely related principles of subject/spectator empathy.

Note: should be viewed through 3D glasses. See http://store.yahoo.com/rainbowsymphony/an3dglasreda.html 

This title is also available on Ben Coonley: Trick Pony Trilogy.

An alternative earth music video. An epic last stand. A portrait of two utilitarian workers engaging in a collaboration with Karen, manifesting improvisational geographic friendships...

This title is also available on HalfLifers: The Complete History.

Operation Atropos is a documentary about interrogation and POW resistance training. Director Coco Fusco worked with retired U.S. Army interrogators who subjected her group of women students to immersive simulations of POW experiences in order to show them what hostile interrogations can be like and how members of the U.S. military are taught to resist them. The group of interrogators is called Team Delta, and they regularly offer intensive courses that they call "Authentic Military Experiences" to civilians.

The orchestra begins and a male and female dancer move from opposite sides of the stage. The dancers embrace and begin the White Swan pas de deux from the ballet Swan Lake. However this is not the ballet as it is normally performed. The choreography has been re-staged so that in every single frame the two original dancers have been replaced by the bodies of four new dancers. The movement remains continuous, the characteristics of the dancers’ movements and gestures the same, but in each frame a different person occupies the dancers’ body spaces.

“A spoof on current art attitudes [that] stretches the definition of what can be considered art. Because the late 1960s and early 1970s were periods of innovation, using the human body as art, making process equivalent to product... [etc.], Baldessari questions that very sense of originality and exploration by taking it to its (rather mundane) limits. By taping a stick at one end, then picking it up at the other, he is both questioning and spoofing what constitutes art.” —Marcia Tucker, “John Baldessari: Pursuing the Unpredictable,” John Baldessari (New York: New Museum, 1981)

The HalfLifers exhume cinema’s favorite incarnation of mindless, decaying mortality, the Zombie, in the hopes of breathing new life into this misunderstood figure. From a panel discussion in an old TV studio to a quarantined helicopter high above California’s rolling hills, these life-challenged entities walk, talk, and chew over some of the more difficult questions of this “whole linear birth-death system."

This title is also available on HalfLifers: The Complete History.

Zachte Berm (from Weiner’s film Plowman’s Lunch) sits with her back to the camera in front of a large mirror—her face, covered with shaving cream, is seen in its reflection. As the soundtrack begins, she tries to lip-sync to the spoken words, “Art is not a metaphor upon the relationship of human beings to objects and objects to objects in relation to human beings but a representation of an empirical existing fact,” while shaving.

John Cage’s work has had an immeasurable influence on 20th Century music and art, and his formal and technological innovations were tied to his desire to push the boundaries of the art world. In 1951 he initiated the first recording on magnetic tape, and in 1952 he staged a theatrical event that is considered the first Happening. His invention of the prepared piano and his work with percussion instruments led him to imagine and explore many unique and fascinating ways of structuring the temporal dimension of music.

In collaboration with DonChristian Jones.

Room was produced during 2020 virtual creative residency of Eiko Otake supported by the Center for the Arts, Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT.

Camera by DonChristian Jones.
Filmed during the Rauschenberg Residency Captiva, FL in November 2017.
Edited by Eiko Otake.

Stephen Varble began Journey to the Sun as a series of performances with projected slides in 1978. After becoming notorious for unauthorized costume performances on Soho streets in the mid 1970s, Varble receded from his public persona at this time. Deriving from his identification with his idol, the reclusive actress Greta Garbo, and informed by the spiritual practice of Subud, Varble began writing an allegorical epic about a musician, the Grey Crowned Warbler, who undergoes tribulation and metamorphosis on a journey to transcendence.

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?”

Illness, treatment, recovery, conversation. This experimental short presents stories of illness and disfunction, bringing together but also separating two performers, their stories, their bodies.

“Duet confronts illness with a caress; it takes us on a journey with two different people with two distinct conditions that present obstacles to very specific senses. A film that makes us address the way that we feel, hear, see, taste, and speak.” —Lynne Sachs

A performance about the artist’s experience in the aftermath of an accident.

Performed by my graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute, this one act play that I had written gets the best production values that $500 can afford. Shot in a large can company, we actually pre-recorded the dialogue in the "can" as the only quiet room in the facility was the toilet. The actors then went onstage to mouth the dialogue, which was piped into the P.A. system.